Was under construction the first web meme? All these people couldn't have arrived at the same metaphor individually (as obvious as it is).

I remember back in `95 building websites that were basically just animated gifs, (no judging i was a kid). I used some under construction ones because I had seen it everywhere and I was constructing!

Keep in mind that the idea of a document that might be different every time you pull it up was still kinda new.

So maybe the "construction" part was a meme, but I think the idea that you needed to warn people that this homepage wasn't "finished" yet was universal.

Check out http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-Page-... for a person's story of how he made the first animated GIFs.

Heh. I'd say that comment made it to Hacker News last year, but I already linked it in the Mefi thread! And then I got server push animation working on my server, & yes, it's really as hideous as people say.

Hard to say if it was the first or not. It may have been "Here's my list of interesting web pages (most of them were probably links to other peoples lists of interesting pages, very recursive.)" I don't think the word meme existed then either.

The word was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, but I don't know when it became well known.

His documentaries (Get Lamp and BBS) are also pretty interesting and well worth watching/purchase.

I for one will make this one torrent that I will perpetually seed until my ISP tries to stop me.

Jason Scott is a pretty cool dude; random story: He was doing the JetBlue unlimited month of travel and showed up in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago to talk at CMU. He was giving a talk at Seton Hill college the next day (about 45 mins away), and posted on twitter looking for a ride. A friend of mine forwarded the tweet to me, and I got in touch with Jason and ended up giving him a ride the next day. I had very little clue who he was before I met him, but he gave me a copy of Get Lamp and some good discussion in return.