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I'm pretty sure the "Chocolate Rain" attention started as a joke at 4chan.org, an image board that is credited with starting lots of popular internet phenomena. It spread to a general audience and people started uploading spoofs. I don't know what causes people to listen to my music. If I could speak it, there would be no reason to write songs.

OP is an abbreviation for Original Poster, AKA the asshole who got there first. Used most commonly on *chan boards and forums, the quality of a thread usually balances upon the OP's ability to generate drama and/or interest in whatever bullshit he's yelling into cybarspace, although occasionally Anonymous just grabs something by the scrotum and runs with it. A thread that snowballs into win can often give an OP unwarranted self-importance, leading to faggotry and/or lulz if they attempt to take credit for the hard work of legion.

There is a large movement amoung 4chan.org users to perform a DDOS attack on the site at 7:00PM EST tonight.

The group of users are calling the attack under two codename: Operation Valkyrie and Operation Clampdown. The goal of the attack is to, according to the boards at 4chan, “stop the spread of the boxxy cancer.”

Author Amy Jo Kim points out a potential difference between traditional structured online communities (message boards, chat rooms, etc), and more individual-centric, bottom-up social tools (blogs, instant messaging buddy lists), and suggests the latter are gaining in popularity.

"It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful," says David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 4chan's utility is its ability to gather millions of people in conversation in a single place and create a "meme-rich" environment, says Mr. Weinberger.

Mr. Poole originally just wanted a place to share his fascination with Japanese comics and television shows. He was a fan of the popular Japanese image Web site 2chan and wanted to create a version for American audiences. With his mother's approval, he used her credit card to purchase server space and started 4chan.org.

"They get rowdy -- it's like a bar without alcohol," says Willard Ling, a moderator and long-time user of the site. "It's like that psychological concept of deinvidualization -- when groups of people become less aware of their own responsibility." Mr. Poole and his team of moderators have handed out 70,000 bans over the last three years, but preventing long-term abuse can be difficult. 4chan's "Wild West" reputation has created a dilemma for Mr. Poole. While it's brought him Internet fame, albeit through his alter ego, and created enviable traffic, he has trouble selling ads to more cautious companies who don't want their ads appearing next to potentially graphic content. He's attempted to quarantine sexual material on a set of adult boards, but that doesn't stop pornography or other adult content from appearing elsewhere.

The forum's origins trace back to a college apartment in Arkansas, where founder Hiroyuki Nishimura was a student in May 1999

2.5 million posts a day and about 800 active boards split into thousands of threads, 2-channel is the biggest BBS in the world

On occasion, the 2-channel community behaves like a mob, turning on members who transgress with massive amounts of hate mail, the revelation of private information and stalkers monitoring their homes 24/7.