A Virtual Unknown: Meet 'Moot,' the Secretive Internet Celeb Who Still Lives With Mom.

To understand why Poole is significant, it helps to understand 4chan. The way to understand 4chan is to understand that it has been responsible for half of what you've been forwarded recently. Have you ever clicked on a link, expecting to go one place, but instead found yourself back in 1987, watching a music video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"? You are one of an estimated 18 million victims of "Rickrolling," a bait-and-switch joke that began on 4chan and has spawned copycats like "Barackrolling."

Or Lolcats -- those photographs of cute felines with captions in broken English? ("I Can Haz Cheezburger?") Those were born on 4chan -- part of "Caturdays," in which weekends are dedicated to posting pet pictures.

Anonymous, the loose collective of activists (sometimes seen as trolls) who made headlines by staging a series of protests against the Church of Scientology last year? That's 4chan.

The kid who hacked Sarah Palin's e-mail was a regular on 4chan; so have been countless other pranksters who have gained brief infamy online.

Some of the memes -- virtual "catchphrases" transmitted through online communities -- are silly. Others seem to get at something culturally significant. (Economic failure = talking cats!)

Much of what comes out of 4chan is juvenile or just plain gross, so offensive that the frequenters of the random "/b/" board are known as "b-tards," which is, of course, offensive in itself.

And yet the cesspool conditions of 4chan have become a highly successful petri dish contributing to Internet culture in dramatic ways.

"It really looms big as the dark heart of the Internet. It's not common that one place generates so much," says Tim Hwang, a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Hwang organized the conference, which is called ROFL Thing. (ROFL, as in rolling on the floor laugh -- wait, do we really have to spell it out? OMG.)

Poole created 4chan when he was 15.

He has become a virtual celebrity, so well known that he began eschewing his real name in favor of "moot" or other pseudonyms while still in high school. With online fame, the border between love and loathing is precariously thin. There are a lot of trolls out there, and Poole has been stalked or smeared by a few.

"Of course, there are the obvious rumors that float around," says a bald, tattooed guy. A bicycle messenger from Boston, he refuses to let his name be printed because he is part of the Internet group Anonymous, which tries to be, well, you know.

Rumors like?