Despite giving the generation a stupid name (The Look At Me's), Newsweek concedes that obsession with documentation isn't entirely a generational phenomenon. But the Internet does qualitatively change our view of recording life. MySpace and camera phones document things that would previously remain secret or temporary.

If Ashley Alexandra Dupré were in the same scandal ten years ago, the call girl wouldn't have been so well-documented and wouldn't have stolen the news cycle from her client Eliot Spitzer. She wouldn't have felt like just another hot girl. But seeing her MySpace page (which was no more packed with self-promotion than the average teen I know) evaporates some of the mystique. So, thanks to the superdocumented life of Gen Y, everyone's prefabricated for their rise to fame. Like Ashley, we won't even have to do something new.

Origins
Rickrolling began last year in 4chan's video game forum. (The 4chan forum site is the sewer of the Internet, but the worst griefing and fighting happens in its /b/ forum. The other forums stay somewhat on topic but are still perverse and often baffling.) Anyway according to the Encyclopedia Dramatica, when Grand Theft Auto IV's official web site launched, everyone rushed to see it and the site got overloaded. Back on 4chan, some people pointed to exclusive videos of the upcoming game, and the frustrated GTA fans clicked the links. Instead of game footage, they got Rickrolled.

The fad caught on, then spread to other popular forums like Fark and Slashdot, which share some users with 4chan. From there it went to the 250, the bloggers and nerds who think they are the center of the Internet — these people. Those people spread it to the web at large and now it's a trend story in the Guardian.

Varieties
Before (or maybe slightly after) the Rickroll came the duckroll, which was the same thing with a picture of a duck on wheels instead of "Never Gonna Give You Up." The absurdity was funnier, but still rather pointless. It still wasn't impressive to, gasp, send someone to a web page they did not expect.

A more heinous variety of Rickroll is a trick that resizes and animates the victim's window and pops up messages, making it very hard to close the window without hearing the whole song. Jesus, never do this. How is it funny? You're just making someone click things, listen to banal noise, and resize their windows. You're replicating the banner ad experience from 2003.

The problem with Rickrolls is the lack of sufficient setup. When you link to something, you set up a tiny expectation in me. That doesn't make for much of a fall when I see the punchline. So the few redeemable Rickrolls must come at the end of a long setup in which a link is discussed at length before it's given. Even real-world Rickrolls are disappointing because they ride on the cultural capital of the web's worst joke.

Alternatives
I was goatseing long before Rickroll. Goatse, the image of a man stretching his own ass open (described at length on Wikipedia), triggers an actual moment of horror (though it's funnier if a first-time victim isn't really bothered). There are other shock sites like meatspin, which humiliates the viewer for watching. A Rickroll is like poking someone in the chest; Goatse is sucker-punching them. Still obviously for teens, college students, and the sort of guy who likes ads by Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

But lately I've switched to "happyrolls," my stupid word for surprising people with good things. "Ha, you thought I was linking you to a spreadsheet, but it's a really cute cartoon about history!" I know, this is so "pay it forward" or whatever, but it's not Rick Astley.

• March 2006: Cover story "Putting the WE in WEB" praises Flickr, YouTube and others for letting ordinary people create things online — years after these sites became popular.
• December 2006: Trend piece declares 2007 the "year of the widget." It wasn't.
• 2007: Profile of hot new user-generated-content startups.
• February 2007: Interview with Jimmy Wales, who explains why his site Wikipedia is the future.
• January 2008: Story about Flickr users organizing photos for the Library of Congress. Newsweek calls them "the unwashed masses," and I wish there was a way to punch a magazine.

• It's for starfuckers. "TED seems like a free pass for the Valley to shed [meritocratic] values, to be seduced by celebrity, to gawk at Hollywood types and politicians that its denizens would otherwise never encounter." That's according to BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy, who's never been invited to TED as she admits in her story "Why I'm Fed Up With TED." Lacy, who wrote cover stories on dot-com "Valley Boys" treating them like celebrities, also got a six-figure advance to write a book about such dot-commers. But if anything that makes her TED condemnation an expert opinion.
• Even the webtards are over it. Such as TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington, who's given up on begging for an invite. Demonstrating the writing skills that will help him replace all tech media with his blog network, he explained on Twitter, "TED is such a lame conference."
• It's for Olds. How else did former TIME editor Walter Isaacson (his name is made of old) get away with calling his upcoming book "one of the first books for the electronic age"? (Like several books before it, an editable version will appear online.) Hello Walter, welcome to computers! Have you heard of the "For Dummies" series? You don't even have a home page.

• Forbes is over it. Former corporate clients told the magazine last July that Second Life was empty except for undesirable horny cybersexers. A rep for Wells Fargo compared it to Iraq.
• TIME is over it. The mag's August takedown story called Second Life's traffic "disappointing," trashed the world's poor usability, and said the government sees it as a criminal kiddie-porn gambling tax evasion wonderland.
• The Times itself is over it. Except when the Times tech blog deconstructed Second Life, all the corroborating links came from competing newspapers.
• Actually everyone's over it. The spike in media mentions, rising from under 200 to over 1000 mentions per month over the last two years, is finally receding, with under 800 mentions in January.
• The headlines are still cheesy. When did blogging become mainstream? When papers stopped using "virtual" and "diary" in every headline about a weblog. Second Life hasn't made that jump. Times headlines include: "It's My (Virtual World);" "A Virtual World But Real Money;" "Obama Is First In Their Second Life;" and "The Reporter Is Real, but the World He Covers Isn't."
• Every story opens like this: "Joe Blow woke up this morning and flew above his house while playing the ukulele. He then did some other impossible things, quite matter-of-factly." [paragraph break] "He was in the virtual world Second Life." [gasps, applause, cheers]
• To wit: "Mr. Gould showed up in a Superman costume. Next, he invited me to sit down next to him in a chaise longue that overlooked the crashing surf. As we talked about my strengths and weaknesses, crabs skittered along the sand at our feet. At another point, in the middle of responding to a question about overcoming professional challenges, I stood up and performed a hula dance."

Buried in page number whatever is a mention of the Mobile Adult Content Conference, who lent their keynote speaker for an interview. The 3rd annual "MACCongress" met yesterday and today. (Their web site has a photo of people in VR headsets, since VR porn will catch on as soon as developers perfect a non-stick headset.) Looks like Reuters rolled over for an easy trend story at the behest of a MACC flack.

Watts also set a control group, who rated the songs on merit without knowing anyone else's ratings. Ratings were much flatter in this group, with a few songs recognized as especially bad or good. Meanwhile in the social groups:

Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit. "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

So musical hits are random, they're not based on merit, and we make them because people like music that they know other people like.

And now, dear congregation, let us close with a hymn by Soulja Boy, the first YouTube-created musical star.