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.

Part 2:

Part 3:

(via Guardian.co.uk)

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: (Obvious note: Not all Anonymous questioners are the same person.)

Andrew W.K. on the greatest moment of his life:

“The greatest moment of life so far is being here right now on 4chan. The second best moment of my life was being born.”

W.K. on his reputation as a perpetually positive guy:

“I think staying positive all the time is kind of un-fun. Life has all kinds of feelings to offer and I’d like to experience as much as possible. One of the reasons I like 4chan is because it’s not all positive. I love negativity very much and every feeling between happy and sad.”

“Overall, the experience of being alive is inherently positive, and within that why not enjoy your emotions – just remember that at the end of the day, everything about existence is completely absurd. But of course 99.9999% of 4chan users already understand this essential truth.”

Andrew W.K.: “4chan is one of the most important human achievements of all time.”

W.K.’s favorite meme: (it’s pretty obscure)

“Well, my new favorite meme is THANK YOU BASEDGOD. I’ve been a huge fan of Lil B for the past few years and have been totally pysched about him and everyone who is getting into me.”

Anon: Dear Andrew W.K.: If you were stuck on an island for the rest of your life and you had a CD Player with unlimited battery life and 5 CD’s, what 5 CD’s would they be?

“I would bring 5 copies of Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Airplane Over The Sea.” (Andrew W.K. knows his audience: This is kind of an in-joke on /mu/ –ed.)

Andrew W.K. on how Andrew W.K. got roped into the lunacy of doing a live Q&A on 4chan:

“Why would be here? At this shit hole? Because this place rules and I’m just blown away by how intense 4chan is. I’ve been very grateful that moot and the BASEDMODS invited me to do this. I’m a big believer in this board. 4chan is one of the most important human achievements of all time.”

In response to calls all night for him to put a shoe on his head:

(Andrew W.K. interview on 4chan: Part 1, Part 2)

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.

Saying that 4chan users all believe X is just about as silly as saying that Facebook users all believe X — while there’s a prevailing attitude and culture on the site, it is after all a collection of a large number of different people. But the initial reaction has been pretty uniformly negative. Following the announcement of the site’s beta launch, 4chan users [in respect of the site's prevailing rules, we did not look at a board named after the second letter of the alphabet] have expressed skepticism about the concept and accused moot of selling out. “I wonder how the volunteer mods feel about the fact that they ran moots site and now he’s getting rich off of it,” wrote one reader. ”It’s the most horrible thing a human being like m00t could come up with,” wrote another.

One highly critical and apparently 4chan-familiar TechCrunch reader summarized his feelings as such:

I find it disturbing…. that a site well known for trolling and increasing the embarrassment of individuals online via doxing & meming, want you to use Facebook to request an invite “granting access to your real life data to 4chan” is ridiculously stupid.

Just another start up that want’s to suck blood & data out of Facebook.

Sorry guys teh pools closed to real lifers only 4now.

[While it's unclear that the site in its final form will require connection with Facebook, one must currently log in to Facebook to request a beta invite.]

None of this is to say that Canvas is doomed to failure; it’s often difficult to expand without angering early fans, and as the recent $30 million investment into Cheezburger Network illustrates, there’s potentially big money to be made in popularizing Internet culture. But in attempting to paint a more respectable, marketable face on 4channian image-sharing, Canvas will need to work hard to keep the colors from bleeding.

(title pic via TechCrunch)

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.

The madness began on New Year’s Eve, when W.K. tweeted out a link to a 4chan-made YouTube video for his song “Party Party Party” with the text “I love @4chan. PARTY PARTY PARTY! It’s New Year’s Eve!” Apparently, “the folks at 4chan.org reached out and invited Andrew to do an exclusive interview!”

WK expresses his excitement for the event, and in the process compares 4chan to Twitter and calls it “cozy”:

4chan is the largest English-language imageboard website in the world! Their users total up to 10 – 12 million per month. The users of 4chan post and discuss topics in real-time, kind of like Twitter, but the site functions as a messageboard. Get ready for a cozy, spontaneous, and uncensored experience online like no other!

