I’ve known Chris White since 1995, when he was running a listserv humor list with no visible business model – what was up with that, Chris? – and I was reading my email using America Online on a Packard Bell that came from Montgomery Ward, which was having a sale. Chris had this idea, which was that he was kind of funny but that a bunch of people he didn’t know well were REALLY funny. And that if he could use Their Funny, he could be funny too. After discarding cannibalism and Electronic Brain Transfers as ways of getting access to their senses of humor, he settled on what we now call user-generated content.

That’s right: It was 1995, and Chris had stumbled on a critical Internet trick: Leverage other people’s desire to excel to help everyone. Before LinkedIn or FaceBook were even ideas, Chris had found something really slick. He sent out topics on which he wanted snappy one-liners to a group of people, collected their answers, pitched out the lame ones and ranked the good ones, and hey presto – he had a great list of funny lines on topics like The Top Five Ways To Tell Someone Their Fly Is Unzipped, or – from 2001! - The Top Five Unforeseen Effects of a Hollywood Writer’s Strike.

I wrote about this a long time ago, at Internet World magazine, in a column titled Five Easy Pieces. (It’s still out there in its Web cryostation, waiting for readers to throng it and make it feel all thawed and loved again.) And now, at the conference, I’ll get to interview Chris live about how he’s done it – and what’s going to do next.