Personal privacy has become a hot topic for Facebook, however, full anonymity is the ultimate in privacy and creates some interesting human behaviour. The biggest anonymous community is 4chan.org an image board, inspired by a Japanese image board, 6 or so years ago, created (apparently) by Christopher ‘moot’ Poole.

“Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there’s a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it.” Christopher “moot” Poole

4chan is the source of many of today’s internet memes (two you might have seen are Lolcats & Rick Rolling), only 6 years old the site gets 70m visitors per month, producing 700,000 posts per day. It’s a force to be reckoned with. In April last year the community hacked the Annual Time 100 Poll to get ‘moot’ to number 1 spot AND coordinated the top 21 first names to spell out ‘marblecake also the game’ (lost more on this here). The community also use their power for good, in Feb last year a young guy posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube, the community didn’t like it and using a number of techniques the had figured out his name in 24 hours and the guy was arrested in 48 hours.

Unusually, moot recently spoke at TED explaining the ‘case for anonymity online‘ this 11 mins is a fascinating insight into an unusual yet gigantic online phenomena.

The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet “memes” it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power — and price — of anonymity. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 11:24)

Do you regularly visit 4Chan, or have you heard of it before? Is it good, bad or otherwise?