Previously, we’ve reported on the experience of Steve Lieber, an independent comics artist who found out that his comic was being torrented on 4chan’s comics board and rather than yell at the /co/ readers, decided to pop in to do a spontaneous, winning Q&A. Lieber won over the board, and he says that sales soared. This is different though in that W.K. is a bona fide celebrity coming in at a preannounced time; despite 4chan’s huge readership, it likes to think of itself as a somewhat secret and exclusive happening. The comments from 4channers on W.K.’s blog do not seem to be too happy. Then again, as I wrote 5 or so times in the opening paragraph, Andrew W.K. is a charmer, and if anyone can accomplish the unlikely task of turning hostile trolls into fans, he’s the guy. This could be interesting…

(Andrew WK via NY Observer)

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.”

In the new video–ridiculous fake personality quirks aside–Boxxy actually humanizes herself a little bit, discussing her accidental Internet fame, and how she both couldn’t bring herself to return to the character of Boxxy for another video, but was also very aware that the success of her previous videos set the bar pretty high for any future projects. Humanizing herself further, she discusses the wave of hatred she received from half of the Internet and explains that played a part in her absence. As the video goes on, she seems to dispense with most of the Boxxy-related personality quirks and appears quite human, genuinely thanks her fans and becomes a bit emotional here and there.

She also promises a new video coming soon, which she claims won’t be like the original Boxxy videos: “It’s not like I’m just gonna sit down and start babbling. It’s gonna be a little bit more complex than that.” Now that she seems to actually be a human being, and not an inarticulate one at that, it’ll be interested to see what the new Boxxy ends up churning out.

(via BuzzFeed)

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.)

On Twitter, Anonymous’ Operation Payback claimed responsibility for the attacks:

In the past, Operation Payback has been involved in attacks against the recording industry, the MPAA, and musician Gene Simmons over their stances on copyright law and punishment for file-sharers. Since WikiLeaks’ and Assange’s accounts were frozen by several financial institutions, Operation Payback has attacked the sites of PayPal’s blog and the Swiss bank PostFinance.

Down for Everyone or Just Me:

The takedown of MasterCard.com does not mean that MasterCard transactions have ceased, so the attacks are arguably symbolic: However, this does disrupt customers’ ability to check account information and locate MasterCard-friendly ATMs, among other services.

According to Panda Labs, which has been closely monitoring the Operation Payback DDoSes, as of 5:18am, “Mastercard.com is still down with 940 computers in the voluntary botnet attacking the site all at once. We have 3 hours 57 minutes of recorded downtime so far.”

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.

Update: Uh, what? Hot Topic has changed their mind and says says they’ll still carry the shirt. Disregard some of the below.

After many hours researched and many communities identifying this as a hoax, we’ve made the decision to continue carrying the “Rage Guy” t-shirt. It is NOT racist.

4chan’s “Race Guy” push was predictably offensive (warning: You may actually be offended if you click the link). That said, the language of 4chan’s disinfo campaign was pretty clever:

“Race Guy is a meme created by the hivemind of Hot Topic Store. Althouth appearing to be just Rage Guy, Race Guy has opened the door to widespread racism in teen culture. Recently, Hot Topic have come under scrutiny for selling shirts featuring Race Guy, yet continue to sell. 4chan’s very own /b/ have launched a combat campaign to provide mass awareness of the clear and present racism presented by Hot Topic.”

So: Chalk one up to the Internet for getting its way. As we previously wrote when Hot Topic first began selling the Rageguy, the threat here was “a broader trend of aspiring ‘edgy’ clothing makers raiding random Dramatica pages for ideas”; the negativity of the reaction this time around will most likely make the “FU Rage Meme” affair a cautionary tale in the ‘edgy’ clothing biz such that said meme-raiding doesn’t happen on a broad, commercial scale, at least for a little while.

That said, you’ve got to give some credit to Hot Topic for their handling of this. Their initial greenlighting of the t-shirt may have been a misstep, but they responded quickly, before the ‘Hot Topic is racist’ meme spread from the Internet to the cable news circuit, reasonably savvily, and in such a way that they’re likely getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of free eyeballs worth of publicity out of it. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-

(via Reddit, MeFi)

Nintendo Will Go Next-Gen After They Sell 45 million Wiis to the US (GameInformer)

Batgirl Wants Equal Pay (Comics Alliance)

DC Comics Office Clearly Hasn’t Been Remodeled Since The 90′s (Bleeding Cool)

GoDaddy Now Defaults Users to .co URLs (/.)

