Excerpted from Time:

You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately. 4chan is unusual in several ways. It's extremely large and active; it gets 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. Since moot started it in 2003, those visitors have put up 145 million posts. By some metrics, 4chan is the fourth largest bulletin board on the Net.

4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his way, moot is one of the most powerful people on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal's report. Note to Olds: Correct usage is "rickroll," not "Rick Roll," but rickrolling is already over. Stick to LOLcats — those will be around forever.

After appearing on the site, "LOLcats," humorous images of cats with loud text beneath them in a fake language called "LOLspeak", stormed the Web last year. (For example, instead of saying "hello," the cats would say "oh hai.") Another phrase "So I herd u like mudkips," a reference to a sea creature from the popular animated show "Pokémon," spawned thousands of tribute videos on YouTube. 4chan.org began as a simple message board with pictures and text. It was started by Christopher Poole in his Long Island bedroom in 2003 when he was 15 years old. Since then it has grown to more than 3 million monthly users, according to Mr. Poole.

One of the site's most popular memes is an online bait-and-switch known as the "Rick Roll."

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

1. LOLCats
"Those ladies who work at the reception desk in your office, they might be sharing these lolcats with their friends." — David McRaney, Wall Street Journal

This:

Equals:

2. Prom Queen
"Five girls will be nominated for Prom Queen, but only one of them will win. And on Prom Night, something terrible will happen." That's the plot of the would-be successor to LonelyGirl15, the indie series that launched with very little backing under guise of nonfiction, achieving an impressive stature as the first mainstream web-based narrative series. Prom Queen, hailed by some of the stupider media outlets as a guaranteed Internet blockbuster and LonelyGirl's heir, is a stale series which makes none of its predecessor's innovations and has none of its charm.

Unfortunately, the show is representative of where "New Media" money is going. Clever ventures that fund and promote good online content are struggling to survive. VH1 canned the promising network Acceptable.TV; many online shows like Clark and Michael (starring Arrested Development actor Michael Cera) made failed bids for TV before giving up altogether.

Yep, the future of online video looks like this:

3. Twitter
Twitter messages are frequent and boring, but not as frequent and boring as articles about how Twitter messages are frequent and boring.

4. Facebook
When I was in elementary school, there was one kid who spent all of recess dribbling a basketball, every day. He'd walk around, dribbling, doing nothing else. Everyone tried to get him to play freeze tag, or "Invade the Jungle Gym," or form a gang where everyone was named after an X-Man. And he was sick of all these frigging idiots and just wanted to dribble his ball. Well no matter how many people invite me to Bite Another Zombie, or Share My Movies, or Build a Super Friend Block Party, I just want to dribble my basketball.

Facebook is also a chance for all my high school friends to remind me how boring they are. Sorry, but if even I find you boring — and I spend all day building my Netflix queue and cleaning lint off of my body — then don't try to reconnect with me after six years.

5. YouTube comments
They're pathetic. See also: Digg comments, MySpace comments, and #3.

6. The computerized pleasure palace
Thanks to the Internet, I have a list of every film I want to see (thanks, Netflix); all the music I like and should like (thanks, Last.FM) and free copies thereof (Bittorrent and Limewire); every book I want for under ten bucks (Amazon, natch); beautiful photos of my friends (Flickr); fifty ways to reach my friends (AIM, e-mail, Skype, Facebook, Pownce, Hallmark E-cards, probably some sort of telegraph-by-web); and a form to fill out for local pizza delivery (I won't tell you or you'll clog up the system). I can also order an Ikea cushion for my sore ass.

7. Mobile sites
In case I'm away from the computer, I can still Be Efficient by using mobile sites to do half of what I normally want to do, at half the speed. When I walk down the street with my iPod on and my hands wrapped around my phone, it's like I'm in a computer game and everyone else is an enemy toadstool. Last week I jumped on a homeless person.

8. Webcomics
Not everyone will get this; it's a specialized condition, like an allergy. But for those of you that have it, clicking one of these links means you'll spend ten hours of your next week reading the entire archive of a webcomic: Dinosaur Comics, Dresden Codak, Achewood, Scary Go Round, Thinkin Lincoln, Wondermark

9. Anything you can do, I can do better

Source: Wondermark

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. He's writing a sitcom about a startup.