4chan Founder Stretches Canvas

You may not be familiar with 4chan, one of the largest online communities — one that's rife with porn and other NSFW content.

But you may recall how its founder, the 23-year-old Christopher Poole who's better known online as "Moot," managed to get 16.8 million votes on Time's 2009 Person of the Year online poll to land its "most influential person" title. (He was profiled by Time a year earlier, at the ripe old age of 20). 

Poole is now looking to go legit, or at least make some money, by launching another web venture that he officially unveiled yesterday at South by Southwest in Austin.

Dubbed Canvas, it's an online community (of course) that lets users upload images, scrawl on other people's images and generally muck around.

Think of it as I Can Has Cheezburger without the lolcats, or a social version of Exquisite Corpse. As meme-makers go, Poole is a wizened pro at letting users in on the joke by collaborating and mashing up others' content.

The still-in-beta sit also aims to be a less radical (read: more ad-friendly) version of 4chan, whose users have been known to stage web vendettas, including supporting the Anonymous movement that defends WikiLeaks.

As the New York Times notes, it has "received financing from such respected venture capitalists as Ron Conway, a noted Silicon Valley investor who was one of the earliest investors in Google, Kenneth Lerer, a founder of The Huffington Post, and Joshua Schachter, who created Delicious, the popular social bookmarking service that Yahoo bought." 

Another high-profile investor: Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm formed by tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who told the NYT that Canvas was “one of the easier investment decisions we’ve ever made.”