Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

FTW

FTW is most commonly understood as standing for "For the Win!" The Urban Dictionary says it entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares. The show featured two contestants playing a trivia based tic-tac-toe game where the squares had celebrities siting in them who "helped" answer the questions.

The final question to complete the tic-tac-toe was asked "for the win..." The show ran from 1966 through 1981 but there were several attempts to revive it.

Fail!

Now a one word sentence primarily used to mock, sometimes with a touch of sympathy, the prominent use of the word "Fail" is said to derive from 1998 arcade game Blazing Star. According to an article from this Fall in Slate, "its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: 'You beat it! Your skill is great!' If you lose, you are mocked: 'You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!'"

See also the relatively new FailBlog.org, a daily collection of unintentionally funny images and videos with very simple captions.

Right: The cycles of history have a cruel sense of humor.

Rickroll

From the consistently obscene fringe message board 4chan to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade! Who would have ever thought a joke like this would go so far?

According to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, the practice of telling someone you're linking to one thing and then linking instead to the Rick Astley video Never Going to Give You Up was originally based on a practice known as Duckrolling. The link would claim to be to a news item or some other thing but would instead take visitors to a web page containing a photoshopped picture of a duck on wheels. Hey look, it's a duck...with wheels.

The first Rickroll ever, Wikipedia dutifully reports, was a May 2007 link on 4chan that claimed to be to a mirror copy of the original trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, which was otherwise unavailable.

4chan is also believed to be the origin of Lolcats.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

You often hear about technology companies "eating their own dogfood," which means using their own software to get work done. According to the book Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, the phrase came from Microsoft's Paul Maritz. Maritz had seen an Alpo dog food commercial where actor Lorne Greene told viewers that Alpo was so good he...fed it to his own dogs! Neither Greene nor Maritz apparently ate dogfood themselves, but Maritz did use the phrase in an email calling for Microsoft workers to use their own products more.

Dorky executives have felt like a little "edgy" using the phrase ever since.

Web 2.0

Many people think that Tim O'Reilly, book publisher and founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, coined the term Web 2.0. Last month O'Reilly mentioned in a PBS Science radio interview, though, that some one who worked for him actually came up with the phrase to articulate some concepts the O'Reilly himself had been discussing.

We did a little hunting around and got to what's apparently the truth. More than 3 years ago Tim wrote an article titled What is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software where he says that it was O'Reilly VP Dale Dougherty who came up with the moniker in early 2004. (Photo of Dougherty, left, by David A. Mellis) How many of you got that trivia question right? At the time Dougherty was the Editor and Publisher of O'Reilly's Make magazine, so he was no stranger to invention.

So there you go. Now you don't have to be a wall flower at parties any more, for fear of not knowing the history of these five terms. Or are the conclusions we've drawn here incorrect? If you've got reason to believe so...speak up now!

What About Copyright Issues?

With today's obsession with our "culture of ownership," where everything from the music we listen to the photos used in blog posts to the blog comments themselves are "owned" by someone and have varying rights of use associated with them, you would imagine that such a creation as "Garfield Minus Garfield" would have been shut down by the copyright cops long before it had a chance to create an online following.

However, that was not the case and the reason is because Jim Davis, who pens the original strip, was actually intrigued and pleased with the concept. He even went so far as to thank Walsh, saying: "I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: 'Oh, I could have left that out.' It would have been funnier."

Now, the online strip will make the move to the printed page. Thanks to Davis' involvement and admiration for the Walsh's version of the comic, Ballantine Books will soon be publishing a book inspired by "Garfield Minus Garfield." In the book, readers will see both the original strip and the one in which Garfield has been removed. Walsh will contribute the forward to the book.

Allowing Art To Flourish

Something about this news brought to mind a recent Wired article on an entirely unrelated subject - the Personal Genome Project. There was a quote from George Church of Harvard Medical School, which was about openness as it related to technology: "sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology."

Arguably, sharing with no restriction on use has implications far beyond just technology - it can impact art as well. Whether or not you want to classify "Garfield Minus Garfield" as "art" is up to you, but by not clamping down on the copyright, Davis allowed a whole new creation to come into existence...and one I read with enthusiasm every day.

Will Davis' respect and willing embrace of the modified strip have any greater ramifications in our society as to change our perceptions about what it means to own a thought, idea, or creation? Will it affect our opinions on when that ownership should or should not be restricted? Sadly, probably not. The belief that because you created or thought of something gives you control over it is instilled so deep into our communal thinking, especially here in the U.S., it will take more than a new comic to retrain our thoughts on the subject. It only speaks to what could be.

The Garfield Minus Garfield book will be published simultaneously with the Garfield 30th anniversary book in October of this year.