(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn / CNET)
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 playbacks each month. Huh says that's getting monetized "soon," which likely means users will be able to upload their videos directly to the service and have it playback in a branded player with integrated advertising. As it stands, most of those videos are making money at the sites where they're hosted, like on YouTube where the Failblog ranks No. 2 in comedy and No. 12 all time.
I caught up with Huh for five quick questions:
Q: When are cats not funny?
Huh: When people are forcing them to do things...with the exception of Keyboard cat.
Q: Have you been getting noticeably more submissions since the advent of iPhone apps that let people create ready-made photos for the site?
Huh: No, we haven't. We're working on doing it to our own app, but it's not fully done yet. We have an API though. It's actually pretty fleshed out. It's for putting captions on photos through mine.icanhascheezburger.com/api. There's an Android app that used it. Soon we'll have a paid version and ad-supported version (of the iPhone app).
Q: Ever gotten takedown requests from celebrities or politicians?
Huh: No, we have not. We have gotten them for cat pictures we have authorized. People understand it's good fun.
Q: Which of the sites has seen the most growth?
Huh: Fail blog has seen the most growth. It's kind of surprising
Q: What's the next foray into expanding the empire?
Huh: Two of the 10 sites we're launching in the next month are Thisisphotobomb and Pictureisunrelated. The rest I can't tell you.
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.
... Read more
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.
News.com's new design.
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.
I often find myself using translation services when looking at obscure blog posts in French, German, or other popular foreign languages, but how about those great services like Babelfish that work the other way around? When it comes to lolspeak--the mysterious language of hyper-intelligent cats--I sometimes find myself at a loss, thinking "wouldn't it be handy if there was a way to take the mental work out of the equation?" That's where Speaklolcat comes in handy. This one-way translator will take any bit of proper English, and turn it into a lolspeak, free of charge. True to form, results come in all caps, and with flagrantly improper grammar.
Similar to 1337 translators, Speaklolcat does its best to handle the words you type in, changing spellings, and often making necessary abbreviations or humorous adjustments. If it somehow bungles its efforts, you can submit your own recommendation, and the service will "learn."
Speaklolcat isn't nearly as comprehensive a service as the lolcat builder, but used in tandem, makes for a quick and easy way to make your own lolcats using Web services.
[via DownloadSquad]
Lolspeak is as simple as it gets. Just enter the text you want translated and hit the button.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
- prev
- 1
- next
