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<br>
<b class="tit">The story behind 10 famous entertainment websites</b>


<br><i>Published on 10/5/2006</i><BR><BR>


<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.Fark.com">Fark</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_fark.jpg" align="right">
Originally, the web server on Drew Curtis' fark.com domain contained no content, except for an image of a 

squirrel with large testicles. Later, in 1999, the site introduced what would evolve into its current 

format, as a way for Curtis to share what he considered interesting news postings with his friends rather 

than sending them numerous emails. Features such as link submission and forums have slowly been added over 

the years, as popularity and participation grew. The number of registered Farkers surpassed 300,000 on 

August 19, 2006.
<br><br>
The term "farking" was originally intended as a euphemism for the verb, "fuck". However, it has also come 

to refer to websites that have stopped responding due to a high load after being linked to from fark.com. 

Particularly small websites referenced by Fark headlines are often "farked", meaning that their servers 

have received so much traffic that they have stopped responding completely (see also: Slashdot effect).
<br><br>
<b>Controversy</b>
<br><br>
Fark and Something Awful have been engaged in a friendly rivalry of sorts, culminating in a Photoshop 

Contest between the two sites, judged by celebrity Wil Wheaton. Contrary to popular belief, there actually 

is no real rivalry between Fark.com and Something Awful. This rivalry was propagated mostly as an inside 

joke by Lowtax, the owner of Something Awful. The joke comes from the fact that Drew and Lowtax are close 

friends, and that Fark.com and Something Awful share some of the same readership.
<br><br>
There are certain sites which Fark.com will not link to, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, 

or Ananova.com. The reason for not linking to The New York Times and The Washington Post is that these 

sites require a user registration. Submitting any link which requires registration is frowned upon by the 

Fark community. Members can post links to The New York Times or The Washington Post in the forums during a 

discussion, but may not submit these links directly through the queue.
<br><br>
Fark does not link to Ananova because the website had posted Fark's headlines without giving credit, in 

addition to posting many inaccurate articles. Ananova was receiving a great deal of traffic due to Fark's 

links while refusing to acknowledge Fark and reciprocate the gesture. While Ananova denied using Fark's 

headlines, Drew specifically put a few "fake" links on the main page which Ananova then posted. Drew then 

decided not to accept links from their website.
<br><br>
Fark has often been criticized for running headlines and articles that are politically biased. However, 

they are accused of having both a conservative and a liberal bias. Drew has stated that rather than trying 

to keep it in the middle, admins enjoy running both far-left and far-right articles. The top four hated 

"groups" on Fark.com are (in no particular order) PETA, Catholic priests, the French, and Duke University, 

according to founder Drew Curtis.
<br><br>
Fark has been accused of selling preferential placement of story links on the main page. Drew responded to 

this by saying he had considered selling links he was already going to post to servers that could handle 

the bandwidth, such as CNN or ABC. He claims the only type of links that are paid are some of the adult 

content (usually "boobies") links, and are clearly labelled as being sponsored. He also claims that thus 

far all sponsored links have been clearly labelled adult content links to ensure the links are 

trojan-free, spam-free, and spyware-free. Adult content links that are not labelled as sponsored links are 

not paid for and were submitted by individual users. According to Drew, there is currently nothing in the 

works to sell links to sites such as AP, CNN, or anyone else. During a discussion in a forum on such 

accusations, the moderators would repeatedly delete comments that questioned whether this was for or 

against Fark.com philosophy.
<br><br>
Many people also complain that Fark will not publish their link to their main page or "greenlight" their 

articles. All of the links submitted on Fark.com are submitted by individual users and are approved based 

on content by administrators. Articles that are posted to the main page are selected based on the content 

of the article, how funny the headline is, and sometimes how much bandwidth usage the site can handle. The 

administrators will never greenlight an article because they were emailed and asked to do so.

<br><br>





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<br><br>





<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.SomethingAwful.com">Something Awful</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_sa.jpg" align="right">

Something Awful is the brainchild of Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, who remains in control of the site, despite 

the proliferation of writers and administrators who have assisted him over the years. The earliest comedic 

features of the website appeared originally on Kyanka's personal site ARCCentral, but were popularized on 

Planetquake including Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse, which at that time presented comical negative 

reviews of user-made Quake II maps, and other reviews, notably of a Doom comic book, and some movies.
<br><br>
After he was forced to resign from Planet Quake for publishing a derogatory Cranky Steve update about a 

fellow employee, Lowtax moved his personal features to a new site, entitled Something Awful, in late 1999. 

