First World Cat Problems

By Xeni Jardin at 3:27 pm Monday, Jan 30 • Comments • Share

I approve of this meme. (thanks, Antinous!)

Can we get cat-sharing sites to harden themselves against Iran's secret police?

By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Tuesday, Jan 3 • Comments • Share

In my latest Guardian column, "The internet is the best place for dissent to start," I look at Ethan Zuckerman's recent talk on the Internet and human rights, and the way that cute cats create the positive externality of a place for dissent to begin and flourish, and look at the problems this causes:

Zuckerman's argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren't good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.

First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation's internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.

But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.

The internet is the best place for dissent to start

HTTP status cats by GirlieMac: classic server error codes, now with cats

By Xeni Jardin at 5:55 pm Wednesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

GirlieMac, aka Tomomi Imura (Twitter) just won the internet with her deftly conceived and Photoshopped series of HTTP status message "motivational poster" images, featuring cats. A bunch of them are featured above and below. The full set is here at Flickr. She's taking suggestions for more, if you can think of any she missed. (thanks, Bonnie Burton)

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The academic linguistics of LOLspeak

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:34 am Friday, Dec 9 • Comments • Share  

On Submitterator, Musicman pointed me towards this great presentation on LOLspeak as a form of language play, and why people engage in that play. According to Lauren Gawne, who gave this speech last week at the Australian Linguistics Society conference, the choice to use LOLspeak has a lot to do with establishing identity—the playful identity of "cat", and the serious identity of "knowledgeable Internet user".

Includes an explanation of why LOLspeak is language play and not some language mashup "kitty pidgin".

You can read more about this on Lauren Gawne's blog Superlinguo.

The video, by the way, is 20 minutes long. It's also got a little bit of weird, warbly feedback in the audio, but that doesn't get in the way of hearing what Gawne is saying.

Cash Cats

By Xeni Jardin at 8:54 pm Tuesday, Sep 27 • Comments • Share

CA$HCATS.BIZ, via demarko

HOWTO take "magazine cover pictures" of your cat (1955)

By Cory Doctorow at 7:56 am Thursday, Aug 18 • Comments • Share

Who can resist the advice of the "world's most famous cat photographer"? I hear he got the title from the World Cat Photography Society, which, as any fool can tell you, is the world's leading authority on the subject.

How to Photograph Cats (Oct, 1955)

Canada: Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes posting cat pictures to Google+

By Xeni Jardin at 12:59 pm Wednesday, Jul 27 • Comments • Share

Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has figured out what Google+ is good for: cat pictures. Apparently he has a history of using kitteh as political props...

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