The internet’s top Lolcat site is changing its name to something more memorable in an attempt to fend off intense competition in the hot Lol space.
I Can Has Cheezburger? has been delighting Lol fans since it burst onto the scene a little over a year ago. By taking pictures of cats and adding crazy captions in terribly amusing Lolspeak, the site has become a veritable hotbed of Lolness, attracting 60 billion monthly uniques and spawning everything from branded cat food to cat-shaped bread rolls and butter knives. A book on Lolcats by the site’s owner Hans Froddington is due next month, and will be followed in the autumn by a user-generated Lol movie featuring the voices of Tom Cruise and Tony Blair.
But despite its success, some dull spots have started to appear in the site’s formerly lustrous fur. Page views have plummeted 20% over the past month, as rival sites with fresher propositions – such as I Can Has Ostrichburger? and I Can Has Venison Sausage? – have grabbed mindshare. Those in the know say the Lol action on these sites has taken Lol to a whole new level – many are even calling it Lol 2.0.
Apart from offering more imaginative Lolness, the new generation of Lol sites have also benefitted from more memorable names. While 1337 Lol kids have no problem remembering and spelling all manner of weird crap, as Lol goes mainstream and gains a foothold in the enterprise, sites with more conventional names become more palatable.
Indeed, in an informal survey of chief deployment officers from 50 Fortune 100 companies, we found that less than 2% were able to spell “cheezburger” correctly. While 95% were eager to get their companies on the Lol bandwagon, 92% informed us that “efficient deployment of strategic internal modules requires consolidation of namespaces to conventional paradigmatic clauses”. In other words, call a cheezburger a cheeseburger and we’ll happily hand over a fuckload of corporate cash.
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the harder-core elements of the Cheezburger community, Froddington has come to see the wisdom in such thinking, accepting that his site’s name must change if Cheezburger is to stay relevant in the new Lol era.
Said the Frod:
I woz rayly oopset abaht it, coz may and the boyz iz startin’ the site to bee zo diffrunt ‘n’ kool. But nah wee muzt bee makin’ de moneez, wich meanz that to keep de big kompanees ‘appy, we muzt rezpect konvenshanul naymspayces ‘n’ paradimmatic klawz. And zo wee willz bee changin’ de naym from “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to “Medium To Medium-Rare, At Your Discretion?”.
While the 1337’s may be crying over their motherboards, normal people – including a goodly proportion of those all-important CDOs – seem delighted with the new name, which is being hailed as everything from the “epitome of paradigmatic clausedom” to “memorable and liberating – I feel I can order what I want, where I want, and not be ashamed”.
The name change takes place this Friday, with cat owners around the world encouraged to spend the next few days identifying and climbing the tallest structure in their town, city or village, and flinging their feline companions “as far as the eye can see”, while a loved one on the ground snaps a picture and adds a wacky caption and PayPal Donate button, 25% of proceeds to go to one of four homeless cat charities and the rest to cover Medium To Medium-Rare’s New York launch party, where a shitload of medium to medium-rare Wagyu steak will be served by jumpsuited waiters acting out wacky captions during saucing and vegetable selection.