During this early period, Lowtax created some of SA's most famous and long-lasting characters and 

catchphrases, such as Jeff K., the Space Robots ICQ prank, and the Awful Link of the Day feature.
<br><br>
Something Awful met with great financial difficulties during the period from 2000-2001 that threatened to 

take the entire site down. All front page updates prior to the end of August 2000 are missing due to 

server problems during this time period. Various sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, promised Lowtax 

payments in exchange for ad space, but none of these companies lived up to their promises. Details of the 

actual financial structure of SA have always been hard to come by, but some forum members assert that 

Lowtax has made, and continues to make, an enormous personal investment of time and money into the site to 

keep it running.
<br><br>
The 2001 decision to charge a one-time fee (currently US$9.95) for forums access seems to be a cornerstone 

of the site's present financial stability. Continuous income is generated through new member fees and 

merchandise sales.
<br><br>
<b>Controversy</b>
<br>
In 2005, a 19-year old man asked for information on buckshots on the Something Awful Forums. A few days 

later he shot two persons. Forum members were accused to deny the responsibility of their actions when 

writing joking replies to the poster.

<br><br>







<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.CollegeHumor.com">College Humor</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_collegehumor.jpg" align="right">

The site was originally created in 1999 by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, two high school friends from 

Baltimore, Maryland as a means to stay in touch when they attended college. It has since blossomed 

considerably and is now operated by Connected Ventures, a New York company that also owns Bustedtees.com, 

Defunker.com and personal video sharing site Vimeo.com. Site traffic averages eight million monthly unique 

visitors; most visitors are male and in between the ages of 18 and 24.
<br><br>
CollegeHumor.com has gained exceptional notoriety (and media exposure) by selling a novelty foam hand 

making a sexually-suggestive hand gesture known as the shocker (parodying the popular "We're # 1" foam 

hands sold at sporting events). This item has become one of CollegeHumor's best selling products. Some 

people have incorrectly credited CollegeHumor.com as coming up with the shocker, when in reality it had 

been an inside joke among college students for some time before collegehumor.com started selling the foam 

hands.
<br><br>
The site is credited with launching the career of comedian Steve Hofstetter, the site's original 

columnist. Several other comedians have since written for the site, including Christian Finnegan, Ben 

Gleib, and Dan Levy.
<br><br>
CollegeHumor has recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures to develop films dealing with college 

humor.

<br><br>







<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.ebaumsworld.com">eBaum's World</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_ebaum.jpg" align="right">
eBaum's World features entertainment media such as videos, Flash cartoons and web games. In 1998, founder 

Eric Bauman launched a bulletin board service, where people could dial in for free text jokes. That same 

year, while a senior in high school, he launched his homepage, eBaum's World. He uploaded his audio files 

of Mrs. Barnes, along with other goofy, bizarre, and just plain dumb media he collected: videos of 

skateboarders impaling themselves, fat ladies impersonating roosters, a preacher whose pauses had been 

overdubbed with flatulence. The word spread and eBaum's World is now getting 1.2 million hits a day.
<br><br>
eBaum's World has garnered significant controversy in many Internet communities over the years due to 

numerous allegations of content being taken from other sites; such as YTMND, Something Awful, Albino 

Blacksheep, 4chan and Newgrounds; without attribution. Companies such as Viacom, 20th Century Fox, and 

Sega have all claimed that Eric and Neil Bauman have infringed on their copyrights as well. Eric Bauman 

denies critics' claims that the site's content is stolen, citing research done by site editors and the 

consent form that must accompany uploads of material. He claims to honor all requests to remove 

unauthorized material, but this is contested by some content creators. In particular, web artist and 

animator Jonti Picking, was only able to have his animations removed at the beginning of 2006. Bauman has 

claimed that he formerly worked with Picking, though Picking has stated that this is false. 
<br><br>
On January 24, 2006, USA Network made a deal with the Fox Television Studios to create a television 

program based on eBaum's World. Producers intend it to be a late-night companion special to air with World 

Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Monday Night RAW featuring clips from the website as well as new and 

exclusive content including interviews with former and current eBaum's World subjects.

