The story behind 10 famous entertainment websites

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Thanx to 2spare.com, you can see how it all began for these sites. Excellent reading material. Here's a little summary of the article:

1) Fark - 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....

2)Something Awful - 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...

3)College Humor - 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...

4)eBaum's World - 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...

5)General Mayhem - 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...

6)Digg - 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.

7)The Best Page in the Universe - 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.

8)Rotten - 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...

9)YTMND - 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...

10)B3ta - 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?"...

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