4chan vs. Tumblr (Urlesque)

This 5-foot Scale Gundam Costs $3.8k (io9)

10 Green Sci-Fi Movies (TDW)

(pic via Reddit.)

4chan’s/Anonymous’ DDoS protests managed to take down, among other targets, the websites of the MPAA and the RIAA, the personal site of rocker and outspoken file-sharing hater Gene Simmons, who said that the attackers “might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend,” and the United States Copyright Office’s site.

While the FBI says the attacks had been on its radar for some time, the DDoS on the U.S. Copyright Office’s site has upped the stakes.

CNET:

While one of the 4chan group’s most recent attacks came last week against the Copyright Office, it is believed that the FBI began asking questions prior to that, said the source. Since the Copyright Office attack, however, FBI agents have begun working closely with many of the organizations attacked, the source said.

Just last week, a 23-year-old student named Mitchell L. Frost was sentenced to 30 months in prison for DDoSing the websites of conservative figures including Bill O’Reilly, Rudy Giuliani, and Ann Coulter between August of 2006 and March of 2007.

Previously: 4chan versus the Tea Party.

(via CNET)

Earlier this week, KISS singer Gene Simmons kicked a proverbial beehive when he threatened to hunt down and print the names and pictures of people who had attacked his website in the midst of an anti-RIAA protest, saying that he’d send their “little butts [to] jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.” The end result: A longer, nastier wave of attacks.

It’s instructive to consider how comic artist Steve Lieber responded when he found out that users on 4chan’s comics board (/co/) were sharing almost the entirety of Underground, the graphic novel that Jeff Parker wrote and Lieber illustrated. After getting the tipoff via Twitter, Lieber dove right into the 4chan thread and began conversing with the forumers. He didn’t berate or threaten anyone, or even use ugly words like “pirate” or “copyright.”

Instead, he answered people’s questions, cracked jokes (when someone said that his last name sounded like Justin Bieber’s, Lieber responded, “It’s true. We dated for a while, but it had to end when I demanded we hyphenate our names, and he insisted that Lieber-Bieber sounded too stupid even for youtube”), and, most incredibly, posted the whole comic for free on his own website. And it seemed to work: While not everyone reading the thread was won over, Lieber evoked a surprisingly positive, enthusiastic response, and by the time the thread ended, many 4chan readers avowed that they’d buy the comic to support the artist.

ComicsAlliance reports:

“I’ve been hanging out with other fans on comics message boards since Usenet in the early ’90s. I didn’t do anything different here. The only ‘secret’ is to talk to people like they’re human beings, and don’t get bent out of shape if someone says something mean. It’s the internet. Someone’s always gonna says something mean,” said Lieber.

As for 4chan’s rep as one of the potentially nastiest sites online? Lieber’s genuinely more interested in engaging its users with poise than being paranoid. After all, criticism is the name of the game in any creative field.

“For me, part of the process of learning to draw was getting some serious criticism from people I respect. No one online is ever gonna tear my stuff apart harder than Joe Kubert did when I was a student. When you’ve had your faults broken down for you by a guy like Joe, the internet doesn’t seem quite as harsh,” said Lieber.

One key point worth noting here is that despite the fearsome, monolith reputation conveyed to 4chan in many quarters, mainly due to the high-profile antics of “random” board /b/, each one of the imageboard site’s individual boards has a distinct vibe. While its liberal attitude towards copyright law might rankle some, /co/ is widely considered one of the nicer boards: According to TVTropes, “/co/ (for western comics and cartoons) is actually QUITE odd in that it defies most of the normal 4chan rules; it is highly popular, yet rather civil, especially for 4chan, and tends to pride itself on being less nasty than the other popular boards (though this varies widely based on who’s actually posting at the time.) The board’s unofficial motto is “/co/ is love.” So while Steve Lieber’s venture into 4chan to address his readers was at once ballsy and shrewd, it wouldn’t have worked on just any terrain.