<br><br>








<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.genmay.net">General Mayhem</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_Genmay.jpg" align="right">

General [M]ayhem, nicknamed by its users Genmay or the "[M]", is an Internet forum containing general 

discussion forums; its title aptly describing the character of these discussions. General Mayhem has very 

few rules. Genmay is currently one of the largest message boards on the Internet, with over 19,000,000 

posts (considering the relatively small number of registered users). [1] While a diverse and independent 

community, Genmay is almost directly derived from a now-defunct hardforums sub-forum of the same name. It 

bears mentioning that Genmay itself is a for-profit LLC.
<br><br>
The current General [M]ayhem was founded after the original HardOCP sub-forum was spontaneously shut down 

by its owner, one Kyle Bennett, after a server upgrade. Following the upgrade, users found their favorite 

forum had evaporated. Any disagreement following the deletion was met by immediate banishment, hand-dealt 

by the infamous Bennett.
<br><br>
Three forum members jumped on the idea of creating a new forum for the displaced community. FLECOM 

registered genmay.com, M|22 registered genmay.net, and James Crivellone registered genmay.org. The first 

controversy happened when the 3 domains were consolidated into one forum run on M|22's computer, a dual 

Pentium 3 which was frequently unable to handle the load that was required, and a question of ownership 

and control came up between the 3 leaders of the forum. FLECOM was eventually de-admined "from [his] own 

------- forum" and disappeared from the site. Crivellone gave up his control over the domain and left as 

well (going on to administer the more regulated forums of Rage3d). The control of the forum currently 

rests in the hands of M|22 and sanjay. Lately Genmay.org no longer works, although the Whois says that it 

still belongs to James Crivellone. A whois for Genmay.info also reveals it is owned by sanjay, although it 

features the same error message displayed on Genmay.org.
<br><br>
The site is now owned and operated under the name General Mayhem, LLC, of which Sanjay holds a 51%, 

interest, and M|22 the remaining minority interest. Genmay is run off of a database server with two 

Opterons, 8GB of memory, and a dual channel UPS backed RAID array. There are four 1U Dell servers that 

serve Genmay via Squid proxies and Apache/PHP.

<br><br>






<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.digg.com">Digg</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_digg.jpg" align="right">
Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay 

Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom currently play an active role in the management of the site.
<br><br>
"We started working on developing the site back in October 2004," Kevin Rose told Richard MacManus of 

ZDNet. "We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October 

when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the 

world on December 5th 2004."
<br><br>
Although the domain name of Digg is registered under the name Jerimiah Udy, he is not one of the original 

founders of Digg, but rather a friend of Kevin Rose's. The domain name was registered under Jerimiah's 

name because Rose did not want others to know that he was associated with Digg. He wanted Digg to stand on 

its own and not become a message board for all things he personally stood for.
<br><br>
Kevin Rose's friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site 

"Diggnation", but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" 

stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called "Digg" instead of "Dig" because 

the domain name "dig.com" was previously registered by the Walt Disney Company.
<br><br>
The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. But as Digg became more 

popular, Google AdSense was added to generate revenue. The site was updated in July 2005, to "Version 

2.0". The new Digg featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a 

"success" page, and a new interface designed by Daniel Burka, of the web design company silverorange. 

After the redesign, some users complained about the lack of the simplistic, minimalist layout used in the 

original version of Digg. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design 

will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 V3 of Digg was released with specific categories for 

Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section 

where all categories are merged. A Sports category was added about a month later.
<br>
Even though Digg is depicted as a user-driven website with non-hierarchical editorial control, there have 

been recent complaints of intervention by editors to promote certain stories, bypassing the choice of 

users. The same editors are accused of hiding these facts by censoring stories which mention them and by 

banning users who have posted them. Founder Kevin Rose responded by blaming the promotion on users rather 

than staff. An exposé by tech blog Forever Geek uncovered what it felt was obvious intervention by editors 

to promote or bury certain stories, bypassing the choice of users. It also implicated Kevin Rose himself 

for digging the same exact stories in the same exact order as the users, and therefore being complicit in 

the promotion. A statistical analysis of the diggs showed that an average of 7-8 of the users dugg each 

others stories within the first 24 diggs per story that made the front page, and Kevin Rose dugg 28% of 

these stories within the first 24 diggs. The accusations were addressed extensively by Rose in an 

appearance on This Week in Tech. On that podcast, as well as on the official Digg blog, he stated that the 

charges stemmed from a coincidence (two stories that Rose was found to have been the 17th person to 

"digg"), and that the whole snafu arose after ForeverGeek users were banned for artificially inflating the 

digg counts of their stories.

