AWWWW: lolcats

we iz laundry, originally uploaded by bounder.

Very different from simple pictures of cats on the interweb, lolcats (aka cat macros or kittah) are reaching critical mass.

A lolcat consists of a cat photo, captioned with poor grammar and spelling - normally to indicate the cat's thought process.

First there was 'i made you a cookie, but i eated it', and a number of 'i'm in ur computer upgrading ur RAM', but now it's almost impossible to open Firefox without ceiling cat peering out.

GRRRR: People who don't understand about sharing

I'm not talking about people who don't offer you a crisp (although, hang around I might get to them), but the sort of anal idiots that upload their photographs to photo-sharing websites (see the word there, 'sharing') and then get narked if you share the image. Flickr is the most well-known of these, although by some way not the most popular, and it is specifically set up for people to share photos, and post them on other websites.

Flickr's Terms and Conditions say that it "allows and encourages" use of photos on other sites as long as the photo links back to the flickr page. It even includes handy blogging tools that make that simple - although you can turn this off, which makes it more time consuming but still not difficult:

Removing this button makes it more difficult for people to blog your photos, but remember that anyone can copy and blog a public photo. If you'd rather this didn't happen, change your settings to make your photos private.

I don't blog photos that don't have a 'Blog This' button, not because it's difficult or wrong, but because if someone doesn't want their photo blogged I don't want to blog it. Yet I still occasionally get stroppy messages like the one above, which basically say "I don't know you, you are steeeeling.". I try to politely explain about the rules of flickr, sometimes even the laws of copyright if their message is that badly informed. But I remove the image, I don't want to blog (or drive traffic to) the pictures of people who don't want to share. These people wouldn't even know that the photos were blogged if I didn't like the pics and leave a comment to say so - when this happens to me I'm flattered.

These people are too stupid to be allowed cameras or computers, they certainly shouldn't be allowed email. It upsets me to get one of these messages, makes me think that I won't bother to blog, to communicate, to show people "look at this brill pic I found".

In truth I suspect that it's a control thing, yes they love flickr comments (which have cache like myspace friends, "i got 10 comments on that one"), they love praise and to be noticed - they don't like the idea that other people can see the images and they don't get to count - or show off - the numbers.

AWWWW: Pictures of cats on the interweb

Cats from above, originally uploaded by bounder.

The internet is a series of tubes, tubes full of kittens. Take photo-sharing site flickr, it's about 20% holiday snaps, 29% 'serious art photography' (some great some awful), 1% serupticiously taken camera-phone pictures of large breated women and a whopping 50% cats!

So much so that there are constant discussions amongst po-faced members about there being "a need for a cat free version of flickr". So much so that there's a cottage industry growing up that blogs pictures of cats from flickr, just picking the cutest and the funniest - and I know because I do it myself.

Dogs don't have the same qualities that make you photograph them, or squeal with delight at grammatically incorrect captions.

LOL!! I IZ IN UR PC BLOGGING ABOUT UR CATZ!!!