In late May 2012, blogger Katie Czarniecki announced that she will be hosting a film festival dedicated to online videos of cats at the Walker Art Center, a reputable modern museum art located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The research findings were picked up by numerous news sites and tech blogs, beginning with the New York Times' article "How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000" published on June 26th, 2012. ![]() On June 12th, 2012, a group of Google researcher led by the Stanford University computer scientist Andrew Ng and the Google fellow Jeff Dean published the findings of its years-long study on the simulation of the human brain in a paper titled "Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning." At the heart of the research project is an artificial neural network created by connecting 16,000 processors with more than one billion connections, which was then put to exposure of thumbnails extracted from at least 10 million YouTube videos.Ĭlick through to read the original research paperĪffirming the popular myth that "YouTube is made of cat videos," the study revealed that Google's neural network model was able to teach itself to recognize cats-along with human faces and bodies-far better than others in a list of 20,000 distinct items or objects. ![]() The analysts counted and compared the number of relevant page results containing the names of several different animals, which revealed that the majority of cute animals sharing in the sample pool was associated with dogs rather than cats. On November 23rd, 2011, URL bookmarking service Bitly conducted a data analysis of its internal search engine to measure the sharability of animal-related media by species. ![]() Urban Dictionary’s earliest definition was added on October 24th, 2006. Caturday originated on 4chan in the mid-2000s. It has since spread to other websites as well as other days of the week. In addition, numerous academic research projects have been initiated around the peculiar subject.Ĭaturday is the tradition of posting LOLcats to 4chan on Saturdays. The increasing presence of cat-related media on YouTube and elsewhere on the web have been noted by various news publications: Salon's article "The Internet is Made of Cats" and TIME Magazine's article "A Day Without Cats on the Internet" in 2009, Mashable's article "Why does the web love cats?" and BBC's article "Cute cats, memes and understanding the internet" in 2012, among many others. The LOLcat phenomenon is thought to have entered the mainstream of the Internet sometime after the launch of I Can Has Cheezburger in early 2007.Īs of 2012, cats continue to remain culturally influential and relevant on some of the largest media-sharing communities and publishing networks on the web such as YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit and Cheezburger. However, the online popularity of cat-related media took a leap forward beginning in 2006 with the growing influence of LOLcats and Caturday on Something Awful and 4chan as well as the launch of YouTube, which essentially paved the way for the ubiquitous, multimedia presence of cats. Some of the early adopters in the blog world include M圜atHatesYou, a single topic blog dedicated to cat photos since 2000, Rathergood, an internet culture site launched by B3ta forum member Joel Veitch in 2000, and the Infinite Cat Project, a blog that curates pictures of cats looking at another cat, that began in 2004. Pictures of cats were also spread through chain e-mail networks, the most notable pre-LOLcat example being "Everytime you masturbate, God kills a kitten" (shown below, right). In the English-speaking online communities, pictures of cats became a recurring topic on memetic hubs like the B3TA Forum, Metafilter, General Mayhem, Something Awful, 4chan and FARK, just to name a few. Daily photo and video journals of domesticated cats soon became a staple genre of blogging on the Japanese web, compounded by the advents of leaderboard-style blog ranking sites, as well as technological innovations in digital cameras and video recorders. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the introduction of personal blogging and consumer-grade digital cameras charted a new era of animal photo blogs across the world, particularly in Japan where cats are generally considered the most favored pet animal. The group's FAQs were originally written in 1992 and released online in four parts over the span of nearly three years. Pictures of cats have been shared online as early as since the days of Usenet through newsgroups like, which offered a variety of answers to general questions people have about raising cats.
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