Assignment: An introspective look at icanhascheezburger.com

Blogging has taken many forms in the years since its inception. One of the most interesting takes on blogging is an extremely popular photoblog entitled, oddly, “icanhascheezburger.”

Icanhascheezburger.com is a website consisting of a collection of images of animals, though mostly cats, with funny captions included. These images have become known as LOLcats (pronounced lawl-cats) and are circulated regularly throughout certain channels of the Internet. This type of captioned image is known throughout Internet culture as a meme (pronounced both meem or in the traditional French, même).

The audience of icanhascheezburger is not a very specific one. Animal lovers, witty individuals, comedians, or anyone looking for a chuckle could be fair game to enjoy the content of this blog. In addition, the aforementioned members of an entrenched Internet culture, the ones who initially started this phenomenon, are part of the audience as well.

Icanhascheezburger is a collective effort by fans and readers of the site who can make and submit content to be displayed among the ever-growing ranks of humorous pictures of cats. The site is intended to make its readers laugh and it does a good job, as the 817th most visited site in the United States (source: Alexa page rankings).

Finally, the presentation and layout of icanhascheezburger.com is fairly simple and effective in the sense that it doesn’t get in the way of the site’s main objective which is to display funny pictures of captioned cats. While I could contribute to a site like icanhascheezburger with a funny entry or two, I could never run such a site because I would get bored of its repetitive nature. That being said, icanhascheezburger does provide a cheap laugh every now and then when I need a break from the daily grind.

  1. zackshapiro posted this