Top 5 "I Can Has Cheezburger?" References

Just in case you've been hiding under a "No Pets Allowed" rock for the past few months, you probably are well aware of the I Can Has Cheezburger phenomenon.

If you haven't heard of Lolcats (generic term for the pictures found on the Cheezburger site), a bit of background is in order: According to BusinessWeek.com, "I Can Has Cheezburger was started by Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Hawaii, posting a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, “I can has cheezburger?” in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict.

Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa."

Even more fun, perhaps, are all the other places the Lolcats are showing up and the places the concept is spinning to. Here are five we've found:

5. Lolzombies. "I Can Has Braaaaaains!" Google it, if ye dare.

4. P.G. Wodehouse (sort of). Mark Liberman at Language Log posited the best theory about Lolcat grammar, arguing that Lolcat is best described as kitty baby talk, as often spoken memorably by certain P.G. Wodehouse characters. Liberman cites a 1922 passage from The Clicking of Cuthbert: "Little Tinky-Ting don't need no liver-pad, he don't," said Mrs. Luella Mainprice Jopp, addressing the animal in her arms, "because he was his muzzer's pet, he was.

3. From one of our investors. Thanks, Scott!

2. Geekipedia, a supplement to Wired, October 2007, page 029.

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Any Lolcat sighting we've missed?