An interesting thread at Cre8asiteforums (typoglycemia) about random wording got me thinking about Internet Phenomenon in general. JanussunaJ starts the thread with the following:

Msot ploepe can raed tihs, athlhuog it lokos raehtr odd. It is cllaed typoglycemia (haha). You can raed tihs eevn wehn it lkoos srtange, bceasue the barin deos not raed the wohle wrod at the smae tmie, so it semes as thguoh the wdors are selpled croreclty, utnil you take a colsoer look.

And proceeds to explain that the phenomenon of people being able to easily read misspelled words is called typoglycemia. Although Google hasn't caught up to it yet, Wikipedia has a good entry on the subject, and in fact a great entry listing hundreds of Internet Phenomenon.

These projects, as strange and sordid as many of them are, are fantastic ways to generate backlinks entirely naturally and organically. Through pattern observation, it also quickly becomes apparent how the phenomenon spreads across the web and what the difference between mass link building campaigns and massive organic linking is. Investigating just a few of the backlink checks for these sites I noticed a lot of characteristics that are fundamentally different than what you'd see in a commercial campaign:

1. On-topic pages are not linking - for many of these sites there are no "on-topic" pages, but for others, anyone who thinks they're amusing or interesting to their demographic will put up a link. This is certainly a good bit different than how Google and Yahoo! explain link relevancy, but demographics has been part of advertising since the inception of the two.
2. Anchor text is not well organized and often is haphazard - "here" and "check this out" are very frequently used to point to all the pages.
3. Sitewides are incredibly rare - I couldn't find any in my brief search...
4. Numbers over time spike and collapse - from what I could tell, the phenomenon would be picked up by one corner of the web (or blogosphere) and thousands of links would point to it, only to have a week or two of lull-time before another segment picked it up and began linking.

For those considering how the SEs might spot "unnatural linking patterns" in a website that's gaining a large number of links over a short period, this is worthwhile material.