What was the first link you received in your inbox that you clicked, copied and sent to all the email addresses you had? Many of us can't remember right away, but have an instant reaction when reminded of Mahir and the chuckles he offered us a couple of years ago.

Since the mid-nineties, before viral marketing was a buzzword, people were catching on to the possibilities of the Web by sharing the URLs of one-page sites that were often hilariously simple. People discovered that they could amuse friends without worrying about messing up the joke by emailing humor sites like the Dancing Baby and Cindy Crawford Concentration. For many, the ability to connect and share immediately answered the initial "Why?" question about the Internet.

Many of these sites still exist even though the dot-com bubble burst caused other free, fun things on the Web to turn into file not found errors. Today's Ellen Feiss was yesterday's Jennicam. Before the Rather Good's punk kittens there was Hamster Dance, which was a single Geocities page with rows of animated GIFs. Today, Hamster Dance 2 is a much more commercialized operation offering CDs and other merchandise.

The most popular pages have parodies or impostors, or are mirrored on other sites to ensure their everlasting presence. Burning Pixel's 1996 Dancing Baby has been reborn in thousands of un-official Dancing Baby sites. Ron Lassiter writes, "The "BabyCha2" avi file that I enhanced and leaked to the internet back in '96 has become tiring as is, and needs to evolve or die."

And so the Baby has evolved into screensavers, greeting cards and games. In 1999, he enjoyed a cameo appearance on the television show, "Ally McBeal."

Belinda Choi, who got her first editorial job at the now defunct magazine, "The Web", in 1997 says that people still look at these sites because they continue to find them entertaining even after seeing them repeatedly. She also speculates that as the Web grew it may have taken some of the sites two or three years to go around the world. "After that," she says, "It must get hard to keep finding new generations to see them."

At the very peak of the dot-com boom, when the Nasdaq was nudging five thousand, Mahir Cagri became recognized internationally in a matter of weeks. His personal home page was an enthusiastic attempt to find women and "invitate" them to his home. Filled with exclamation points and broken English, his page brought open laughter to cubicles throughout the United States. It also took him on a world tour sponsored by dot-coms that have since evaporated.

Mahir's adventures are now chronicled at his official site, ikissyou.org. However, his original quest has not ended. When asked about his love life he writes," Yes Im single still beacuse I cant decide who real-correct girl-women for me (u know many women-girl not show real face -heart) You married kids? or live alone and where city? (may be I can visit u future ...) Kisssss lipss xox [sic]."

Mahir wasn't the only one disappointed that his site didn't get the desired result.

Jonathan Katz of Cindy Crawford Concentration never met Cindy, and is disappointed that Cindy never made a page in return. Nonetheless he maintains CCC because it doesn't take much effort and people still seem to enjoy the game after eight years. It gets about three thousand hits a day with multiple page views from game play. Katz doesn't think that the traffic is just driven by Cindy's fan base but also by the fact that it is a fun thing to do. He says that many supermodels and celebrities are representative of an era and thinks that maybe that's also true of Cindy Crawford Concentration.

Mahir wasn't the only one to have his English mocked.

The phrase "All You Base Are Belong to Us" has thrilled geeks and others since late 2000. Tribal War has one of the many pages that sent this poor translation of an outdated game into posterity. Post-September 11th zeitgeist has inspired even more AYBABTU pages, as well as rock bands and t-shirt printing. Would anyone but hard-boiled retro-game lovers know the origins of this phrase without the Internet?

A Google search for "The Last Page on the Internet" returns over 5 million results and at least the first thousand are relevant. Some of them even have copyrights and dates, like physics student Darrin Maule's. And while some claim to be the Second to Last Page on the Internet there doesn't seem to be a last Last Page on the Internet.