Internet memes travel in waves. A fun site can lie dormant for years before suddenly being rediscovered.
The latest example I've found is Let Them Sing It For You, which has been around for years, but has been drawing new attention on blogs in the last couple of weeks. On Tuesday, I received my first personalized message through the service.
Created in 2003 by Eric Bunger, Let Them Sing It For You is a simple but fun Web application that lets you enter a text message, then translates the words into audio. The catch: it uses popular song snippets for each word.
So, for example, if your message contains the word "creep," it gathers that song from the Radiohead tune of the same name. "Fire" gets you Jim Morrison yelling the last line of "Light My Fire," and "love" has Robert Plant's holler from the swirly psychedelic middle of "Whole Lotta Love." If the app doesn't know a word, it tries to stitch together a phonetic approximation from multiple songs, and also asks you to suggest a source for later use. Once you're done, you can e-mail the finished message to your friends. Try it out here.