The joke in the blogosphere is that the Internet “comes from” only a handful of places. This chart created by webcomic Endless Origami doesn’t teach you where to find content, but helps you choose which source for what ultimately ends up being the same pool of content is right for you. Granted, the chart leaves out neat geek culture blogs that sift through all the rabble to cull the top content, and generally also has some pretty killer original content of its own.

(Endless Origami via Geeks are Sexy)

It’s #Friday, and you know what that means: Viral music video star Rebecca Black, whose 16 million-YouTube-hits-and-counting “Friday” has our staff far more obsessed than any group of twentysomethings should ever healthily be with a tween pop song, appeared on Good Morning America to discuss her unexpected celebrity. She seems like a nice, normal girl! And she doesn’t sound like an Auto-Tuned Gorgon when they ask her to sing a few bars of the National Anthem.

Still, the GMA interview is all kinds of strange, what with the interviewer reading her nasty Internet comments about her music and the anchors sagely observing that “Friday” is really bad, but “not the worst song ever.” Also, 4chan is going to rage about Black’s on-air entreaty to Justin Bieber to perform a duet with her. (Hey, she is a 13-year-old girl, after all.)

Previously: Black’s first interview since “Friday”-mania began.

At South by Southwest this year, 4chan founder Christopher Poole delivered an interesting speech in which he (to no one’s surprise) supported Internet anonymity, as well as called the imageboard, as well as its infamous subforum, /b/, misunderstood.

“4Chan is misunderstood – people like to think that /b/ is the dark heart of the internet. It isn’t just that.

People want to think everyone on 4Chan is a young rambunctious male. That’s not accurate – it’s a wide range of people using it. One of the things that 4Chan does that’s really special is the way people come together to collaborate en masse. It’s the process at which you arrive at the product that is fascinating.”

Poole also discussed Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg, declaring Zuckerberg’s views on anonymity incorrect.

“Zuckerberg’s totally wrong on anonymity being total cowardice. Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way.

The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.”

He also discussed a mistake he feels he made with 4chan, which is believing the community can police itself, given the right tools.

“One of the mistakes I’ve made is believing in an invisible guiding hand as far as moderation goes. And that if you give the community the right structure they could police themselves.

“I’ve underestimated the value of having a real staff presence, and encouraging them to police the boards behind the scenes. When it’s not clear that we’re leading things it’s like we’re not there and that we don’t care – it’s extremely detrimental to community.”

Head on past the break to watch the other two parts from Poole’s speech, which features some behind-the-scenes information, including popular memes like CAPTCHArt.

So there was some kind of awards show last night for gramophone enthusiasts. More important, hard-partying rocker Andrew W.K. kept true to his promise and paid a visit to 4chan’s music board /mu/ last night, answering questions, out-trolling trolls, and generally winning over the crowd, not that he didn’t have a few haters. W.K.’s Q&A session was so popular, in fact, that all of 4chan was briefly brought down, possibly from too much party.

Below, a few of the highlights from W.K.’s two-hour visit to 4chan:

This afternoon, Christopher Poole, a.k.a. moot, announced the closed beta launch of Canvas (canv.as), which aspires to be “the best place to share and play with images.” The site looks pretty enough [though I say this based on screenshots, having not received one of the 4,000 launch invites], but what makes this launch notable is moot’s role as the founder and administrator of 4chan.org [warning: 4chan], the feared and revered imageboard and hub of breathtaking creativity and unspeakable villainy.

Thanks to its founder and its image-centric nature, comparisons to 4chan are inevitable for Canvas, which raised $625,000 in funding. TechCrunch guesses that “more than a few of the 4chan crowd may head over to Canvas to take a gander.” Maybe so, but Canvas, which some in the tech press have referred to as “4chan 2,” has its work cut out for it if it wants to win over the sizable population of 4chan 1.0.

Perpetually good vibe-emitting rocker Andrew W.K. is about to put his ability to be a chill bro to the ultimate test: On February 13th at 7pm EST, W.K., who has previously hosted a reality show about answering people’s questions and once held a live event in which anybody could ask him anything, will be appearing on notorious imageboard 4chan to host a live Q&A.

For the uninitiated, or for those who are generally safe from Internet Happenings, Boxxy is a girl who posted rambly videos on the Internet a couple years ago and, due to the somewhat adorable, somewhat annoying, seemingly forced, over-exaggerrated personality she exudes, she became an Internet phenomenon, largely supported (going so far as being called their queen) and hated by Internet forum 4chan. Her supporters and detractors were so fervent in their beliefs that the situation between the two parties ended up crashing 4chan. In an odd move after becoming Internet-famous, she actually bowed out of the limelight, until a few months ago when she posted an auction of an InuYasha bag on eBay.

Since her eBay venture, all was quiet on the digital front–until now. On January 10, 2011, Boxxy posted the above video with a title that some may perceive to be a dire warning: “Things are about to get intense.”

Notorious website of notoriety 4chan.org is currently down; even if you manage to get on the site’s frontpage, which as of posting could take well over a minute, the boards and images are all offline. According to site administrator Christopher “moot” Poole, the site is down “due to DDoS. We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!” As of posting, downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirms that the site is down.

Yesterday, Internet vigilante group Anonymous, which has loose ties with some 4chan forumers, launched a DDoS attack against Bank of America’s website, an act of retaliation which they said came in response to Bank of America’s refusal to process payments or donations to WikiLeaks.

Placing bets on which group could be behind this. Banks that cut off WikiLeaks’ funding and were hit with DDoSes this past month retaliating themselves? Tumblr kids who still take the 4chan/Tumblr war seriously? 4chan?

(4chan status via Slashdot. title pic via 4chan’s Twitter.)

Following MasterCard‘s controversial decision to pull the plug on WikiLeaks‘ funding over alleged illegal activity, despite the fact that WikiLeaks or its founder Julian Assange have yet to be found guilty of any crime, some Internet vigilantes affiliated with Anonymous have taken matters into their own hands, bringing down MasterCard.com with a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

We’ve previously covered Hot Topic‘s Internet-enraging pilfering of the Rage Guy meme, which they sold in t-shirt form while managing to get many details very wrong. But that’s all over now. Following a devious 4chan campaign to get Hot Topic to pull the FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU-spouting “FU Rage Meme T-Shirt” by associating it with racism, the clothing retailer has complied, and says it will stop selling the t-shirts.

From Hot Topic’s Facebook page:

Rage Guy is the character Hot Topic sells, see the original post from 1 year ago. The character focuses on interesting situations, check out the image gallery.

Race Guy is the newest iteration posted this afternoon, today (the character everyone is talking about).

Who created Race Guy? We don’t know. Who created Rage Guy? We don’t know. We sold the shirt because it is pop culture and the series was funny. Why not let our customers express they’re interest in meme’s? So now what? Well, Hot Topic is the last company to support racism. Hell, we support diversity and wear it proudly. Now that the character represents racism because of these unknown creators – we will no longer be selling it.

After tonight (11/17), it will be removed from our website. Next week, it will be removed from our stores.