Lieber acknowledges as much in the comments section on his blog, saying that anyone who looks at this exchange as proof that they can move into 4chan and “build a Starbucks” is woefully mistaken:

FWIW, I don’t think this is likely to be the start of a gentrified 4chan. I was like some guy who stumbled into town with a head injury. The locals patched me up and sent me on my way. Anyone who is dumb enough to look at my visit and think “I can move in and build a Starbucks!” is going to have a very different experience.

At that, the proverbially head-injured Lieber seems to have made the most of the experience. He shares these traffic stats for the Underground website, which show that even the vaunted Boing Boing effect was dwarfed by his post-4chan traffic:

Lieber’s experience is almost certainly not generalizable, and other artists or marketers who tried to pull off similar stunts to self-promote would likely get burned. But there’s still a lesson to be learned from this weird, sublime, organic interaction: The days of creators on pedestals and consumers as groveling groundlings are long over. And creators who can engage their audiences and communicate with them as equals rather than threatening to send their little butts to jail have a much better chance of making a living even as the Internet stirs upheaval in every medium it touches.

(Steve Lieber via ComicsAlliance via Urlesque Tumblr | Underground webpage / Lieber’s Etsy page)

Simmons’ site was first attacked by the loosely 4chan-affiliated group as part of a broader campaign against supporters of current copyright laws, particularly as they apply to prosecuting file-sharers. According to TorrentFreak, the initial attack on Simmons’ website has “caused some dispute within Anonymous, with the main group distancing themselves from the assault with a declaration that artists should not become a target, regardless of their opinions.”

Following the attack, Simmons reportedly wrote:

Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say “adventurous” young people, who feel they are above the law.

And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.

First, they will be punished.

Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.

We will soon be printing their names and pictures.

We will find you.

You cannot hide.

Stay tuned

This can’t possibly end well…

According to The Daily What, a message is currently circulating among Anonymous containing the above quote, plus the message “We are just getting started, Gene. Enjoy your downtime and welcome to the Internet.”

GeneSimmons.com is presently down, and may be for a while per these reports.

(RWW via The Daily What)

>>>Full story at Mediaite.

In case you’ve been living in an Internet-free cave, Pedobear is a character made popular by the 4chan image forums that is frequently displayed or referenced when someone is being a little too weird about children on the Internet and basically amounts to one big Internet in-joke, in no way supportive of pedophilia. Despite this, California’s San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department issued a “public safety information bulletin” describing the dangers of Pedobear.

The Californian sheriff’s office didn’t get the memo that the people who make mention of Pedobear are Internet nerds, not actual pedophiles (surely if real pedophiles identified themselves with such a symbol, it would be a godsend to law enforcement.) They released a pamphlet (unintentionally) humorously entitled “A Seemingly Innocent Menace: An Introduction to ‘PEDO BEAR.’” A news station even reported on the “menace” in the segment in the video above.

The pamphlet describes the bear as a common symbol pedophiles have created to unite under to easily identify themselves within the pedophile community. Of course, most of the people who sport the symbol or even dress up in costume as the character are simply people who are fond of Internet jokes, something of which the sheriff’s department is apparently aware, but decided to ignore and produce a serious pamphlet regarding the “issue” anyway. As funny as the police warning may be, it’s scary that people who simply enjoy Internet humor could be branded as pedophiles by the police or by people in their community due to one overzealous sheriff’s department and the tone-deaf news outlets that have picked up their warning.

Kudos to Valleywag for contacting the sheriff’s department as well as digging up pictures of the flyer, below:

(via Valleywag)

Anyway: During the trial, moot was asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski to define some common online and 4chan lingo, including “troll,” “Rickroll,” “404,” “.jpg,” and even “/b/tard.” (Yes, this is a violation of rules 1 and 2, but hey, he was under oath.)

Some choice excerpts below:

Full PDF available here.

(Smoking Gun via BuzzFeed; h/t Business Insider)

Trolling victims, or the most brazen trolls yet? Redditor choochy spotted this bumper sticker from an Oregon Tea Party group which steals one of the most recognizable Anonymous slogans: “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” Its veracity has been called into question by some Redditors, but one found a since-deleted cache item from the Portland Tea Party’s “Tea Party Patriots” page in which the slogan is used as the group’s primary description.

