List of Internet phenomena

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This is a list of phenomena specific to the Internet, such as popular themes and catchphrases, viral videos, amateur celebrities and more. Such fads and sensations grow rapidly on the Internet because its instant communication facilitates word of mouth. The search and rating features of sites like YouTube and Google then amplify this interest.

Advertising

• Lowermybills.com - Banner ads from this mortgage company feature endless loops of cowboys, women, aliens, and office workers dancing.
• Orbitz.com - Miniature golf game that became one of the few popular pop-up ads.

Animals

• Badger Badger Badger — A hypnotic loop of animal calisthenics set to the chant of "badger, badger, badger".

• "Dramatic Chipmunk" (or Drama Hog) — Actually a prairie dog turning its head suddenly toward the camera, with a zoom-in on its face. The clip comes from an appearance by J-pop group MiniMoni on the Japanese TV show Hello! Morning.

• Hampster Dance — A page filled with hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.

• LOLcats — image macros featuring cats with humorous captions, typically in Internet slang or leet. Originated on 4chan.

• Rose the goat - married a Sudanese man after being caught in flagrante.

• Skateboarding dog — Tyson the bulldog is a star on Youtube and now Oprah.

Animation

• Dancing baby — A 3D-rendered dancing baby first appeared in 1997 by the creators of 3-D Studio Max, and became something of a late-'90s cultural icon, featured many times in the TV show Ally McBeal.

• Hey Macaroni! — A spoof of the Macarena featuring a squad of elbow pasta that comes to life for a lively song and dance number.

• Loituma Girl (also known as Leekspin) Hypnotic loop of Orihime Inoue twirling a leek set to the music of Loituma.

• Peanut Butter Jelly Time — featured the Dancing Banana with the song by the Buckwheat Boyz.

• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny — a battle royal between many notable real and fictitious characters.

E-mail

• Bill Gates Beta — an e-mail chain-letter that appeared in 1997 and was still circulating as recently as 2007. The message claims that AOL and Microsoft are conducting a beta test and for each person you forward the e-mail to, you will receive a payment from Gates of more than $200. Pseudo-realistic contact information for a lawyer appears in the message.

• Cookie recipe — an e-mail chain-letter from the mid to late 1990s in which a person tells a story about being ripped off for over $200 for a cookie recipe from Neiman Marcus. The e-mail claims the person is attempting to exact revenge by passing the recipe out for free.

• Goodtimes virus — an infamous, fraudulent virus warning that first appeared in 1994. The e-mail claimed that an e-mail virus with the subject line "Good Times" was spreading, which would "send your CPU into an nth-complexity infinite binary loop", among other dire predictions.

• Carmen Winstead/Jessica Smith — a chain-letter style posting that first appeared on MySpace and has since spread to other Social Networking sites. The post is about a girl that was murdered by her fellow high-school students by pushing her down a sewer, and informing that recipient that they will be haunted by the ghost of the dead girl if they do not forward the message.

Films

• The Blair Witch Project — The first film to use the Internet for astroturfing. Its makers spread rumors that the material they shot was authentic and that the three protagonists really disappeared in Burkittsville. Many websites began to feature "stolen" clips of the film, later discovered to be supplied by Artisan and the filmmakers, and planted reviews of the film, which disguised their origin with intentional spelling mistakes and poor design. Other filmmakers accused the producers of creating a fake fan buzz to generate a real one, stating "That was an organized effort. What happened is that they tricked the press."

• Brokeback Mountain — inspired many online parody trailers.

• Cloverfield — Paramount Pictures used a viral marketing campaign to promote this monster movie.

• Snakes on a Plane — attracted attention, due to the film's title and premise, a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released. Producers of the film responded to the Internet buzz by adding several scenes anticipated by the fans.

Games

• All Your Base Are Belong To Us — Engrish from the opening cut scene of the 1989 video game Zero Wing, which has become a catchphrase, inspiring videos and other derivative works.

