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Canvas, an online forum for sharing, remixing and commenting on images came out of private beta recently. The site was built by 4chan founder Christopher Poole (known online as "moot") and is intended as a more interactive, less unruly version of 4chan.

On Canvas, users can upload images, edit directly in the browser and add captions. Once published, they can be remixed and commented on by other users. The site employs a badge-like system of stickers, which can be applied to images as a way of casting a vote. Drag the "LOL" sticker onto an image you thought was funny. Or you can give a cookie sticker to images that "need a little condescending acknowledgement." Stickers contribute to aggregate totals and help determine each image's overall popularity and placement.

As the creator of one of the Internet's most base, vile and creative websites, 4chan founder Chris Poole knows a little bit about the effects of user identity on user behavior. 4chan, a completely anonymous, real-time message forum, is the birthplace of many an Internet meme and user identity, or the lack thereof, can play a big part in this.

Poole spoke about the collaborative, creative process today in his keynote address at SXSW in Austin, Texas, spending some time on the topic of identity and authenticity. In this horserace, Poole unsurprisingly comes out on the side of anonymity.

Sometimes, it's the community that makes a site what it is. It's that unique thread of personality, inside jokes and general rules of engagement that gives it the je ne sais quoi and separates it from the crowd. What would Reddit be without Narwhals and bacon, for example? For anonymous message board 4chan, its that unique community identity that's lead to such wondrous Internet memes as Pedobear, Rick Rolling and Chocolate Rain.

So, with4chan founder Chris Poole launching a new site, can we expect more of the same or will a new venture attract a new crowd?

The 4Chan-allied, Wikileaks-defending hacker group Anonymous has apparently launched a distributed denial of service attack against government sites in Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The official Tunisian government site and that of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were both targeted in the North African country. In Zimbabwe, the first lady's website and the official Zimbabwean government site and ministry of finance site were targeted.

Both attacks seem tangentially related to Wikileaks, on whose behalf the group has previously targeted Visa, PayPal and others. In the case of Zimbabwe, Grace Mugabe is suing the Zimbabwean newspaper The Standard for $15 for publishing a cable asserting she is benefiting from illegal diamond sales. Tunisia has blocked access to the primary Wikileaks cable site.

4chan, the infamously crude message board, is currently down due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has been since the early morning hours according to the site's Twitter account. The attack comes just a day after similar attacks slowed down Bank of America's Web services.

Over the past few days, we've watched a battle unfold between two Internet giants. No, not Google and Facebook. 4chan and Tumblr. Members of the two sites have come to blows, so to speak, over who "owns" Internet memes, and some on the 4chan message board called for "Operation Overlord" - a DDoS attack targeted against the microblogging site. Tumblr users have threatened to respond by filling the 4chan boards with pictures of kittens. And both sites have taken turns over the past 24 hours being offline.

It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

According to 4chan's Twitter account and status update blog, they have been "explicitly blocked" by the Verizon wireless network.

If you're unfamiliar with 4chan and why an ISP/wireless company would block it, read more about it on Wikipedia. The high-traffic image board of mostly anonymous users was created by Christopher Poole in 2003 and has been the subject of a fair amount of negative media and legal attention over the past six years. But why would Verizon choose to block the site now? Does this put Verizon on par with foreign ISPs that block torrent sites and social networks? Or is there more to the story?

While Ashton Kutcher and CNN are trying to be the first to hit 1 million followers on Twitter, Joseph Frieschel, an inconspicuous Australian MD, is quickly catching up. Frieschel only opened his Twitter account last night, but he already has over 200,000 followers. How can this be? Well, it looks like the anonymous members of the infamous 4chan imageboard didn't like the idea of either Kutcher or CNN breaking the 1 million follower barrier before they got a chance to make their presence felt.