Results tagged “lolcats”

Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we've all been discussing here lately. Here's some highlights:

Startup.gov

After I posited that the U.S. executive branch is the most interesting startup of 2009, there have been some amazing responses. Craig Newmark (you love his list!) very kindly gave a nod towards my post, adding "In some results, it's run like a really good Silicon Valley startup", and spreading the word on The Huffington Post as well. Mike Masnick at Techdirt chiimed in as well:

For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both [Federal CTO Aneesh] Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.

Towards the end of my essay, I'd pointed out one particular challenge that faces this new startup-minded government effort: "Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience." Amazingly, the latest perfect example of the type of talent that are heading to D.C. these days just popped up, with Christopher Soghoian's announcement that he is joining the FTC. I only know Christopher's work by reputation at Harvard's Berkman Center, but I think the fact that the government is looking for talented people in academia (a talent pool that typical tech startups often overlook) is a great sign.

Of course, there are skeptics. Gautham Nagesh covers the government for Nextgov and Atlantic Media, and he thinks I'm believing the hype". Of course, I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general, and that I'll take small signs of progress as successes, even if there is a lot of work left to do yet.

In fact, I'll be talking about this a bit later today on Federal News Radio's Daily Debrief show. If you're in D.C., tune in to 1500 AM at 4:05 EDT and one idea I'll be discussing is how the recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing.

The potential is also hinted at in Brady Forrest's post about EveryBlock's acquisition over on O'Reilly Radar. I'm ecstatic to see Adrian and his team at EveryBlock get even more resources for their work, but just as pleased to see the government's work being discussed as a peer to even the most cutting-edge startups in the private sector.

Google's Wave Moment

After my recent posts about The Wave Way and Google's Microsoft Moment, I was very graciously invited to join Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis on their awesome podcast about Google and cloud computing, This Week in Google. If you have an hour or so to spare for listening to a podcast, I am very proud of how it came out, and especially that I got to participate with such pros on a show like this. TWiG is available on iTunes and Boxee and all of those usual services as well.

The idea that Google is facing a reckoning as it grows in size and influence seems to have caught on, and comparing the company to Microsoft has gone from seeming a bit radical at the time I posted to becoming much more popular when Wired covered the idea to finally having become something approaching conventional wisdom in just a few weeks. Take, for example, New Google is the old Microsoft, by Galen Ward, which lists the ways that Google ties its nascent (or even unsuccessful) efforts to the results of its dominant search engine.

Apple Blinks on Secrecy?

Less than three weeks ago, I was arguing that Apple's culture of secrecy can't scale. Fortunately, we may never know if I'm right. Astoundingly, Apple has opened up to some degree, most notably via VP Phil Schiller reaching out personally to bloggers John Gruber and Steven Frank. Of course, that's not a complete course change for Apple, but it is still significantly more human, personal and open than any recent communications they've made about their efforts.

Meanwhile, the idea that Apple's traditional secrecy is untenable has gotten an even larger audience with The Times' lengthy look at Steve Jobs and Apple:

[A]long with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”

But employees are one thing; shareholders are another. Should Jobs (who, as far as the world is concerned, is Apple) have been allowed to conceal the seriousness of his illness? Warren Buffett, the greatest investor alive, doesn’t think so. “Whether [Steve Jobs] is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”

Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy, but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple’s obsessive secrecy.

Pushing the Right Buttons

Finally, the idea of the Pushbutton Web seems to be gaining steam. I am delighted to point out Om Malik's The Evolution of Blogging, which Om uses as an example of a longer-form blog post he's enjoyed recently, but which I also hope will be a catalyst for the evolution of blogging that he's calling for in the post overall.

That point is taken even further with Farhad Manjoo's ruminations in Slate, which reference my Pushbutton post:

[A]s technologies like PubSubHubbub proliferate around the Web, with companies like Google, Facebook, and others embracing them, real-time Web updates will become the norm. It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. Winer envisions these systems coming up alongside Twitter—when you post a status update, it could get sent to both Twitter and whatever decentralized, next-gen Twitter gets created. If these new systems take off, Twitter would be just one of many status-updating hubs—and if it went down, there'd be other servers to take its place.

