Lip #1: "The World Belongs to Geeks Right Now"

Posted 05/21/2010 at 12:42pm | by George Jones

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If you read Maximum PC Magazine back in the days when it was called boot, you might remember a series of interviews we did named Lip. Every month, we spoke to someone about something, and the results were usually pretty interesting.

This month, we’re bringing Lip back in online form. My original plan was to kick things off in a few weeks with a hardware-oriented interview. Then Ben Huh, the CEO of the I Can Haz Cheezburger network (Lolcats, Graph Jam, Failbook, and more) walked into our offices. We originally planned on talking to him during the first half of Maximum PC’s No BS podcast. Never having met Huh before, we weren’t sure what to expect. Slapstick jokester? Pure business guy? On-message slickster? Try none of the above. This is a guy who knows what it means to be a geek, and his impassioned plea at the end of the interview for geeks to rise up was oddly inspirational.

Our conversation was so interesting that I listened to it again this week and thought it would make for a fine Lip interview. If you want to hear the full audio version of the interview and the podcast, click here.

Oh, one more thing before I jump into the text of the interview: Do you have someone in mind that you’d like for us to interview next? Chime in on the comments below or send me an email directly. If we use your suggestion, I’ll send you something from the Maximum PC grab bag.

Ben Huh, CEO of the I Can Haz Cheezburger network.

Ben, before we started taping, you told us that you were trying to run an experiment to see how long you could go laptop-less for. So you’ve only been using an iPad for the last week. How’s that working out for you?

So far so good. There are a couple of major issues that I’ve run into. One, no flash video obviously. HMTL 5 should fix that. But two, this is really weird, you can’t save into the system. There’s no “save to desktop”. That kind of stuff doesn’t exist. So, all those cloud-based file services? You can’t save into them unless you email your files into the system. So that’s a little awkward. Otherwise, it’s been absolutely amazing. As I sit with this tablet in front of me, I don’t even know where the mic is. And I’m Skyping.

Before the iPad, are you a Mac person or a PC person?

I am pretty much a Mac person, but before that I was a hardcore PC guy. I was modding my cases and upgrading my PCs for a very long time. Until I went back to Macs. And now, I don’t even know how to open a computer.

How long ago was that?

When I was a college kid. That was like 10 years ago.

How does it feel that you’ve been positioned as being at the center of Internet memes? For now, that’s your legacy. What’s your take on that? And where does it go from here? Where do you go from here?

It’s interesting that we’ve been known for Internet memes. But if you look at our site directories, memes count for a pretty small percentage of what we do. What we actually pride ourselves for doing is creating online playgrounds for specific groups of people to get together and have fun. We don’t focus on memes. People ask us if we just hang out on 4chan and figure out what’s coming out next. We tend to look at inbound submissions—what people are submitting to our system—and we try to find out if there’s a common thread or if there’s something that we’re doing that can create a new community. So memes are more like a vehicle for marketing, and a vehicle for people to understand what we do. We want to continue to build more of these playgrounds for people to come and hang out. For example, we started a website called Somuchpun, and it’s a pun-based web site. We felt like there was no real user-generated content place for pun-based jokes on the Internet with the exception of reddit comments, which are all basically puns…so we started it and it seems like it’s a hit.

How quickly can you iterate and spin off of the cheeseburger site?

Every week we launch a new web site. It’s not that it takes a week; it’s just a schedule that we go by. There’s a full-time team of three people whose job it is to launch and manage new web sites. It’s a lot of work, but it’s become a process and we’ve built all this infrastructure and tools to handle that.  We’ll give it anywhere from two months to a year to see if that site is successful. Success is defined by web site traffic that goes up at a sustainable level.

What are the surprise hits? Which sites have popped?

Two web sites that have surprised us recently. One is failbook.com, which contains funny stuff that happens on Facebook. We first started posting them back in 2009 and we thought, maybe we should actually create a place for this. Another big success has been VeryDemotivational.com, which is like a motivational poster site. This has been around the Internet for a very long time starting out with a company called Despair Inc that created these anti-motivational posters called despair posters. We got in the game pretty late – there are dozens of sites that cater to this community and we thought, you know they’re not quite hitting what we think is the best-of. So we wanted to get into that community since we’ve had a motivational poster building tool for a while now. And that’s been a tremendous success.

You guys have taken a lot of active steps to embrace the community and bring them into the fold. Can you walk me through how that works, just in terms of you guys thinking about it. And can you also talk about where it goes from here?