<br><br>










<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://maddox.xmission.com">The Best Page in the Universe</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_Maddox.gif" align="right">

The Best Page in the Universe is a personal satirical humor website created by self-proclaimed pirate 

George Ouzounian, better known as Maddox, from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The site originated from a text 

document he wrote listing 50 things that "pissed him off." He gave the list to several people on EFnet's 

#coders. The response was positive, so in 1997 he created the web site.
<br><br>
As the title suggests, the website proclaims itself to be "The Best Page In The Universe", a name stemming 

from an old Yahoo! policy that blocked sites with the word "best" in the title from inclusion in their 

search engine. In protest, Maddox claimed the site to be the best in the universe and named it 

accordingly.
<br><br>
<b>Controversy</b>
<br><br>
With regard to his hatemail pages, Maddox has been accused of not actually arguing against the points his 

detractors make, but simply insulting the detractor and distracting the reader with visual aids. His 

defenders claim that these straw man arguments are intentional and the main criticism he is making of his 

detractors is that they care.
<br><br>
Maddox is also often criticized for not updating frequently. He has responded to this criticism by posting 

a news update titled "Foreplay" in 2004 and a "special request" in 2005 Small updates are sometimes posted 

on the front page: an update on August 22, 2005 tells visitors, "Updates coming soon, I have work, get off 

my nuts."
<br><br>
Due to the nature of his rants, some of his fans occasionally come to criticize him for attacking their 

favorite thing. He calls these people his "ex-biggest fans" and says he has received "one email like this 

per week about every single one of my posts since 1998."
<br><br>
Due to the controversial content, four countries and some internet filtering products have banned his 

website. On January 8, 2004, the United Arab Emirates was the first country to ban his website. On 

September 11, 2005, the site was banned in Saudi Arabia. His site is also banned in Myanmar. Maddox wrote 

the Websense article in which he described being filtered and banned on several services, such as 

Websense, Lexmark, and the Department of Defense. In addition, several cities have banned access to his 

site on public access computers, such as Sligo, Ireland.
<BR><BR>
Beth Robbins, a mother, formed Mothers Against Maddox. Her slogan was, "Help us Fight and Finally Shut 

Down the Most Hateful site on the Internet." She also created a petition to get the site shut down. When 

Maddox wrote about it in his Websense article and posted a link to the original Geocities site, Mother 

Against Maddox was inundated with visitors and repeatedly exceeded its bandwidth limit, so Maddox hosted a 

mirror. After Maddox posted the petition link, the MAM petition shot up to the Top 10 Active Petitions on 

PetitionOnline, with Maddox fans flooding the petition and posting extremely vulgar comments. The petition 

was eventually deactivated.
<BR><BR>
Maddox has a long-standing feud with Something Awful webmaster Richard Kyanka and many of the site's 

thousands of forum members. After a falling-out with the site's administrators, Maddox berated Something 

Awful as being too capitalist (since it costs $9.95 to register on their message boards). Detractors point 

out that Maddox sells merchandise from his website. Unlike Something Awful, Maddox does not require 

payment to use any part of his site. Maddox states on his online store that "You're not doing me a favor 

by buying this stuff. I'm doing you a favor by selling it."

<br><br>












<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.rotten.com">Rotten</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_rotten.jpg" align="right">
Rotten.com is web site with a slogan of "An archive of disturbing illustration" operated by Soylent 

Communications. It is devoted to morbid curiosities, primarily pictures of gruesome fatalities, 

deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs depictions of perverse sex acts, and historical curios that 

are disturbing or misanthropic in nature. The site was founded in 1996, and its format has changed very 

little since that time.
<BR><BR>
Rotten.com was started by a California Bay Area BBS sysop in 1996. According to the rotten.com FAQ, it 

began as "a 'what should I do with this domain now that I blew a hundred bucks on it' exercise."
<BR><BR>
On an April 1997 morning, shock-jock Howard Stern surfed rotten.com live on national radio. Traffic jumped 

in one day from 4,500 people a day to 50,000. The site had to be closed down for a few days from the 

massive bandwidth increase.
<BR><BR>
During 2000 and 2001, Rotten.com was strongly associated with several of the Slashdot trolling phenomena, 

with Rotten exhibits such as "The Incident With The Bird" and "The Incident With The Fish" responsible for 

penis bird and penis fish, ASCII art messages posted to the Slashdot website. Mischievous users also put 

disguised links to images on the Rotten.com website in their messages in an attempt, much like with the 

Goatse.cx trolling phenomenon, to trick unsuspecting readers into inadvertently viewing unpleasant images.