Seeing so many great conversations pop up recently around the topics I've been obsessing over has been very inspiring; Right after I made offhand mention of one of my Big Think interviews being about the Philology of LOLcats, my original piece on LOLcat language, Cats Can Has Grammar, was indirectly cited in Time's profile of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", through a reference to "kitty pidgin". It might seem like a minor mention, but the idea that a random dude like me can write a post that results in a phrase showing up in Time or The New York Times is still very exciting to me, after all of these years.

Best of all, there have been a spate of amazing comments on all of these posts lately, both on this site and in some of the responses I've linked to above. I'm having more fun than ever in watching the conversation across the blogosphere.

In the meantime, two to consider:

• Slow Web: "There's a web that well-considered and worth savoring. We'll show you where."
• Every Friday, Rain or Shine: "When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays."

I know I just did one of these roundup posts yesterday, but there are a whole bunch of new conversations branching off of the topics I've been blogging about here. You might find some of these interesting.

• Big Think posted a series of video interviews with me as part of their ongoing effort to capture ideas from people in a wide variety of disciplines. Rex and Choire both gravitated towards me talking about LOLcats (naturally), but I was pretty happy with the segment about the fact that those of us who create social media technologies have a set of responsibilities that come along with our privileges:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb asks, Is a Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking? Answer: Yes! There's a nice nod to Pushbutton technologies there, but the whole piece is worth reading as it lays out some key events that are opening the door for some new technologies to succeed.

• Similarly, Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk asserts "Open Source ‘Twitter’ Could Fend Off the Next Twitpocalypse". This piece echoes Marshall's premise, pointing out that recent weaknesses demonstrated by platforms like Twitter might lead to solutions that take advantage of the web's inherently decentralized nature:

Other open, Twitter-like concepts are in the works: OpenMicroBlogger, Google’s pubsubhubbub, Dave Winer’s RSSCloud and Anil Dash’s “Pushbutton Web.” If this trend towards open microblogging trend continues, in whatever form — and despite Twitter having seemingly every reason not to cooperate — it will no longer be possible to shut down micro-blogging with one or two concentrated attacks.

• I've been ecstatic to see my friend Baratunde Thurston get a ton of recognition for his amazing work lately, but perhaps the most amazing milestone is seeing the debut of his new show Future Of.... With Baratunde as host, Popular Science backing the effort, and the Science Channel broadcasting it, I am extremely optimistic about this smart, funny show's chances. (Though I do wish it were possible to watch it on the web.) The incomparable Lynne d Johnson wrote up the premiere for Fast Company and I was just one of the people raving about the series and Baratunde's work in it.

• Finally Clint Boulton in eWeek takes another look at Google Wave and my questions about some of its complexity:

[Gartner analyst Ray] Valdes, who wrote his first Wave robot in 30 minutes using 30 lines of Python code at Google's Hackathon last weekend, also believes Wave suffers from a complexity problem, just not in the same vein as Dash. Dash argued that the many moving parts of Wave, including XMPP and OpenSocial, make it a bear to use, unlike the easier RSS and AJAX Web technologies. Valdes said:

"I do think that Wave has a complexity problem, but it is not so much internal technical complexity as user interface complexity. In its current form, Wave fails the 'grandma test'—that is, can my grandma use it? I am speaking, of course, of online grandmas that are already using e-mail and IM and Facebook—which these days, there are very many that are. I think Google needs to simplify the Wave user experience if they want to achieve mass adoption."

While I bristle a bit at Ray's use of the tired "grandma" trope, I can't say I disagree with his premise. I didn't want to be too critical of Wave's user experience as I understand that it's still early in the process of the platform's development, but as it stands today, it is a wee bit confusing most of the time.

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I've been at least tenuously linked to some of the web's most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and celebrities, I knew I had to be there.

The thing is, every time one of these little memes pop up and I get involved, people always ask me "Why are you wasting your time on this kind of trivial crap?" And the truth is, any one of these memes by itself is a relatively meaningless distraction. (Although you'd be surprised how many people have said "Oh, I saw your name mentioned in The Long Tail!", where I'm quoted because of the Goatse T-shirt thing.)

