Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Cute Cat Overload on the Web

Several days ago my daughter sent me this link to a site of humorous cat pictures such as the following.













Now in today's New York Times I see an article by Dan Mitchell on other warm, cuddly, and fuzzy sites. An excerpt:
Meg Frost, a 36-year-old design manager at Apple, started cuteoverload.com three years ago to test Web software. Within months, it became an online institution, drawing about 88,000 unique visitors a day...viewing the site “is like taking a happy pill.”

And in that warm feeling lies the reason for its popularity. Given all the nastiness on the Internet — blog trolls, flame wars, vicious gossip, pornography, snark and spam — what better antidote is there than looking at pictures of tiny ducklings waddling in a line or kittens splayed on their backs, paw pads in the air?

The most famous cute-animal Web sites are presented with a touch of self-mockery. The site I Can Has Cheezburger? (icanhascheezburger.com) features cat pictures with ungrammatical captions, Stuff on My Cat (stuffonmycat.com) displays photos of objects stacked on sleeping cats, and Kittenwars.com pits pairs of cat photos in a cuteness showdown.

3 comments:

  1. Very well known (a bit scary?) social phenomenon...
    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat

    PS: very nice blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:02 PM

    THE NUMEROUS CUTE CAT SITES ARE JUST A MEANS TO AN END, WE WILL LULL YOU INTO A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY. WE WILL TAKE OVER YOUR WORLD WIH OUR FELINE CUTENESS. YOU HUMANS WILL BE OUR SLAVES AND YOU WILL FEED US TUNA. YOU WILL BE AS LOWLY AS MICE TO US. RESISTANCE IS FURTILE! HA, HA, HA, MIAOW

    ReplyDelete
  3. Felines enjoy communicating. We cat people understand that talking to your kitty is a must. Yes, it may look like we're babbling incessantly to ourselves, but no, in reality, our cats must have constant verbal input.

    ReplyDelete