FARK

The first thing you should know is that Fark.com isn't a Weblog. Fark.com, the Web site, is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership, from which we hand-pick the funny and weird notable news -- and not-news -- of the day.

Fark isn't an acronym. It doesn't mean anything. The idea was to have the word Fark come to symbolize news that is really Not News. Hence the slogan "It's not news, it's Fark." Fark was originally a word Drew became known for using online back in the early 1990s. He can't remember why, but his guess is that it was either to replace another F-word or that he was just drunk and mistyped something. He tells everyone it was the former since it's a better story that way.

Four letter domain names were getting snapped up quickly, so on a whim in the summer of 1997 Drew checked to see if Fark.com was available. It was, and he grabbed it. At the time the only thing you could do with a Web site was put up what was then called a vanity site. This was almost all the Internet consisted of back in 1997. Think of vanity sites as poorly coded MySpace pages. Yes, MySpace pages look pretty bad, but these were worse. Drew didn't want to use the Fark.com domain name for a vanity site, so he decided to wait until he had a better idea.