Fans of LOLCats can exhale: The 'I Can Has Cheezburger' book, which culls individual LOLCats from the famous Web site of the same name, is about to hit bookstore shelves.
(Credit: Icanhascheezburger.com)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.
At the Gnomedex conference in Seattle in August, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the origins of the site and where the LOLCat phenomenon had come from.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)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.
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Pundit Kitchen, a new site from the folks who brought you Icanhascheezburger, is an LOLcat site, except for politicians instead of cats and other animals.
(Credit: PunditKitchen.com)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 on Monday also launched another site, GraphJam, that is effectively LOLgraphs.
So now, if you want to take any photo of a politician and append a silly phrase to it, these guys have got your back.
The user submissions on Pundit Kitchen lampoon politicians on both sides of the ideological and partisan divide.
(Credit: PunditKitchen.com)The effect is pretty much the same as on the main Icanhascheezburger site. Except that, perhaps, the tone is a little bit meaner. One thing that it got me thinking as I waded through the submissions, is just how far will the site's administrators go in poking fun at politicians and the people who, er, love them.
The answer to that remains to be seen. But, with a stock of Pundit Kitchen submissions that already lampoons both sides of the political spectrum, I dare say the 2008 election season is finally underway.
Aren't you glad you don't have to wait anymore?
Jones Soda is teaming with Icanhascheezburger.com to put LOLcats on bottle labels.
(Credit: Jones Soda/Icanhascheezburger.com)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 or other animals. And Icanhascheezburger.com is the lion in the LOLcat kingdom. And I even think Jones soda can be pretty good.
The two outfits are teaming to find the highest vote-getting LOLcats in a special contest, the top five of which will adorn special bottles of the soda.
But I just don't quite see the connection between LOLcats and the soda buying community. It's not that I don't think that a lot of people who buy Jones soda also enjoy LOLcats. It's just that I'm not sure how well they translate onto a soda label. It would be one thing if the LOLcat choices were specifically about soda in some way, but because they're going to be the top-five vote-getting choices from Icanhascheezburger.com's contest, they will likely be about walruses without buckets, or tigers pretending to be monorails. There's just likely to be a disconnect.
On the other hand, maybe I'm overthinking this. I suppose it's possible that people will be walking down the aisle in their local supermarket, see the strange labels on the soda and laugh themselves into buying a few bottles.
And people do love custom labels, or magazine covers, things that bring a little social context to their everyday products. Just look at Reason magazine and the personalized satellite images of each subscriber's address that it put on the cover a few years ago.
This won't be quite so personalized, however. And that's probably good, since LOLcats definitely follow the 80/20 rule.
So will this sell more soda or raise the profile of LOLcats? I have no idea. I just wish instead of partnering with a soda company, Icanhascheezburger was teaming up with politicians to make campaign posters. Now that would be a mashup I'd like to see.
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