Can you imagine the Web without cats LOLing, eating spaghetti or playing the keyboard? The day (just a day!) is coming.
Sept. 9 will mark Urlesque’s 24-hour feline-content blackout, also known as “Day Without Cats on the Internet,” and as a lead-up to the event, the site will spend the next few days focused on kitty memes.
I Can Has Cheezburger, the Web site that popularized the “art” of matching cat photos to misspelled captions, is the inspiration for a new independent musical that debuts Friday.
Kristyn Pomranz and Katherine Steinberg, both online editors at AOL, created “I Can Has Cheezburger: The MusicLOL” out of a mutual appreciation for the site.
For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun,” a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times paperback best-seller list.
Facebook is supposed to be a safe haven for drunk teenagers who want to post pictures of themselves vomiting. These simple pleasures were being undermined by this solipsistic intruder, “25 Random Things About Me.” But once you stop being annoyed you realize that, at its best, it’s one of the more compelling wastes of time to hit the Web in years.
Creating viral videos and concepts has become a keystone for many businesses marketing online.
Such Web phenomena are known by technophiles as “memes.” Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” a meme is a unit of cultural information–an idea, a practice, a phrase, or an online video–that’s passed on virally.
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