eBaum's World is an entertainment website owned by Literally Media. The site was founded in 2001 and features comedy content such as memes, viral videos, images, and other forms of Internet culture. Content is primarily user submitted in exchange for points through a monetary point system "eBones."
An Internet meme, or simply meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time. The name is from the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972.
Rocketboom was a daily vlog produced by Andrew Baron in the format of a newscast with a comedic slant. Since 2004 Rocketboom has presented oddities, vlog excerpts, social and political commentary. The Rocketboom weblog and Apollo Pony featured supplemental material unfit for the vlog.
Andrew Michael Baron is the founder of Rocketboom, video aggregator Magma and Humanwire, and the co-founder of Know Your Meme. Baron has taught undergraduate and graduate classes at Parsons School of Design and was teaching IDTech at M.I.T. when he came up with the idea for Rocketboom.
Joanne Colan is the former VJ for MTV Europe and former anchor of the vlog Rocketboom. She is an actress, known for Know Your Logic (2012), Any Given Latitude (2005), and Themes from a Rosary (2012). She was on Discovery's show Dean of Invention alongside Dean Kamen as a correspondent. She also hosted a travel adventure series and she was senior vice president and senior content strategist at Edelman New York.
Cracked.com is a website that was based on Cracked magazine. It was founded in 2005 by Jack O'Brien.
A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.
Caitlin Alexandra Hill is an Australian YouTube personality under the name TheHill88. She produces, edits and uploads her videos from her home in Brisbane, and since 2008 from New York City.
I Can Has Cheezburger? is a blog-format website featuring videos and image macros. It was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), from Hawaii, and his friend Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger). The website was one of the most popular Internet sites of its kind receiving as many as 1,500,000 hits per day at its peak in May 2007. ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal-based image macros and lolspeak into mainstream usage and making Internet memes profitable.
Ben Huh is a South Korean-American internet entrepreneur and the former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites.
"Charlie bit my finger - again !", more simply known as "Charlie Bit My Finger" or "Charlie Bit Me", is a 2007 internet viral video famous for being at the time the most viewed YouTube video. As of October 2022, the video received over 897 million views. In May 2021, the video was sold as an NFT at auction for over $700,000.
Pedobear is an Internet meme that became popular through the imageboard 4chan. As the name suggests, it is portrayed as a pedophilic cartoon bear. It is a concept used to mock child sex offenders or people who have any sexual interest in children or "jailbait". The bear image has been likened to bait used to lure children or as a mascot for pedophiles.
Jamie Wilkinson is an internet culture researcher and software engineer. Wilkinson started Know Your Meme, a database of viral internet memes whilst working at Rocketboom in New York City. Wilkinson also co-founded VHX, a digital distribution platform targeting independent filmmakers, which was acquired by Vimeo in May 2016.
A rage comic is a short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces, or rage faces, which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity. They are usually crudely drawn in Microsoft Paint or other simple drawing programs, and were most popular in the early 2010s. These webcomics have spread much in the same way that Internet memes do, and several memes have originated in this medium. They have been characterized by Ars Technica as an "accepted and standardized form of online communication." The popularity of rage comics has been attributed to their use as vehicles for humorizing shared experiences. The range of expression and standardized, easily identifiable faces has allowed uses such as teaching English as a foreign language.
Overly Attached Girlfriend (OAG) is a fictional character and an Internet meme originating in a YouTube video published on June 6, 2012. The character was created by Laina Morris. The video was a submission to a contest held by Justin Bieber who challenged fans to create a "Girlfriend" counterpart to his hit song "Boyfriend". The video, which satirized elements of the Bieber song that have been perceived as clingy, featured Morris staring at the camera with a fixed smile while singing about Facebook-stalking her boyfriend and other themes.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English. The meme most frequently uses an image of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, though versions with other Shiba Inus are also popular.
Neetzan Zimmerman is an American journalist and blogger. He gained attention for his tireless aggregation of Internet ephemera at his blog The Daily What, which Cheezburger acquired in 2010, and Gawker. In 2023, The New York Times described him as a "a well-known digital traffic maven".
Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the World Wide Web. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet".
DreamWorks Animation's Shrek film series, based on William Steig's book of the same name, has an underground Internet fandom that started around 2009.
