lolcat

I'm here at the Washington Technology Industry Association's technology showcase in Seattle, which just wrapped up, and managed to catch a minute with Seattle local Ben Huh of icanhascheezburger fame. Huh is the CEO of Pet Holdings, which owns the ring of sites that surround icanhascheezburger, including Failblog, Engrish Funny, and not-quite-as-funny-as-lolcats-site Loldogs.

Huh's five-minute pitch to the audience was simply an overview of the company, the same one Huh has done at other shows. However, this one came with updated information about the growth of the site's video viewership, which now tops 80 million video … Read more

LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?

Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be … Read more

If you're a big fan of LOLCats like me, then you probably are very familiar with Icanhascheezburger.com, a community site where the most active practitioners of the phenomenon involving funny pictures of cats mixed with odd, badly spelled phrases ply their trade daily.

To the uninitiated, LOLCats can be hard to decipher, especially given that many of them are subtle meta references to the phenomenon itself. So regular Icanhascheezburger.com visitors are well-versed in phrases involving things like "Ceiling Cat...," "I'm in ur...," "...ur doing it wrong" and so on.

Over the last year-and-a-half, the site has become massively popular, with tens of millions of monthly visitors and even a series of spin-off sites, all in spite of the fact that it was hardly the originator of the phenomenon.

Now, the creators of the site have cobbled together several dozen LOLCats from the site into I Can Has Cheezburger? the book. A slick little volume subtitled, "A LOLCat colleckshun," it features the famous fluffy gray cat so familiar to fans of the site on the cover.

I was really looking forward to the book, as I figured it would cull the best of the site's thousands upon thousands of user-created entries. And since I can always feel confident that a visit to the site will have me ROFLMAOing--rolling on the floor laughing my (butt) off--I expected that the book would induce much the same reactions, except even more concentrated.

Sadly, that wasn't the case. … Read more

SEATTLE--How does one build an empire on pictures of cats with silly, misspelled captions?

As most fans of the Internet now know, I Can Has Cheezburger has become one of the most popular sites online. Its daily collection of LOLCats is the source of endless humor, and you can be pretty sure that someone in your office is reading the site and chuckling to themselves right now.

But how did it happen?

At the Gnomedex conference here Friday, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the genesis of the site, and some of the milestones it has gone through as it has become not only a household name but the vanguard--if not the originator--of one of the most popular memes ever to hit cyberspace.

To Huh, the "Lolean Timescale" started several years ago, back when LOLCats were a much edgier phenomenon. Back then, a LOLCat was as likely to have a snarky, sexual theme as not. You may remember the famous, "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" LOLCat that began to make its way across the Internet a couple of years ago. … Read more

Are you one of the millions who visits icanhascheezburger.com every month? The site is well known for its user-generated lolcats, the pictures (usually of cats) with humorous captions thrown on top. Earlier this month, the site unveiled its latest swag, a tried and true 1990s relic: magnetic poetry. The twist is that the words follow popular lolcat memes and have been made to emulate their Web counterparts with the proper white impact font.

Our shipment of magnets arrived earlier this morning and have been privy to some rather humorous concoctions. The best use of these I'm told is … Read more

When I wrote this morning about an LOLcat contest in which Icanhascheezburger.com users would be contending to create one of five bottle labels for a soda company, I mused that it would also be nice to have a politics-LOLcat mashup.

Wait no more. In fact, even as I wrote it, the nice folks at Icanhascheezburger hopped in their time machine, went back 24 hours, and launched the exact site I wanted yesterday.

Well, OK, maybe there was no metaphysics involved. But either way, on Monday, Icanhascheezburger launched Pundit Kitchen, a site for LOLcats, except with politicians.

The same folks … Read more

I can has a break?

OK. I love Icanhascheezburger.com, and LOLcats in general, as much as the next guy. Truly. I have spent hours, in aggregate, laughing myself to tears on the site.

But when I ran across an item on the site on Tuesday morning announcing that it is teaming up with the trendy micro-soda company Jones Soda to run a contest to put LOLcats on root beer--and other flavor--bottle labels, I had to ask myself if someone was maybe huffing a little too much catnip.

LOLcats, of course, are the whimsical combinations of silly pidgin English phrases and funny pictures of cats … Read more

In the grand spirit of the Swedish Chef translators that popped up on the Net several years ago (see The Dialectizer and even Google's "Bork" translation), the Malevolent Design company has released LOLinator. This service will take almost any Web site and not only change its text from English to LOLcat, but it will massacre the design as well. Lovely.

It's good for a laugh or two.

Maybe you can't has Facebook right now, but you can has a Harry Potter lolcat:

We'll now return to our regularly scheduled programming--until the next funny cat photo with a grammatically butchered caption shows up.

(Via Webware lab rat Josh Lowensohn, an apologist for both lolcats and Harry Potter)