Role-playing games in their current form owe their existence to a 15th century form of improvisational theatre called commedia dell’arte, where players were given roles and situations without a script to guide them. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson combined this theatrical form with Gygax’s Chainmail wargame to create the world’s first modern role-playing game—Dungeons and Dragons.

Currently in its fourth edition, Dungeons and Dragons remains the most popular tabletop role-playing game. Its future has looked uncertain at times. In the early 1980s, the game was mired in a moral panic centered on the accusation that the game promoted Satanism, witchcraft, murder and other unsavory practices. Later, the game’s original publisher, TSR, approached bankruptcy before its 1997 purchase by Magic: The Gathering publishers Wizards of the Coast. D&D recovered from these setbacks, however, and current estimates place its player base around 1.5 million.

Of course, RPG video games and the explosion of the MMORPG—Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game—have redefined public perception of the RPG. The desktop, rather than the tabletop, is now the preferred venue for role-playing (although staunch advocates of tabletop gaming might argue that this is not, in fact, role-playing).

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is now the most popular role-playing game in the world. Based in the setting created for Blizzard’s original Warcraft real-time strategy games, the game was first announced in September 2001. New areas of the world were unveiled in 2007 and 2008 by the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions.

World of Warcraft had 11.5 million subscribers as of December 2008 and holds a Guinness World Record for the most popular RPG by subscribers. It holds over 60% of the MMORPG subscription market.

“The most important program on your computer is your web browser—and yet most people aren’t sure which web browser they’re using or what a web browser even is.” So begins a video, posted on Google’s official blog, which briefly attempts to remedy that problem.

Given that information, you might expect Microsoft Internet Explorer, Windows’ built-in web browser, to be the most popular browser in the world—and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Between IE6 and IE7, Microsoft’s own browser had a higher market share than any other until January 2009.

According to W3Schools, the current most popular browser is Mozilla Firefox with 46.5% of the market. This is likely due to the good publicity Firefox has received since 2004, when Forbes declared it the best browser. Since then, PC World and CNET.com have both compared it favorably to Internet Explorer. Firefox included tabbed browsing long before it was standard and, in 2006, Mozilla was known to respond more quickly to vulnerabilities in their browser than Microsoft.

The fastest growing browser is also the most recently introduced. Google’s Chrome has, since its release in September 2008, snapped up 11.6% of the market—making it the third most popular browser in the world.

In the 7 years since its release, iTunes has become one of the most used media players in the world. This is in no small part due to iTunes’ proprietary relationship with the iPod. Another factor is the iTunes store, one of the first retail sources of downloadable media.

A recent Soundscan report has revealed the first track to exceed 2 million sales through iTunes. Of course, such a track would need to be a timeless classic, but not too timeless—old people don’t have iPods, right? It would need to be something released within the last ten years or so with both the musical acumen and lyrical genius to appeal to both teenage girls and aging hipsters.

Of course, it could also be Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

I can only attribute this phenomenon to the Sopranos series finale in which the song was featured. It certainly isn’t so popular based on its own merit.

Right?

Right?

Social networking sites have come a long way since they were first introduced to the internet. Sites like The makers of Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com were pioneers in a field that eventually exploded onto the mainstream. Of course, no one remembers those sites now, but most readers will be intimately familiar with the most popular social networking sites in the world.

The most popular social networking site in the world is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s notorious social networking site was exclusive to Harvard students until 2004. Gradually, the site expanded to service most universities in the US and Canada. The site was later opened to high school students, employees of large companies and, finally, anyone over the age of thirteen.

Until recently, the world’s most popular social networking site was MySpace, a site well known for its music scene. As recently as May 2008, however, Facebook overtook MySpace for the first time with 123.9 million unique visitors and 50.6 billion page views. MySpace, for its part, had only 114.6 million unique visitors and 45.4 billion page views. If we’re to believe MySpace owner Rupert Murdoch, however, that won’t last.

If you’ve seen the movie Hackers (1995), you may remember that it used to be plausible that the most popular password was, simply, “god.” Try to set a password like that nowadays and see how far it gets you. So what are the world’s most popular passwords in this security conscious day and age? A number of lists have been made.

We’ll start off with a list published by the University of Maryland in early 2007. According to the university’s Michel Cukier, these are the most popular passwords—if you’re a hacker. The following list of passwords are the most commonly-guessed passwords used by hackers to gain access where they’re not allowed.

1. [username]
2. [username]123
3. 123456
4. password
5. 1234
6. 12345
7. passwd
8. 123
9. Test
10. 1

The following list was generated by PC Magazine in 2007. Supposedly, these are the most popular passwords on the internet today. Luckily, according to security expert Bruce Schneier, these passwords are used by a small number of users—only 0.22%, in fact. Apparently, it doesn’t take much to be one of the most popular passwords.

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10. [user’s first name]

If you happen to be using one of the world’s most popular passwords, you may want to think again. This is one area where popularity hurts.

Because I don’t value my sanity at all, I have decided to watch and tell you about the most popular YouTube videos of all time. After all, I have no better way to spend my time than sifting through the internet’s landfill.

Rihanna – Don’t Stop The Music

68.4 million views

Judging by the video, this song is about Rihanna adjusting her boobs in the bathroom. Also, she claps. I like to think that, had the video continued another 10 minutes or so, we would see Rihanna getting the clap in a dingy bathroom.

