Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. One of the first Internet memes was The Hamster Dance, which was just a website with a bunch of animated pictures of hamsters and a clip of sped up music. It was one of the first websites whose popularity spread by word of mouth, and had no real value other than being silly (and having an annoyingly catchy tune!).
Hamster Dance was created in 1998 by Deidre LaCarte, who was an art student at the time, as a tribute to her pet hamster and as a competition with her sister to see who could generate the most traffic to a website. The site started with only about 4 visits per day, but as with most viral phenomena, it suddenly jumped to 15,000 per day. To read more, please see the wikipedia article.
So….
Did you see the Hamster Dance when it originally came out? Or have you seen it since? And will you admit whether you sent it on to all your friends?