<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.YTMND.com">YTMND</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_YTMND.jpg" align="right">
YTMND, an initialism for "You're The Man Now Dog", is an online community centered around the creation of 

hosted web pages (known within the community as YTMNDs) featuring a juxtaposition of a single image or a 

simple slideshow, which may be animated and/or tiled, along with optional large zooming text, and a 

looping sound file. Images used in YTMNDs are usually either created or edited by users. Most YTMNDs are 

meant to expose or reflect the more inane facets of pop culture, and some can be considered inside jokes.
<BR><BR>
YTMND originated in 2001 from Max Goldberg's original website, "yourethemannowdog.com", which he 

registered along with "dustindiamond.com" after seeing a trailer for the movie Finding Forrester. 

Originally, the website featured the text "YOURE THE MAN NOW DOG.COM" drawn out in 3D ascii text with no 

sound. The advent of zoomed text currently on the website was seen in the following months, where the 

website also featured a photograph of Sean Connery and a sound loop from Finding Forrester reciting the 

phrase "you're the man now, dog!" Goldberg's new creation inspired others to make similar sites with other 

movie and television quotations (or any other sound clip they wished to use). At first, Goldberg 

maintained a list and mirror of these sites, but the list soon became exceptionally long.
<BR><BR>
In 2004, Goldberg wrote a press release after winning a lawsuit filed by Dustin Diamond for the "fan page" 

at the aforementioned dustindiamond.com. He mentioned yourethemannowdog.com, as well as a new website, 

YTMND, that would be ready by April 10. The website opened that day after rushing through the coding and 

design process. The site caught on in popularity and became an Internet phenomenon when major weblogs 

began linking to the Picard Song YTMND.
<BR><BR>
<b>Controversy</b>
<BR><BR>
In January 2006, eBaum's World hosted and watermarked a Lindsay Lohan montage created by YTMND user 

SpliceVW without crediting either SpliceVW or YTMND. In response to their actions, users from YTMND joined 

users from other Internet communities, namely Something Awful, LUElinks, Newgrounds, and 4chan, and 

decided to attack the forums on eBaum's World, using spam posting and DoS to repeatedly crash them.
<BR><BR>
On June 10, 2006, a cease and desist form was sent to Max Goldberg by lawyers of the Church of 

Scientology, claiming that several Scientology-based sites had infringed on their copyrights to some 

Scientology material. In response, Goldberg replied to the lawyer that the cease and desist form was 

"completely groundless" and he would not be deleting any Scientology-related sites. Days later, a 

Scientology page section had appeared on the front page along with a disclaimer on the bottom stating the 

following: "This website is in no way affiliated, sponsored or owned by the Church of Scientology, L. Ron 

Hubbard, SeaOrg, Dianetics, volcanoes or aliens of any sort. We are, however, sponsored by Citizens for 

the Release of Xenu, a not-for-sanity organization."





<p class="itemsubt"><a href="http://www.B3ta.com">B3ta</a></p>

<img src="/_media/imgs/articles/a40_b3ta.jpg" align="right">

B3ta is a humorous British website, described as a "puerile digital arts community" by The Guardian. It 

was founded by Rob Manuel, Denise Wilton and Cal Henderson. To inspire creative works, B3ta poses a weekly 

image challenge, such as "if cats ruled the world" and a "question of the week", for example asking 

"what's your most embarrassing injury?".

<br><br>

Throughout its history, B3ta and its contributors have been subject to a lot of controversy. The most 

notable events were the production of a Popstars flash animation which relied heavily on the use of 

phalli. When threatened with legal action the animation was pulled from the site. The site has also 

suffered from several media attacks and features in tabloid press on occasion. A photoshopped calendar by 

a member called sick_boy purporting to be of naked MPs caused particular concern.
 







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