Affinity+Space

The affinity space currently occupying the [|Hampsterdance] video meme is a website that is focused for children. It is an interactive site and capable of remixing. It informs viewers of the history of the Hampsterdance, offers games to play and quizzes to take. People can follow their favorite hamsters on Twitter and can talk to one another via a message board. They can watch videos and order hamster products. All this resulted from a woman named Deidre LaCarte, a Canadian art student, who competed with a friend and her sister to create a web site and receive the most traffic. In 1998, Ms. LaCarte created the website using a hamster as homage to her pet hamster who had recently died. The video depicted four hamsters dancing and singing a song originally sung by [|Roger Miller] called //Whistle Stop// and eventually spun off into a CD. As of January 1999, the site only received about 800 visits a year, then suddenly the visits shot up to 15,000 per day. The site was spread by email, blogs and bumper stickers and was eventually featured on a television commercial for Earthlink an internet site.