meme

The classic MrWeebl animated music video Badgers, a short looping song of badgers, a mushroom and a snake. It is a staple of early internet absurdist humor.

A short clip of Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft event chanting "developers" over and over. It became a lasting internet meme.

A TiVo-captured clip of the notoriously repetitive 2006 Head On headache remedy commercial, with its 'apply directly to the forehead' jingle.

A brief clip of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride saying 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'

A short clip from a lecture Q&A in which Richard Stallman appears to pick something off his foot and eat it.

A short clip of Steve Ballmer's famous sweaty chant of the word Developers, repeated over and over.

The original Rickroll video, the bait-and-switch link prank built on Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.

The mostly unmodified clip from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in which Kirk screams 'Khaaan!'

A one-minute clip of Miss Teen USA 2007 contestant Miss South Carolina giving a rambling, incoherent answer to a pageant question. It became a widely shared internet meme.

The original 2009 Touhou Bad Apple!! PV, a monochrome shadow-art animation set to music from the Touhou series. It became the source of countless Bad Apple demos on other hardware.

A one-minute clip from Chappelle's Show in which Dave Chappelle riffs on Ja Rule and the 'what does Ja Rule say' bit. It is a short comedy sketch with no technical content.

A one-minute clip of the famous 'Where's the Beef?' catchphrase from a classic fast food commercial.

The classic 1980s anti-drug PSA in which a father confronts his son about drugs and is told 'I learned it by watching you'.

The official music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, the song behind the Rickroll internet prank.

A very short clip of George W. Bush's garbled 'fool me once' line.

A short CSI clip in which characters try to track a killer's IP address by writing a Visual Basic GUI. It is a famous example of absurd TV hacking.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, gives an Authors@Google talk in 2007 about the webcomic and his background, followed by audience Q&A. Donald Knuth and Guido van Rossum ask questions during the session.

A 2007 Fox news segment that portrays 4chan users as hardcore hackers.

Dave Carroll's song and music video about United Airlines baggage handlers breaking his Taylor guitar and the airline's refusal to compensate him. It became a viral example of a customer fighting a company.

A short upload of the classic ICQ notification sounds, such as the 'uh-oh' message alert.

A one-minute clip in which columnist John C. Dvorak explains to Dave Winer his technique for trolling the Apple community.

A short Supernova 2007 provocation in which Clay Shirky uses a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine, rebuilt periodically, as a metaphor for how networks change business and collective creativity.

A short, absurd happy-hardcore song and animation celebrating the Bagger 288, the enormous bucket-wheel excavator, in dramatic over-the-top terms.

The 1994 music video for Edie Brickell and New Bohemians' 'Good Times'. It became widely known as one of the bonus videos on the Windows 95 CD-ROM.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in April 2005. Co-founder Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo for about 19 seconds.

A short spoof of a nature documentary shows spiders building webs after being given various drugs. It is an early internet comedy classic.

A subtitled edit of the 1987 Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, in which hijackers interrupted Chicago stations WGN and WTTW.

A fan-made video of the Simpsons Stonecutters Song, in which a secret society takes credit for controlling world affairs, with lyrics and stills from the show.

A clip from the film Aliens in which Ripley says to nuke the entire site from orbit because it is the only way to be sure.

A short clip from The Wire, season 3, in which Stringer Bell chairs a meeting of the New Day Co-Op with Prop Joe and Fat-Face Rick. The scene shows the drug crews running their cooperative like a formal business meeting.

A one-minute clip from the film Office Space in which consultants ask an employee what he does here. It is a widely shared workplace comedy moment.

A short clip from Animal House of Kevin Bacon's character at a fraternity paddling, saying 'Thank you sir, may I have another?'

The bar scene from Good Will Hunting in which Will outwits a pretentious Harvard student.

A two-minute clip from The Wire in which characters work through the meaning of the word evacuate, an exchange that has become a meme.