Cat meme update

Christian Crumlish

So Essential Blogging has cats on the cover, eh? Is this that the cat meme again? I've been trying to note when I see that meme in use these days. In print it's hard to capture, but I have snagged these arbitrary online appearances of the cat meme:

• The Blog Phenomenon (PC Mag):
  

  The vanity page is dead; long live the Blog. The vanity Web page has lost momentum. People who posted one have already done so, and the growth has slowed. Most are uninteresting and uninspired. Cat pictures dominate too many of them.



• Backup Brain:
  

  Many people say that the Web is all about people posting pictures of their cats. And some people say it as if that's a bad thing. This site is for just those people.



• A BurningBird comment that is unavailable as that site converts to YA content management system.


• Movable Type's Standalone Trackback documentation:
  

  For example, if you run a site about cats, and want to have a way for users to ping your site with entries they write about their own cats, you could set up a TrackBack URL like http://www.foo.com/bar/tb.cgi?tb_id=cats, then give that URL out on your site. End users could then associate this URL with a Cats category in their own blog, and ping you whenever they wrote about cats.



• My own recent tutorial at the Screen Savers site:
  

  Dreamweaver MX is the latest version of Macromedia's Web-design program. It's used by everyone from beginners putting up pictures of their cats to professionals coding dynamic database-backed Web applications.



• A post by Reverend Mykeru to a thread at Metafilter:
  

  I wish I remember who said it, but "The invention of the printing press made control of information difficult. The net made it impossible". Sure, most of what gets published is pictures of people's cat, but it is the idea of cheap self publishing, that can potentially have a huge readership—if that's your bag, baby—is still the most appealing thing about the net, and blogging, and the most cause in some people's minds for suspicion.



• A post Mark Bernstein made to his blog's Home Page category:
  

  Weblogs are simply a natural outgrowth of the old home page. David Siegel's popular Killer Web Sites book, way back in 1996, popularized the notion that frequent updates were important and that it made no sense to waste all your most-visible screen space on corporate logos or pictures of your cat.