Drew Curtis - Fark.com

Curtis graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1995. From 1996 to 2002, he owned and operated DCR.NET, an ISP based in Frankfort, Kentucky.

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.

e spent the next couple of years drinking and promptly forgot all about the domain. One day in February 1999 he had an epiphany - or a really good buzz - who knows.... He was sitting in his living room, thinking long and hard about starting Fark. He decided that if he was going to do it, he would have to do it every single day. He took a deep breath, grabbed a fresh beer, and jumped in. His friends evidently told other people about Fark and it caught on like a house on fire (or that weird ass rash you don't want to tell anyone about) and that's how it all started.

The first year Fark received 50,000 page views. That's a respectable number for a site started from scratch. The second year it was a million. The number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting Fark's servers was CNN. Number two: Fox News.

What is Fark exactly? Fark is what fills space when mass media runs out of news. Fark is supposed to look like news... but it's not news. It's Fark.