Best Comment: hello AMANDA what ups AMANDA YOU SEEL MAD AT ME IF YOU SEEL MAD AT BECAUSE YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME ON THE WEEKEND.AND MY DAD SAID YES IF TO HUNG OUT WITH YOU TONIGHT. BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.

Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love

68.5 million views

Leona Lewis and her crack team of multiracial stripper neighbors have terrible luck with men. This is probably why Leona likes to make out with walls, floors and radiators. Luckily for them and us, African-American Stripper set the building on fire and they won’t be whining anymore.

Best Comment: This song describes wat im going threw.My FAVOURITE SONG. Every word she says is so TRU

Lo que tú Quieras Oír

76.2 million views

I think the title means “Daddy Left Because Mommy Never Gets Off The Phone.” I’m not sure—I used a screwdriver to forcefully remove any Spanish I didn’t forget immediately after high school.

Best Comment: WHAT IS THIS??

Evolution of Dance

98.9 million views

The video is described as “The funniest 6 minutes you will ever see!” Honestly, I think it’s more likely that 98.9 million people are hot for the balding comedian in the pink shirt.

Best Comment: hey plz come watch my video so i can win a bet for $100.00!!!! i need 1000 views my next monday

Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend

101.6 million vides

Whoever decided to mix punk rock and cheerleading is a marketing genius who needs to be shot, strangled and tried for crimes against humanity. I’m going to go throw up what’s left of my brain and then maybe I’ll spend the rest of my days in a monastery where I’ll never, ever have to see anything like this again.

I hate you, The Internet.

Best Comment: It enchants this song to me !

With the different abundance of video sharing and video streaming websites such as Yahoo Video, Google’s recent purchase, YouTube, and many many others, it may be hard to find the most popular video. Because of the growth of sites like Myspace and YouTube, many people spend more time now watching videos on the internet than they do on television. The on demand video clip has become a modern day media phenomenon.

If you are looking for the most popular video on the the internet, you might want to start at the most popular video sites on the web. You can view the most popular videos all time on YouTube and all time on Yahoo.

According to the marketing company the Viral Factory, the footage of Ghyslain Raza – who became known as the Star Wars Kid – has been viewed 900 million times and is the most popular video on web. The company collected view totals from various video web sites and the Star Wars kid was on top as the most popular video.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is the most popular online music store today. iTMS has both big name artists and a large selection of more independent and obscure musicians. The rate for songs is still 99/cents a track in the US, but there is talk of raising this price in the near future.

Napster was once the most popular way to download music, but due was shut down to the rampant illegal file-sharing, and Napster has been relaunched as a legal online music market, hoping to compete with Apple’s most popular online music download service.

The biggest downside with the popular online music store is that unlike mp3s, tunes you download from Apple’s Music Store will not play on other portable players that are not iPods. The iPod has quickly become the most fashionable portable digital music player, but as other competitors research and create their new portable devices, many users will be left with digital music collections that will only play on Apple brand devices, since Apple has not licensed its FairPlay DRM technology.

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A blog, the shortened version of weblog, is a publication on the web usually consisting of personally written articles listed in reverse chronological order. Like magazines or television stations, most weblogs pick a particular topic or niche and concrete most of their writing in that area to gain an interested audience, and become popular websites.

Blogs generally use content management or publishing systems which allow for adding new articles and pages to the website with ease. Because of this even a novice on the web can start writing and create a popular blog. What is the most popular blog today?

Technorati measures the most popular blogs by counting the unique links in the last six months. Using this standard, the technology oriented weblog BoingBoing.net is currently the most popular blog.

If you consider Drew Curtis’ Fark.com a weblog, then it is currently the most popular weblog was measured by number of visits per day with over 1,000,000 visits/day according to The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB).

TTLB’s Blog Ecosystem measures links from blogs which it tracks to other weblogs which are being tracked. Using this method of link counting, Glenn Renold’s right-leaning political website Instapundit.com is the most popular blog today, but when you start look at visitors and pageviews, it is clear that Instapundit while influential may not be the most popular blog.

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• Most Popular Website
• Most Popular Search Engine

Internet search engines are programs designed to help users find web pages related to a specific search term. By indexing the full text of web documents, search engines are able to collect information and generate results for almost any query, making them ever an more popular resource. Around 2001, the Google search emerged quickly becoming one of the most popular search engines.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a global leader in market research, reported that the volume of Internet search queries grew to more than 5,100,000,000, yes 5.1 billion, in the month of October 2005 alone. Google has maintained its leader position as the most popular search engine with nearly half of all searches, or 48 percent, by serving more than 2.4 billion queries.

The four most popular search players, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL have maintained the same rankings in the past half year very little change in market share.

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• Most Popular Web Site
• Most Popular Weblog

A web site is a collection of addresses and the corresponding pages common to a particular internet domain name. Popular websites must employ several servers and load balancing equipment to serve all of the requests generated. Google may be the most popular search engine but it is not the most popular website, as more people use Yahoo for their portal services.

3 Most Popular Websites according to Alexa Rankings January 12, 2006:

1. Yahoo!
2. Microsoft Network (MSN)
3. Google

This rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).

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