Tag Archives: Cats

Why Yes, the Internet Cat Video Film Fest Will be in Minnesota

Dylan? Prince? F.Scott Fitzgerald? The Cohen Brothers? These Minnesotan’s contributions to arts and letters will pale in comparison to the Walker Art Center’s Internet Cat Video Film Fest:
“While YouTube may count views and decide Internet cat popularity on a global scale, we’d like to know which kitty clips are striking a chord with the local community.In the spirit of Open Field being “what we make together,” we want to hear from you: What are your favorite cat videos? Help this cat-lady-in-residence (still not a real position…yet) curate the cat video film fest “nominating your go-to cat videos.”

Friday Links: A scientific explanation for why cats run the Internet

• Why do cats run the Internet? A scientific explanation.
• iPads using iOS6 and high res displays show up in Ars Technica’s server logs.
• WtF QR Codes.
• Banksy on advertising.
• Essential design books.
• You’ve seen The Guardian’s Three Little Pigs ad, right? You should.
• Batman named greatest comic hero, 83,821 nerdy arguments ensue (only three of which I started).
• Unlimited data is dead, so let’s fight a smarter fight.
• The tech industry’s Asperger problem: affliction or insult?

The making of the Cheezburger empire

So how did a site with pictures of cats and misspelled captions become a web empire that “will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales”? I’m not entirely sure. But what I am sure of is that I read The New York Times’ story about I Can Haz Cheezburger twice hoping to discover the secret.

I didn’t learn the secret but I learned that the site has spawned a network of fifty-three other sites, including Fail Blog and There I Fixed it, employs forty people, and garners some 16 million unique visitors a month. The most mind-boggling? The content is all reader generated. The Cheezburger employees act as editors deciding what is and is not funny, while keeping an eye out for trends worthy of a new site.

This is one of those articles that could make you feel a little bitter wondering, why didn’t I think of that or it could just make you laugh and love the Internet just a little bit more. Personally, I save my bitterness for blogs with book deals, which, yes, includes Cheezburger. . . but come on, who buys these books?

Profiles in Nerdery: Sarah Hokuf, calls Buffy a nerd, not slain (yet)

• Astrological Sign: Libra – Should I tell you that or shouldn’t I? Hmmm. . .
• Time at the Nerdery: 5 months.
• Area of expertise: Eating. Oh, you mean my skills? Eating. Well in my past life I lived and breathed design, html, zen cart, and Joomla. Now I just talk about those things and you will usually see me in LinkedIn daily.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: Look at my profile in LinkedIn, it says “Director of Nerds.”
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: By myself, ecommerce. On the Sales side, websites with fun agencies.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have dogs and beer.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Name that font 2. Foods around the world 3. Movie Titles 4. Volleyball rules 5. Your cat 6. How many buttons in a jar. 7. Catch Phrase.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Really, she is a nerd.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That sentence is too long for my attention span.