Update: A little more evidence that the slogan was legitimate: The Next Web has what looks like an email exchange with the head of the Oregon Tea Party. Note that the response is from 3:03 PM, so the sender would have to be in Europe or another time zone east of EDT for this to be legit.

Even more frighteningly, the slogan has appeared at some real-life Tea Party rallies, suggesting that it has been ripped off by Tea Partiers on a broader scale, most of whom probably have no idea of its origins:

(via Portland Mercury)

The slogan of moms, indeed.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that Anonymous and 4chan are far from the same thing: 4chan is one of the group’s highest-profile strongholds, but it has plenty of other online hangouts and affiliations. Still, the Tea Party is definitely not one of them. One thing is for sure: Anon is going to be pissed about the theft of their slogan by Tea Partiers, if they didn’t secretly socially engineer the whole thing.

Update 2, 2:50pm: It looks like the Oregon Tea Party is currently under attack. Their Facebook page is currently being flooded with Desus, Heracrosses, and links to sex toy websites, among other things:

Update3, 4:33pm: The Oregon Tea Party will no longer be using the slogan. They write that they “appreciate [Anonymous'] resources” and “admire [their] tactics.” Hurm.

(via Reddit)

There’s a lot of anger and snark on the internet (I should know, I write some of it), so it was great news that this weekend gave us an internet story that just makes you smile. That story is the tale of Zach Anner, a young man with cerebral palsy, who became the internet’s latest celebrity when he entered Oprah Winfrey’s contest to give a regular person their own TV show. Anner’s audition video was hilarious and his overall good nature won over the internet and soon a few well-placed links had landed him more than two and a half million votes!

Here’s Zach’s awesome original audition tape where he describes his proposed travel show where, despite his disability, he and other people have never gotten to see the world will travel anywhere because, as he puts it, “no mountain is too high, and no Atlantis is too underwater or fictional!”

Proving that cool stuff can’t escape the eyes of Reddit or 4chan users no matter where it’s originally posted, Zach’s video went from the contest page to nearly every message board in the world in hours. It even ended up on John Mayer’s tumblr after he found it on the Daily What. Mayer advocated an “internet rally machine” to help Anner, but the internet was two steps ahead of him. By the end of the weekend, Zach was in first place in the contest with more than twice the votes as the contestant in second.

So what does Zach think about his newfound celebrity (and yes, he’s definitely an internet celeb as proven by this NSFW link)? Apparently, he didn’t even notice until yesterday when his brother showed him. The best part? His brother and friend taped Zach’s reaction when he turned on the computer and saw the results. Zach included that footage in a great thank you video he released on YouTube. This new video is even more endearing than the first one and warranted a “your welcome” response from Mayer.

Zach’s Thank You:

So it looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more of Zach Anner, perhaps even moving from the computer screen to the TV screen. We at Geekosystem can’t be happier. If you aren’t yet sold that Zach deserves a show, this four year old video of him stopping Dennis Quaid on the street and persuading him to do a bizarre skit is sure to seal the deal. Hell, if he gets Quaid as his cohost, I’ll Tivo his show now!

The Internet has officially decided that June 15th is Keanu Reeves Day.  Why?

It seem like he’s just a really cool dude who’s had some bad breaks.  Even 4Chan, the well oiled pistons of the Internet Hate Machine, offers this in his defense.   And so, The Internet would like to give back to the movie star who has a healthy history of charitable donation, by dedicating a day in his honor.

But where is the Facebook Group, you ask?  Why, right here.

What exactly does one do on Keanu Reeves day?  From the Facebook Page:

On June 15th, we plan on sending letters, emails, gifts, and any other niceties and kind words to a real bro, Keanu Reeves…

In case you don’t know, Keanu’s sister Kim was diagnosed with leukemia many years ago. If you want to make a more significant gift, consider donating to a cancer research charity in the name of Cheer Up Keanu Day. I’m sure a letter or email informing Keanu of this action would really make his day.

(via T3chH3lp.)

Christopher Poole, a.k.a. moot, stumbled upon a Japanese forum and subsequently launched an Internet empire. So large and interesting an empire, in fact, that he was invited to speak at TED. The talk covers a surprisingly broad subject matter in such a short time. From the origins of the site to its social impact, he covers nearly everything about the what, where, why, and when, and distinct lack of a who behind his chaotic forum.

