Serious research on 4chan, where Anonymous began

http://www.slate.com/id/2297492

"The researchers captured two weeks of activity on /b/ last summer: 5,576,096 posts in 482,559 threads. As you can gather, the pace is furious. The median life of a thread was 3.9 minutes. The shortest-lived thread disappeared in 28 seconds; the longest survived for 6 hours and 12 minutes."

I would guess this means the researchers are in possession of questionably illegal content, but nevertheless, it's good research that shows the value(?) of anonymity on a message board.  The question they were asking is, how can such a chaotic, wild-west web site produce so many popular internet memes?  The answer; it's a chaotic, wild-west web site.