I can’t stop being fascinated by the lolcats-phenomenon. For those of you not familiar with what lolcats, it’s basically a picture of an animal with a funny caption.
The picture can be created by anyone with less than basic skills photoshop, imageready or even windows paint. The Google of Lolcats, I can has cheezburger, has even created a deadsimple editor – The Cheezburger Factory – that enables even quickier to create these funny captions. They even provide images, if you don’t have any of your own.
The lolcats created in the Cheezburger factory lolcats are published to get rated by other users and the best end up on the front page, a Digg for lolcats if you may. What’s really interesting is, that the real explosion of lolcat-consumption is directly correlated to the launch of the Cheezburger-factory. So what we have is:
- Clearly defined contraints (funny animal picture + caption)
- Super convenient publishing platform
- User refined relevance mechanism
Recognize it? It’s the same pattern that has driven blogging, Youtube, Facebook etc. Constraints drives creativity, makes sure that submitted content is somewhat relevant and lowers barriers to creation; a simple publishing platform lowers barriers to creation even further; and the user refined relevance mechanism creates broad commitment and assures quality thru emergence by making sure that all the crappy lolcats are kept out of harms way (for all but the most obsessed fanboys).
You gotta love it. Not sure wether lolcats will survive in the long run… but funny animal home videos are pretty similar and they’re still prominent on most funny-home-video-shows on TV, right? Lolcats or not, it will be interesting to see what other kind of alternative culture that will spawn from platforms built on this pattern.
Wierd as it may sound, I kind of like the finnish macho thing.