In the brief Q&A after his talk, Poole is pressed to defend the supreme message of anonymity he advocates, and he does a great job. Other excerpts from the video include parental response, former music stars jumping out of floats, why his site’s viewers are better than CSI, marble cake, and the game.

It’ll be interesting to see how 4Chan translates to physical urban planning. Everyone packed in one room but blindfolded? We’ll have to wait and see.

(Via TED)

Yesterday, when Wikileaks released their video showing the military accidentally killing 12 civilians in Iraq, there were two things that were clear: a) People would somehow turn it into a right vs. left debate within minutes, and b) Other people would turn the tragedy into off-color humor shortly thereafter. Sure enough, the Internet didn’t disappoint on either front.

The Wikileaks video is just the latest in a continuing cycle: In the past few years, every single horrible event has been cause for near-instantaneous lampooning on the web. Users take the latest terrible image that’s haunting the national psyche, photoshop something ridiculous in, and post it online for the hundreds of angry comments they so crave.It’s no different than any other kind of trolling. It’s sad people trying to provoke others as a way of getting attention.

However, we can’t ignore this response. Even though most sites just pretend images like the ones above that appeared on 4chan and Reddit don’t exist, there is some actual merit in a few of these posts no matter how offensive they seem. While most are just trying to rile people up, there are messages buried inside a few of these and, while they may seem in poor taste, they are certainly effective.

Shock humor is, of course, not new to satire. Humorists and sociologists still cite the National Lampoon’s “Vietnamese Baby Book” 28 years after Michael O’Donoghue first wrote the article, which featured a fake diary with keepsakes like “baby’s first shrapnel.” In fact, the image manipulation found on 4chan can frequently find a solid lineage with that old humor magazine. There are only a few differences between then and now.

First off,  the Internet now allows people to make jokes about events only hours after they occur (in the case of Wikileaks video, the events depicted may have happened in 2007, but  the release of the video makes the wounds as fresh as if they happened yesterday, especially for some). Secondly, online message boards don’t have an editor-in-chief shooting down ideas that are either too offensive or (even worse) just plain stupid.

So the reader is left to be the editor. If a person is willing to wade through the tragedy-related posts on these sites, they have to put aside their offense and ask themselves: Are these jokes saying anything? In the case of the picture directly above, it’s obvious that it’s in poor taste but there also seems to be an underlying message. By photoshopping the end of a rocket launcher onto a camera, the creator of this image is pointing out how different a reporter’s camera looks from an RPG and is therefore critiquing the actions of the soldiers involved.

You can disagree with that message or not, but anyone would have to agree that the image gets it across quicker than the thousandth rambling post on a political message board.

We all know that there are some pretty terrible, dehumanizing things on the Internet, but some of these threads offer an appealing image of people amidst all the bad jokes and provocations.

There’s something incredibly human about using humor to confront something terrible and these pictures (and all the quips in the thread responses to them) show perfect examples of that. They help people get over tragedy and put it behind us so we can learn from it and move on. Then, hopefully, we can move back to listening to Erasure songs and piloting unicorns.

4chan admin, evil genius and TEDTalk deliverer moot shakes hands with FourSquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. Both are festooned with the coveted Gold Badges.

(via Geekosystem roving correspondent and SXSW Interactive presenter Rachel Sklar.)

Well, this was inevitable. The abysmal tedium of Mass Effect 2‘s mining segments has been well-known since initial reviews of the game came out; however, the minigame has now inspired minor nerdcore sensation Kabuto the Python (above) to pen a rap about his frustration with BioWare’s design choices.

Sample lyrics: “I used to rock microphones, rhymin’ in the stadium/These days I launch probes, mining for palladium/Slouched at my console crying from the tedium/I contemplate relations with the slimiest of aliens.”

Video below: technically NSFW, but if your boss doesn’t care about your listening to tracks about Mass Effect at work, we don’t think the obscenities per se are going to be an issue.

Kabuto deserves serious kudos for integrating the game’s sound files into his track. Now — when will a yet-unknown Internet Hero apply to same treatment to System Shock‘s terrifying broadcasts from a murderous AI?