But taken together, the propagation of memes through the Internet is a new channel for creating culture. I think that's a phenomenally important development, and one well worth taking seriously. If that can happen and we're having fun laughing at silly cat pictures at the same time, even better. Because prior to the ascendancy of television as the creator of popular mass culture half a decade ago, the primary method of passing along and popularizing new aspects of culture was through existing social ties. We're returning to that sort of transmission, to culture being mediated by our social networks, though obviously the existence of the Internet has radically changed the way those networks communicate today.

This intersection of silly internet memes and the reinvention of pop culture has taken a lot of interesting forms over the years. Efforts like (the late, lamented) Blogdex and The Contagious Media Project and eventually Buzzfeed were based on the importance of this kind of cultural transmission. Some of the very best blogs, like Waxy and Fimoculous are, appropriately, both propagators and consumers of these memes.

And, frankly, none of this social media stuff so many of us have been working on will have amounted to a hill of beans unless we can change the course of popular culture. The verdict is still out: We've never made a rock star -- if MySpace counted, those bands wouldn't consider getting signed to a major label with a traditional media company as a milestone of success. Snakes on a Plane tanked. Howard Dean is not the President. A funny YouTube video can get a couple minutes of play on a clip show on basic cable. But I think there's a future where we really can do a lot more than just contribute 10 minutes worth of ha-ha to your workday.

So, come join me at ROFLCon. I'll be the one taking everything a little bit too seriously. But don't worry, given the rest of the formidable guest list, you'll still have fun. And in perhaps the only fitting way to end this post, please see "Lolcat r full of win", one of a package of feature-length articles in the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, which has a bunch of quotes from me. I'm not positive the quotes from me are 100% accurate. Nor, for that matter, am I sure that the cat grammars described there are really accurate, either. But at least it's a fun read, and lookit silly memes, making their way into good, old-fashioned newspapers!

What makes lolcats appealing is that it's simultaneously obscure and accessible. It's an inside joke told in an online lingua franca, but with a bit of effort anyone can become an insider.

"An in-joke used to be constrained by geography and who you knew socially," says Anil Dash, occasional lolcat critic and vice president of Six Apart, which creates several popular blog-software programs. "This is a very large in-joke" that blurs the old distinction "between Net geeks and the normals," he says.

I've seen some bloggers put up media quotes on their sites as examples of their credibility and expertise. I've already got the ridiculous photo of myself at the microphone up there, but thanks to my most recent appearance in the Wall Street Journal, I am sorely tempted to put "occasional lolcat critic" on my sidebar. Whatcha think?

I’ve been holding off on updates about lolcats and related memes for a while because it’s easy to get burned out and probably as boring for you as it is for me. But there are still some interesting parts to it. As I alluded to in Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations, once you’re known for something like writing a post about lolcats and grammar, you become the central place for both people looking for information about such things, as well as the go-to place for people to pitch their new ideas about the topic, whether they’re exciting or not.

As is usually the case, most people who are just trying to fill in the blanks with a lolwhatever site are not only unfunny, but tedious. I have what’s called a “Hippo Problem”, based on the problem of someone offhandedly mentions a fondness for hippos once, and is plagued the rest of their days with hippo-emblazoned kitsch for the rest of their days.

My hippos are captioned cats.

It’s a thankless burden — imagine if you were an expert on “I Kiss You!”, or the go-to guy for All Your Base. I’m just glad I didn’t write anything about that goddamn dancing baby.

The truth, of course, is that it’s not so bad, and I try to remember that there’s inevitably somebody out there who feels like they really understand this topic. They’re sitting in a cafe somewhere with a laptop, resentful and bitter that a hack like me got associated with lolcats in the first place. I’m sure the I Can Has Cheezeburger folks get hate mail from people who said they started a lolrus site exactly four days earlier and have thus been completely ripped off.