• Leeroy Jenkins — A World Of Warcraft player charges into a high-level dungeon with a distinctive cry of "Leeeeeeeerooooy... Jeeenkins!", ruining the meticulous attack plans of his group and getting them all killed.

• Line Rider — A Flash game where the player draws lines that act as ramps and hills for a small rider on a sled.

Images

• Bert is Evil — A satirical website stated that Bert of Sesame Street is the root of many evils. A juxtaposition of Bert and Osama Bin Laden subsequently appeared in a real poster in a Bangladesh protest.

• Goatse.cx — A shock image of a distended anus.

• Little Fatty — Starting in 2003, the face of a student from Shanghai was superimposed onto various other images.

• Lootie — An Associated Press photo taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, under the caption "A looter carries a bucket of beer out of a grocery store in New Orleans." The original photo shows a black man in waist-deep waters carrying a tub full of bottles of beer. This image and the man's face were incorporated into various parody and gag images, using Photoshop.

• O RLY? — An owl originally posted on Something Awful and then on 4chan.

• The Saugeen Stripper — An 18-year-old female resident of Saugeen-Maitland Hall at the University of Western Ontario performed a striptease at a birthday party, and dozens of digital images of the party ended up on the Internet. The incident briefly attracted widespread media attention and was the subject of articles by a number of Canadian and American media outlets. The controversy sparked a discussion about just how much control that institutions of higher learning have over what goes on in their residences.

Music

• Canon Rock — a virtuoso rock arrangement of the Canon in D by JerryC which became famous when covered by funtwo and others.
• Hannes Coetzee - A slide guitarist who plays using a teaspoon held in his mouth.

• Here It Goes Again — Grammy-winning music video in which OK Go dance on treadmills.

• Hurra Torpedo — A Norwegian band whose coast-to-coast tour was a viral campaign to promote the Ford Fusion car.

• Lemon Demon — famous for Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, Hyakugojyuuichi and the Potter Puppet Pals.

• Tunak Tunak Tun — bhangra song by Daler Mehndi.

People

• Angry German Kid — A German boy becomes very angry while playing Unreal Tournament.

• Angry Video Game Nerd - An angry gamer who reviews bad games in videos.

• Bus Uncle — A middle-aged man reacted furiously after the young man seated behind him on a Hong Kong bus tapped his shoulder and asked him to lower his voice while speaking on the phone. His outburst spawned catchphrases in Chinese communities around the world.

• Chris Crocker — Had a growing following for his YouTube and MySpace vlog postings until 2007 when Crocker gained international mainstream media attention after a video he made in support of Britney Spears became viral email and landed him on CNN, Howard Stern, ABC and numerous other shows.

• Christopher Walken for President A faux campaign to elect the actor as US President.

• Chuck Norris Facts — archetypal joke, in which the five-times-world champion, eighth degree black belt is portrayed as the ultimate hard man with incredible attributes.

• Cory Kennedy — an intern, model and girlfriend of the fashion photographer Mark Hunter.

• Dancing Matt — Matt Harding dances around the world.

• Dog poop girl — a Korean refused to clean up after her dog and so was exposed and shamed on the Internet.

• Honglaowai — An American singing Chinese Communist songs.

• lonelygirl15 — A popular video blogger whose work turned out to be a professional hoax.

• Mahir Çağrı (i kiss you) — A Turk with an amusingly effusive website.

• Nintendo 64 Kid — Two kids get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas and the boy screams "Nintendo 64, OMG!!!"

• Randy Constan — Dresses in Peter Pan costumes.

• Ron Paul — US Presidential candidate whose campaign made use of the internet to attract donations and support. His YouTube channel, Facebook page, and so on, are the most heavily subscribed of any candidate.

• Shakeel Bhat — A Muslim activist whose face became a personification of angry Islamism in western media.

