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I Can Has Cheezburger?

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Skidodo142 (talk | contribs) at 02:38, 28 November 2008 (I have added a section about the "LOL Builder" on the icanhascheezburger site.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

I Can Has Cheezburger?
File:Ichc logo.gif
Type of site
Blog
OwnerBen Huh, Pet Holdings Inc.[1]
Created by"Cheezburger" and "Tofuburger"
RevenueAdvertisement
URLhttp://www.icanhascheezburger.com

I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC for short) is the name of a blog featuring lolcats and other animals created by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), a blogger from Hawaii and his partner, Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger). The website is one of the most popular lolcat sites on the internet,[2] receiving as many as 1,500,000 hits per day.[3] [4] ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal based image macros and lolspeak into mainstream usage.[5]

According to TIME Magazine, the website was acquired by a group of investors in September 2007 for US $2 million. [6][7]

ICHC was created on January 11, 2007, when Nakagawa posted an image from Something Awful of a smiling grey cat, known as Happycat, with a caption of the cat asking, "I can has cheezburger?" in a style popularized by 4chan. It is from this image that the site derives its name. After posting similar images, Nakagawa then converted the site to a blog.[4]

Content

ICHC's content is submitted by the site's readers, and hosts "the cheezburger factory", a lolcat builder that allows users to create their own lolcats. The number of submissions has risen dramatically with the growth of the site. In July 2007, ICHC received as many as 500 submissions per day.[8] By January 2008, the average was over 9000.[5] Only about a dozen or so submissions per day are posted to the website,[2] while updates are timed to coincide with when readers are most likely to be visiting the site - morning, lunch time and evenings.[4] As of early 2008, ICHC gets about 2 million page views per day.[9]

The site attempts to maintain a community feel, encouraging interactivity with readers via a voting system where users can rate an image from one to five "cheezburgers", and through running themes as one image will spawn responses into a running narrative. According to Nakagawa, "It's like you're creating a story supplied by people in the community, and then the people in the community supply the next part of the story."[4] ICHC also hosts a wiki called "The Lolspeak Wiki" designed to be a collection of key lolspeak phrases.

Popular trends on the ICHC website for captioning have included: 'ceiling cat', 'basement cat', the 'itteh bitteh kitteh committee', the walrus and his 'bukkit', fail, 'nom' (as in eating), references to cheeseburgers, and 'oh hai'.

LOL Builder

The "LOL Builder" is the captioning program used to make most of the captions for the "LOLcats". However, users have captioned pictures elsewhere, such as Motivated Photos. However, so users could make similar pictures directly from icanhascheezburger, a "Poster Builder" was eventually added to the LOL Builder in addition the the "Basic Builder"and "Advanced Builder." Using the LOL Builder involves uploading a picture to caption, or choosing one of the already uploaded images provided. Then, the picture is captioned with one of the three builders. With the Basic Builder, the image is captioned by placing a certain size, font, and color of text on the top, middle, or bottom of the photo. Different styles, effects, and opacities can also be applied. With the Advanced Builder, the same text formatting is used, but the text can be placed in more specific areas of the image by using a text box. With the Poster Builder, there is a title and a subtitle beneath the image, with a surrounding black border. Both the title and the subtitle can use a specific font, style, and color. Once the caption is finished, it is either saved on a URL or added to the user's account, if they have one. Other users can then view the "LOL" by using the URL, or, if the LOL has been saved to a user account, other users can view the LOL from the the creator's user account. Also, if the LOL has been saved to an account, it has a possibility of making it to the icanhascheezburger homepage. But, it only has less than a 0.5% chance of being added to the homepage.


Fonts

The computer typing font Impact is used in almost every picture on all the I Can Has Cheezburger websites, and has even gone as far as to be attempted to be replicated in an oil painting representation of the original "Happy cat" (the original lolcat to say "I can Has Cheezburger?") on the ICHC website. This use of the font stems from it being the default font on the site's Lolcat Builder, but many people creating lolcats in other software have used the same font to make it more traditional to the content of I Can Has Cheezburger. Other standard fonts are available for use as well on the builder.

Other sites and projects

There are several sister sites internal to ICHC—"I Has a Hotdog", which follows the same themes as ICHC but predominantly features dogs, or "goggies" in lolspeak; "Roflrazzi", making fun of celebrities in general and showing pictures of funny things in show business; "Totally Looks Like", which matches celebrities and famous people with humorous animals, other people, cartoons, and others; "Pundit Kitchen", which pokes fun at news, politics, and politicians, and also features fierce political debate by commenters; "Graph Jam" featuring humorous office graphs such as line graphs, Venn diagrams, bar graphs and pie charts; "Failblog", containing pictures and videos of blatant stupidity or incompetence with captions involving the words "[Epic] Fail", "Owned", and "Pwned" prominently; and "Engrish Funny", supplying pictures of humorous foreign translation errors.

The site recently spawned a book publishing deal with Penguin/Gotham to produce "I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun" available for sale at The Book's Official Website and released widely on October 7, 2008.

A browser toolbar was created for the site in 2008.

The site was also the inspiration for LOLCODE, a computer programming language.

See also

References

  1. ^ benhuh!com
  2. ^ a b Rutkoff, Aaron (2007-08-25). "With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2008-02-13.
  3. ^ Huh, Ben (2008-03-09). "SXSW 2008 Panel LOLWUT? Why Do I Keep Coming Back to This Website?". Rocketboom. Retrieved 2008-03-16.
  4. ^ a b c d Tozzi, John (2007-07-13). "Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks". Business Week. Retrieved 2008-02-13.
  5. ^ a b Steel, Sharon (2008-02-01). "The cuteness surge". The Phoenix. Retrieved 2008-02-13.
  6. ^ Grossman, Lev (2008-07-09). "The Master of Memes". TIME. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
  7. ^ Moses, Asher (2008-07-18). "Huh? He's a weird burger and a net cult". Sydney Morning Herald.
  8. ^ Grossman, Lev (2007-07-12). "Creating a Cute Cat Frenzy". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2008-02-13.
  9. ^ Wortham, Jenna (2008-04-25). "Behind the Memes: Kickin' It With the I Can Has Cheezburger? Kids". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 2008-05-08.

[1] [2]

  1. ^ http://icanhascheezburger.com
  2. ^ lol@icanhascheezburger.com
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