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who?

The site has two founders. One of them has retired from KYM to work for another company. These people are the following:

- Jamie Dubs (retired)
- Greg Leuch

I thought KYM broke off from rocket boom.

Know Your Meme never broke away. Know Your Meme is still a part of Rocketboom. Also, the video series came before the website, and the concept for the series was something that I think Kenyatta, Jamie, and Ellie all came up with.

ahh, so that is it.

Fun facts about the origin of Know Your Meme

When writing scripts, I like to keep one super-page open full of possible links, ideas, suggestions and related research links etc and Kenyatta had recently suggested we incorporate more reoccurring segments (like our 'Word Play' segment e.g.), and threw out "Know Your Meme" playing off of the popular "Know Your _____" idea thats been around for ages.

On September 3rd 2007 (for the Sept 4th episode of Rocketboom News), I wrote a Know Your Meme segment on Miss Teen USA which was blowing up all over the place. At the time, Kenyatta was actually working on building up our editing department and had consequently edited this episode. I wrote another Know Your Meme segment (the second one) on September 16th to run on the 17th about "Leave Britney Alone".

Around this same time I had become almost fanatical about wikis being the best tool we had available for audience participation. I had installed a wikia wiki on our server and completely opened it up, without even requiring a login to alter anything but the front page and a few other locked down pages. Blog comments were common, and forums of course are always common, though I was mostly attracted to the idea that anyone could go in with such ease and change an article, even anonymously.

Thus, on September 5th, I made the Know Your Meme page on the Rocketboom wiki to plant the seed hoping our Rocketboom news audience would run with it. I tried to set the tone from an academic perspective, as with the video scripts because that's what we were mostly interested in and thought our audience would be interested in: just simply studying the information because its fascinating – we like to discuss the theories behind the why's and wherefores.

By now it was nearing the end of 2007 and Rocketboom had been publishing every single week day, through all holidays, sense the end of 2004 and I was imagining it was time for me personally and the rest of the VERY stressful production environment at that time, to take a break. Kenyatta and I figured that the only way to do that would be to create two weeks of non-time-sensitive material that we could have in the can ready to go by Christmas and just punch play each morning and get back to a vacation (as if). With all the excitement and fun everyone was having studying memes we decided to extend the Know Your Meme segment to a whole recap of memes for 2007, it was a good year for memes, like a fine year of wine indeed.

Originally we hoped Joanne would be able to host the episodes but she was not available and so we decided to go for it – Kenyatta pushed the lab coats – I wrote the scripts (and invited Jamie and Ellie to contribute to the scripts and all four of us did quite a bit on putting the two week series together).

By the beginning of 2008, KYM had essentially moved up from a news segment to an entire episodic series with character development and has grown ever sense. Jamie suggested moving the destination site away from the wiki which was obviously pretty crappy (as I mentioned, it was the best we had at the time without investing too much of our time into it) and was critical, along with Greg, in building out the site that is Know Your Meme today, from scratch. By building the site to meet the demands of the users (for this was the purpose) the feature set and the general design was able to grow organically, which in my mind is great because it appears to fill a least some kind of gap that is desirable to people that they were not getting elsewhere. I.e. Unlike a wiki or other predefined CMS' which forces users into patterns that may not be applicable, when you build it from ground up you can suit the specific use case.

Cheif scientist Kenyatta along with Ellie maintain creative direction of the KYM Show and have built up a professional production team (along with Barry and Leah) and a growing pool of professional writers (including Chris). Greg maintains direction over the development of the KYM website. Chris and Brad maintain direction over the content and community on the KYM site. EVERYONE at Rocketboom has and continues to contribute greatly to KYM – we're all inspired by studying memes and love to talk about what's next.

What? Jamie Dubs left?

Jamie Dubs still lurks from time to time but he's retired from the Institute. Last I heard he was tracking the migration of a herd of wild Snorlaxes or something like that.