• Star Wars kid — A Québécois teenager became known as the "Star Wars Kid" after a video appeared on the Internet showing him swinging a golf ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber. Many parodies of the video were also made and circulated.

• Tourist Guy — A photograph of a tourist that appeared in many edited pictures after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Zidane headbutt — In the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals, French player Zinedine Zidane rammed his head into Italian Marco Materazzi's chest after a provocation. The image inspired various parodies, including images, videos and online games.

Videos

• Ask a Ninja — Popular podcast featuring a ninja who answers viewers questions.

• Boom goes the dynamite — Brian Collins, a nervous sports anchor, fumbles highlights, concluding with this infamous catch phrase.

• Chocolate Rain — by Tay Zonday, noted for his unusually deep voice.

• Coke and Mentos — Geysers of carbonated drink mixed with Mentos.

• Don't Tase Me, Bro! — an incident at a campus talk by Senator John Kerry.

• Evolution of Dance — Judson Laipply performs a medley of dances. This is the most-viewed video on Youtube.

• Impossible Is Nothing — An ambitious video resume by Yale student Aleksey Vayner.

• "Ken Lee" - badly garbled song by Bulgarian Music Idol hopeful, Valentina Hasan.

• Kersal Massive — Three children whose demo was widely parodied.

• The Last Lecture — a dying professor delivers an upbeat lecture on Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

• Little Superstar — a video of Thavakalai, a short Indian actor, break-dancing to MC Miker G & DJ Sven's remix of the Madonna song Holiday, in a clip from a 1990 Tamil movie Adhisaya Piravi, featuring actor Rajnikanth.

• Music Is My Hot Hot Sex — Used in advertising then reached the top of YouTube's most watched list, due perhaps to a hack.

• Negarakuku - Wee Meng Chee's controversial rendering of the national anthem of Malaysia.

• Numa Numa — Gary Brolsma lip-syncs the Romanian song "Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone.

• Rickroll — A bait and switch link to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

• Prison Thriller — A recreation of Michael Jackson's hit by prisoners in the Philippines.

• Who Needs a Movie? — A Kelowna couple promote their "video movie" business with a bizarre sample of their own work.

• 2 Girls 1 Cup - Reaction videos to two girls engaging in coprophilia.

Web sites

These websites play a significant part in the creation of internet phenomena or are a phenomenon in their own right.

• 2channel — A Japanese Internet forum (the largest in the world). The site has significant influence on Japanese culture and popular opinion.

• 4chan — The English equivalent to Futaba Channel, responsible for creating many popular internet memes.

• Facebook — A social networking website.

• Fark - A community website created by Drew Curtis allowing users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites.

• Flying Spaghetti Monster — A religion that lampoons creationism.

• Google — Popular search engine which now hosts other innovative content such as Google Trends.

• Homestar Runner - A popular website with various cartoon characters and cartoons that became popular by word of mouth.

• JibJab — Hosts political flash animations and is best known for the song This Land Is Your Land which parodied the 2004 US presidential election.

• MySpace — One of the most popular worldwide social networking websites.

• Newgrounds: a freeware flash animation webpage in which people and users can upload their own work.

• Real Ultimate Power — Upon which a fictional young boy obsesses about ninjas.

• SomethingAwful — Forum responsible for many popular images, documented events, pranks and oft-repeated catchphrases.

• Weebl's Stuff - The website of the creator of the Badger Badger Badger video and many other flash animations.

• Yahoo — Popular portal which now offers a variety of content and features.

• YouTube — A popular website where people can view videos submitted by users.

• YTMND - A website which allows users to create their own mini-sites.

See also

• Blog
• Internet celebrity
• Forum
• List of YouTube celebrities
• Meme
• Notable Usenet personalities
• Phishing
• Spam
• Urban Legends
• Virus hoaxes
• Web 2.0

External links

• Memes on the Internet Article regarding the spread of Internet memes.
• Snopes page on Urban legends