The Wall Street Journal, recently purchased by News Corporation, has decided that their readership needs to be educated on lolcats. Check the article out here.
Favourite quotes ahoy:
If lolcats were jazz music, the refrigerator-invading cat would be a standard — an example of the art form that every practitioner is assumed to recognize and understand. And much like a well-known melody, the “IN UR …” phrasing is a recurring source of riffs and references within the lolcat community.
“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.
Where can I buy stocks in these lolcats? Can I incorporate them into my business plan? Maybe I should partner with them, take advantage of the obvious synergy between my products and their funny faces.
2 Comments for On Cats, Financial News
Jordie | August 30, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Jordie | August 30, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Also! How can icanhascheezburger be considered a standard? The url its self breaks the “I’m in your…” format. To me the “I’m in your…” pictures are the hard-core. All these other jokes, developed on the periphery, deserver their own lesser category.
I think these high traffic figures are misleading people to the conclusion that lolcats is universal. I disagree, I still think it is niche comedy, the standards for esotericism have been raised, not blurred. Furthermore, were I to, for instance, have a base, and if someone were to clandestinely gain access to said base and go about some malicious activity, killing my dudes for instance, he might be prompted to mock me after the bulk of the damage has been done. Such a jest would be quite humorous to any lookers-on.