The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston usually plays host to the world's leading scientists, Nobel laureates and technological pioneers. But at the weekend it was overrun by more than 500 self-professed "internet geeks".
They were attending ROFLCon, a web symposium which attempted to answer conundrums such as why so many people like watching animated hamsters dance, and what is so funny about photographs of cats with misspelt captions.
Described as a conference of "internet microcelebrities", it offered an insight into those people who have found a sort of fame - and in some cases, a great fortune - by thinking up the most popular gags, jokes and fads on the internet.
These phenomena - known as internet memes - are spread from one person to another in a similar way to viral emails. Even web surfers who do not know what a meme is may have unwittingly acted memetically by passing on a video of a sneezing panda to their friends, for example.
(...) The Guardian
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