For every angry would-be lolcat expert, though, there are some perks to this kind of thing. “Cats Can Has Grammar” is (I think, I’m lousy at tracking stats) my most popular post in the nearly 8 years that I’ve been blogging, with something like half a million people having read it since it went up. I’ve gotten mentioned or quoted in stories all over the place, from the Chicago Tribune to a TV station in North Carolina to an Associated Press story that ran all over the place. I even talked to the Wall Street Journal, though I’m hoping some editor spiked the piece that was being researched, in a fit of good taste. Somewhere, Mahir’s talent agent is shaking his head sadly. “Enjoy it while it lasts, kid.”

The picture above shows that the Houston Chronicle actually ran a cover story about the lolcat phenomenon that referred to me as a “legendary blogger”. Look, mom, I still don’t have a college degree, but now I’m a lolcat legend!

And the final lesson is that we all create our own misery. If I complain that this one lighthearted and offhand piece gets more attention than all the writing I’ve carefully crafted over the years, then it’s of course only fair that I get my comeuppance. My favorite newsweekly, Time, published their own lolcats story today, and I was kind of disappointed to see that I’m not mentioned anywhere in it. Be careful what you ask for…

Following up on Cats, Comics and Closure, Meowchat and PetSpeak (which, surprisingly, came up during a panel on race and class on Friday), and of course Cats can has grammar, I've rediscovered the bizarre things that happen after a couple hundred thousand people stumble across a blog post.

Chief among the unexpected results is that I've become a reluctant dumping ground for people who want to share their lolwhatever sites with me. Please note: I am not asking you to send me more. Doesn't mean I don't like them, or that I won't look at the links you send; Some of them are interesting. But, being fully employed, married, and relatively sane, I couldn't possibly check out all the fascinating, inane, and useless web memes that have popped up around lolcats and image macros.

If you want to get a feel for what the realm looks like, here's a random sampling:

• Update: I missed a good one, just published today. Cat Power: You cannot resist lolcats just went up on Slate, a meditation on the meme in the form of a slideshow. I even got some props.
• I Can Has Corgan, for fans of Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. Also the subject of a Stereogum contest.
• I Has A Tardis, for those interesed in Dr. Who cat macros.
• Research indicating that emoticons are tied to cultural context. Duh! The discussion on Ars Technica is a little less dense than the original research (PDF format), but that one seemed like an obvious call.
• Unsettling Gawker fave Kreepie Kats considers the meme.
• And there's even a nod in a recent episode of current geek-fave web comic xkcd.

And that's all I have to say about that subject for now.

As it turns out, there's more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who've emailed and commented with additional links.

First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter's various error messages. That's the first place I've seen the grammar used in official (albeit informal) communications for a company.

More important is some of the additional understanding I've gained about why some forms of kitty pidgin are so delightful. Take, for example, invisible bike and its variations. Part of the delight of invisible item cat pictures is the element of surprise, the realization of where the missing item fits into the picture yields an "a-ha!" moment that's much more satisfying than a more literal image would be. This isn't surprising -- a lot of humor relies on the element of surprise.

But there's something more subtle going on here. If you've ever read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, you might be familiar with the concept of "closure". There are many meanings for the word closure, of course, but in comics, it represents the crucial construct of allowing your reader or viewer to make the final connection with your media. This is wonderful for many reasons -- it's trusting the intelligence and creativity of your audience, knowing that they'll make the mental connection in their minds. It's also allowing for spontaneity and inspiration, instead of constraining the ideas (or humor) of an image to merely whatever the original author created. And most importantly, leaving space for your audience to interact with something as prosaic as a cat picture is just plain fun.

Closure has long been part of the vocabulary of comics.

"See that space between the panels? That's what comics aficionados have named "the gutter!" And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics...If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar."

Of course, other media make use of closure as well -- in movies, our minds effortlessly connect each frame to those preceding and following it -- but comics requires conscious (or semiconscious), high-level closure between every frame.

You need an example. Let's go to the world's worst humorous cat pictures: The Garfield comic strip. Fantagraphics has an astounding writeup of why Garfield sucks so bad, despite what your 9-year-old self thought back in the day.

