I've had a similarly surreal experience. I took a photo of a cup of coffee in Zeitgeist Cafe in Seattle early in 2005. I was new to Wikipedia so I uploaded it and put it on the page for Coffee, where it has stayed since.

I see it everywhere. The most surreal experience was when I was waiting for my luggage at SeaTac last year, and on the TV in front of me was an ad for a national hotel chain -- and they used my photo (violating the CC license by the way) when touting their continental breakfast. You can see the way this photo "virus" has spread on the new Google Image search as well: http://images.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=cup...

In our (everyone's) defense... it's a really nice photo.

In a way, it is a really perfect picture though. It's a nice plain cup of nice plain black coffee, no visible writing or advertising, no clutter, nice background with a gradient.

It would have been awesome if you had put a secret message in the image, just for kicks.

A little off-topic, but maybe it would be possible to 'unwrap' the cup and construct a little panorama of it's reflection.

Wow that's really creepy.. Look at the 'coffee' in some of the pics on the second page of results

Just wanted to highlight this bit:

""" I can't see how to reliably hotlink to Google Image Search results, so go to http://images.google.com/, click the little camera icon and paste in the URL to the image, like http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWrit... """

For a company that built its original USP on analysing hyperlinks, Google have a remarkable cultural tendency to screw up their URLs.

Don't worry about credits. Give something back to the amazing online community. If someone claims it is his image? So what? He probably is a very sad man and you probably can prove that it is indeed your picture. Stop worrying about these petty things.

208 results? Meh :)

Some time ago I created a theme for my WordPress site, which I released publicly later. I included a (cheesy?) line in it (plus a grammatical error) and it is frightening to see it in 500K+ pages now:

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=%22What+I+say+is+immensely+...

That image is missing a fourth circle: stuff you can do that's better than the current stuff (with the resources you have available to you.)

If whatever you want to do is not better than existing options then there's no point in doing it since your customers will just continue using the old thing.

In this case Microsoft represents the thing that can do stuff better than everyone else:

Scott had just gotten a job with Microsoft. I recall thinking that the point of his picture wasn't just to convey how happy and lucky he felt about the new opportunity, but to also explain why he was leaving his old employer.

That's a hacker point of view, sure. But lots of jobs you just have to do the regular thing, adequately. Build cabinets. Plant trees. Cut hair.

I never saw this picture before, nor do I think it's any special. Try googling for me_gusta.jpg, if u look for "virus like" spreading of one picture.

Somehow he made his site unzoomable on the iPad. Now I won't read it, however interesting his story might be. Shame!

You should try the magical image finder: tineye.com

'Meme' is the correct term, not 'virus'

I read an article, though I cant remember where that refers to memes as a new kind of hard-to-kill virus, even the wikipedia article has references to it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme