An Internet phenomenon is akin to a fad, in which something relatively unknown becomes increasingly popular, but usually for a short duration of time. It is nearly impossible to accurately measure the depth of a phenomenon's popularity, and different groups of the Internet may participate more than others. The Internet's lack of physical boundaries leads to a much faster and wider spread of information and ideas, especially when the subject is based around humor or curiosity. Most Internet phenomena can be often seen as good examples of memes, the self-propagating ideas.

Internet phenomena include:

• Mr. T Ate My Balls - a Yahoo! site with images of Mr. T, captioned with various absurd and questionable statements. Repeatedly done with other subjects, both fictional and non-fictional. Spawned an entire Yahoo category under Tasteless Humor > Ate My Balls.
• Mahir Cagri - personal website of a Turkish man; has received mass adoration by fans, mainly for its overly enthusiastic text.
• Thundercats outtakes - outtakes of the animated 1980s television series Thundercats.
• All your base are belong to us - a phrase from the English translation of the video game Zero Wing, adapted into a popular flash animation.
• The Hamster Dance - a page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters, linking to other animated pages. It now has its own CD soundtrack.
• Dancing baby - A 3D rendered dancing baby.
• Weeee!, a squirrel based Flash animation.
• Oolong the Rabbit A Japanese rabbit owner who places various objects on top of his pet's head.
• Real Ultimate Power
• The individual articles from The Best Page in the Universe often spread memetically.
• The Star Wars kid, a video, digitally edited numerous times, of a Quebecois teenager from Trois-Rivieres named Ghyslain Raza, student at the Séminaire Saint-Joseph .
• Group X, makers of the songs Bang Bang Bang and SchfiftyFive, adapted into Flash.
• Chin2 (link)
• Yatta
• Tai Mai Shu
• OS-tan link - Operating Systems personified as cutesy mascots by various Japanese artists
• Badger Badger Badger
• Bananaphone
• goatse.cx, a shock site frequently linked from webpages and IRC channels.
• Emotion Eric
• Clock Spider
• Limecat
• The Spongmonkeys
• Bonsai Kitten
• Exploding whale
• Animutations
• Absurdist Flash animations like "The Demented Cartoon Movie" [1] or "You are a chef!" [2]
• Tourist Guy (link), the same person photoshopped into photos of different events, mostly disasters.
• Whassup ([3]) Budweiser commercial series that took a new life when it was parodied with the SuperFriends ([4])

Resources

• Ebaum's World - BangBangBang and SchfiftyFive