I was impressed to find that Eric Burns and The Strip Doctor broke down what is most fundamentally flawed with Garfield's humor. Redundancy. The problem with Garfield is redundancy. It's redundant. The humor is. Redundant.

I could tell you about this, but that would contradict the premise. Take a look:

Invisible captions! LOL.

Wow, you kids really like overanalysis of imaginary pet languages, huh? The best thing about writing Cats Can Has Grammar has been the responses.

• Mat sent me a link to this SF Chronicle story on MeowChat, the online language adopted by cat fanciers when they impersonate their cats in online chat. Note to whomever writes the headlines over at the Chron, if you have to say, "It's not just for crazy cat ladies", it's already not true.

• Danny also brought up MeowChat in my comments here, offering up this overview which gives us a "gives a reasonably good breakdown of that story, though unfortunately in heavily accented meow".

• I made it to Language Log! "After a bit of investigation, though, I've decided that I don't feel badly enough about this to undergo the lolcat immersion required to change it." NO LOLCATS FOR U LOL.

• Metafilter loves lolcats.

• And finally, I found the tags and descriptions that people used while bookmarking the post on del.icio.us to be delightful.

If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you'll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.

The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

• I'M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i'm in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.

• Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There's something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind's ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.

• Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named "lolcats" instead of the more general "image macro" or "cat macro".

The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because "I can has cheezeburger?" has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn't sure this was true until I realized that it's possible to get cat-speak wrong.

Incorrect kitty pidgin jumped to my attention the first time I saw a reference to Dune being used with a lolcat image. The caption on the linked version of the image, "The spice must flow." is fine, if not particularly cat-like. But the caption on the version I saw first was much more verbose: "I are dunecat. I controls the spice, I controls the universe." Besides being an awkward attempt at overexplaining the punchline (I've never read Dune or seen the film, but the joke is obvious) this was just all wrong. The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent.

I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a "cweeole". Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn't a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since "pidgin" is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn't seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. "Kitty pidgin" might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.

There's a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain't Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain't lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

Unfortunately, the evolution of these grammars online can be very difficult to track down; This kind of nascent web culture is generally frowned upon by Wikipedia (witness the deletion of the I'm in ur base article since the Ask MetaFilter thread just a few months ago) and there are no other sites designed to collect definitive collaborative reference material. It's going to take time to document kitty pidgin with any degree of accuracy.

I've just started bouncing the idea of kitty pidgin off of Erin and Grant, two of my favorite word experts, but I'm confident that someday we'll have kitty pidgin dictionaries. Perhaps we'll even get all the niceties that Klingon and Elmer Fudd-speak enjoy, like a Google translation, a Microsoft Word dictionary, or a cat-native version of the Bible or Shakespeare.

I has a links

Okay, go out and look at some of the finest kitty-related content:

• Kitty pidgin's already made its way into business communications -- our last LiveJournal news post had lots of references to our team-up with Photobucket under the heading "We has a Photobucket". I was especially proud of my quick-and-dirty PhotoShop work in that thread.

• Gordon McNaughton's created a LolCat Build(e)r. A fantastic and essential app, though I have to take issue with the use of CamelCase InterCaps in the word "lolcat".

• Cute Overload is likely the seminal site for taking the "cute culture" aspect of online behavior seriously. Meg Frost always has fun with the content, but I haven't seen any high-profile definitive collections of these genres that predate Cute Overload.

• Choire Sicha is a genius, but if you needed more proof, you can now just head to lolgays.com to be redirected to his Gawker post on lolgays. It's exactly what you think it is.

Update: This post has gotten an amazing reaction, and inspired a number of follow-up posts, including a look at MeowChat and PetSpeak and my thoughts on Cats, Comics and Closure. I've also collected responses to the popularity of lolcats in a few posts:

• Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations shows some of the best early responses to the meme
• Pidginholed shows lolcats gaining popularity in mainstream media, including a Houston Chronicle cover story
• And perhaps most amusingly, The LOL Street Journal marks the milestone of lolcats making their way, yes, into the Wall Street Journal.
• If you enjoy this sort of stuff, you'll want to join me at ROFLCon, an event being held at Harvard just to celebrate silly online memes like lolcats.