I’ve heard many people laughing about the incredible number of cat content on the internet. According to Hardip in Yahoo Answers from 2010, there were 110,952 cat videos on YouTube. I’m sure this has grown exponentially in the last 2 years. I’m not much of a cat person, I’m a dog person, but my friend Jodie has a crazy cat called Frank Schrodinger. Frank the Bengal cat was named after some super scientist that worked with Einstein and devised a quantum mechanics theory that involved putting a cat in a box to test the simultaneous (and obviously contradictory) existence of a live and dead cat. (I know, its way over my head too. But I figured if I was going to mention it, I should at least give you an opportunity to discover it further.) Now that’s done, onto the point of this post.
My friend Jodie’s cat, Frank Schrodinger, is a little bit evil and his mother doesn’t mind shaming him online.
So my friend Jodie is one of those people who love putting pictures and videos of her cat online – she’s even won some money from Frank the Cat on Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. But Frank the Cat is definitely a little bit evil. I can say that because he is a cat, if it was her son or daughter, I’m sure it would not be so well received. I think speaking ill of someone else’s children usually falls into the category of “I can say it about my own children, but you definitely cannot”. I’m sure most of us have said something to a parent about their child, thinking it would be received as intended (a slightly truthful joke), only to be stared down in anger. But, we can usually get away with talking trash about their animals – although there are always those owners/ parents who will not allow a syllable of negativity against their beloved.
But thankfully there are many pet and cat owners that see the funny side. There are whole websites devoted to this kind of behaviour – this picture of Frank the Cat is from a post about 2 weeks ago that Jodie put up on Cat-Shaming on the Tumblr Social Networking site.
When I did a search looking for how many cat videos there were on YouTube, Google returned 177 million results. I know that there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (from 2011), but I wonder how much of that is cat videos?
This very clever blogger was trying to capitalise on the strange practice of cat loving + cat videos online to drive traffic to their site, and it worked, as they ranked #1 on Google for the long-tail search “how many cat videos are uploaded to Youtube every minute?” and I clicked through and while the blog told me that in May 2012 there is now 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, but there was actually no data on how much of that video is about cats.
The cat content online is really quite an interesting phenomonon. Reputable online publishers in digital media like Mashable have chronicles the top 10 funny cat videos, apparently Google has built a thinking computer that simulates the visual cortex in the human brain. The thing that is relevant to this article, is that this thinking computer that simulates the human brain was able to identify cats online, despite not being taught/ programmed with the information of what a cat is or looks like. So perhaps Google’s thinking computer has achieved its goal, it has successfully replicated human behaviour and is a cat lover too (or it simply looks at the volume of data online and the words associated with that content and data and cats showed up an awful lot).
This is Harris, our dog, licking his lips. Something he does often. I didn’t catch him in the act to put it on Dog-Shaming.com but he has been known to eat diapers full of baby poo.
But as I said, I’m a dog person and this is my beloved pooch, Harris. I’ve not gone to the effort of putting him on the parallel Dog-Shaming.com website, but there are dog lovers and owners out there who are just as fanatical about their dogs as Jodie and many others are about their cats. I didn’t catch him in the act, but judging by the remains, Harris has been known to eat Indian Miner birds, anything plastic and baby diapers full of poo. But I did manage to get a shot of his little “F*&k You”, when he ate/ tore apart a telephone book after he was unhappy about being left alone for one too many evenings. It was a very clear message.
Please, feel free to share your Cat or Dog shaming stories.
Our dog Harris eats a phone book because we left him alone too many nights in a row