Hampster Dance
A GeoCities page of dancing hamster GIFs and a sped-up audio loop. One of the very first things to go viral on the web.
The page was made in 1998 by the Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte, who had a bet with her sister and a friend over who could pull the most traffic. The content was exactly as simple as it sounds: four animated rodents repeated in a grid, with a sped-up second of Disney's Robin Hood playing on loop. Over a few months in 1999 visits went from a handful a day to fifteen thousand, spreading by forwarded email and getting written up in newspapers as evidence that the internet had become strange. The phenomenon even produced a novelty single that charted. There is no point to look for — that is the point.