Know Your Meme
Know Your Meme (show December 2007, database 2008) - a community-edited database of Internet culture. “Like Wikipedia, but cooler.”
I co-created Know Your Meme with Kenyatta Cheese, Elspeth Rountree and Andrew Baron at Rocketboom. The show started in December 2007. We dressed up in lab coats as the “Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies” and explained the stories behind notable memes. Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison joined the cast later.
I built the site and co-hosted the show. I had been keeping a database of every meme I found as a personal reference, and in 2008 that became the online companion database, which is the Know Your Meme most people know today.
The meme database in February 2009, with eight entries.
Around May 2010, with a new navy design and 132 entries.
November 2010, with 3,524 entries and a trending bar.
Some highlights:
- TIME named it one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009
- I hosted the Auto-Tune episode with “Weird Al” Yankovic, which won him the 2010 Streamy for Best Guest Star in a Web Series
- Apple picked it as one of the best podcasts of 2010
- In March 2011 we performed a live episode as a keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco
Rocketboom sold the site to the Cheezburger Network in March 2011. It remains a popular destination for anyone trying to understand wtf their kids are talking about.
The Show
Links
- knowyourmeme.com
- Wikipedia: Know Your Meme
- The Daily Dot: A day in the office with Know Your Meme (2012)
- BBC Focus: Internet Memes (2010)
See also: Meme Breaks, Internet Famous Class