We started out by building these islands of communities where we would cater to whatever niche content they wanted to work with. One of the first things we did was we let the community decide what happens to that content. So we built GraphJams.com, which was primarily about translating musical lyrics into graph form. And then over time the users said we don’t necessarily want just music, we want to do graphs about everyday life. Like the likelihood of running into red lights when you’re running late to work vs. when you’re actually on time. Or the percentage of things that Lindsay Lohan is addicted to. That’s a good indicator of a thriving community, when they take charge and want to evolve it beyond the original point. Where does it go from here? People are recognizing the network vs. the individual sites. People are saying, “I love the Cheezburger network because I go to fail blog and GraphJam and There I Fixed It and those are the three sites I go to every day”. So we feel like people understand our role in this. And we’d like to find a way to empower more people and participate in online culture creation.

We’ve built this graph-builder that allows you to create charts without any numbers. So you can actually create a chart with 70% this and 80% that and it totals more than 100% and it doesn’t make any sense because you can just drag the pie around. One day we’ve looked through the submissions and we’ve found all these legitimate office graphics being built. So somebody was filing their company report by creating charts based on no data!

Where are your offices? Are you downtown Seattle or in the suburbs?

We’re literally in the shadow of the space needle. Which is pretty awesome. Seattle is kind of an oddball location for Internet culture. Usually people are based out of New York or San Francisco. So we’re kind of this lonely little island. So we’re trying to bring people over to form an internet community.

I guess it makes sense because you’re slightly subversive in your approach.

I guess, but I always get email from people saying let’s have lunch or coffee, and when I ask them when, they say tomorrow. People just assume that since we’re such a part of the Internet that we’re in San Francisco.

We noticed that the LOLcats we build never seem to go to the front page. Which of course is not a problem…but how much is there beneath the surface? How much content do you get on the sites that never see the front page?

We get about 19,000 submissions on a daily basis. Icanhazcheeseburger.com posts about 5-6 a day on the home page. We’re trying to find out how do we get more people to share their sense of humor to their circle of friends by leveraging Facebook and Twitter. Things tend to be funny if you know someone because you know their sense of humor. You can take a photo of George and that’s funny to everybody who knows George. This isn’t Digg. It’s not home-page-or-nothing.

Everything you’re saying kind of indicates that you believe humor is intelligent—

It has to be. It has to be intelligent. What we’re building is a meritocratic system of humor. It used to be that if you were able to get yourself on television we were subject to your humor. Someone owned it and somebody wanted to push it into your living room and you really had no choice other than whether you were going to watch it or not. It was binary. Whereas today, Internet culture is very bottom up. No one owns the idea of LOLcats. You can’t own the idea, at least not legally. Everyone owns this idea of internet memes and anyone can participate. So what we tend to do with internet culture is that we take popular culture and we twist it out of context. We parody it or make fun of it and do something subversive to it and then we share it with each other. And we have a meritocratic system where the funniest stuff gets seen by the most people.

So it’s natural selection.

It’s…unnatural distribution is what I like to call it. It’s completely unnatural because we don’t know how to do this except through social networks and the Internet has helped us spread these ideas around. And we’re all learning how to do this. Is it appropriate to send a photo of yourself in a bikini to your coworker, or is that not cool? Is it okay to post on Facebook? Is it okay to add your boss on Facebook?

You guys are in a unique position to get good metrics on this sort of thing. You could actually tell us what, according to traffic, is the funniest cat picture ever taken.

What’s interesting though is that, because traffic levels change, the later stuff always gets more traffic than the earlier ones. We need a way to bring back the classics. So it’s difficult to tell.

Can you tell us the first LOLcat?

We don’t know what the very first LOLcat was. But I’ll take you back in time. Some of your older listeners may remember the Hang in There Kitty with a cat hanging on a branch and it says “Hang in There” in a psychedelic font. So that’s a LOLcat – it’s a cat with a funny caption underneath it.

We’re talking about doing a story on home theater story for an upcoming issue. What does your home theater look like?

My home theater is a 46-inch LCD Samsung 1080p TV with an Onkyo system with Bose speakers in the front with NTHC speakers in the back—two of them. Apple TV, a Macbook, and an Xbox. And a Blu-ray player. I’m trying to get rid of the Apple TV. I actually think it’s a bad product, and I’m really disappointed with Apple. I only have cable Internet, I don’t have cable-cable, which is an awesome liberating thing. I just want Internet. Everything should be over Internet Protocol. VoiP. Video. Obviously, having an Xbox really helps. I just finished Battlefield 2. I could just spend hours blowing things up. It’s pretty simple. I wish the Xbox had Blu-Ray in it, like the PS3 so that I could get rid of another component in the house.

Do you have any closing wisdom you’d like to share?

Yeah. I’ll say this: The world belongs to geeks right now. This is our time. This is our time to shine. We’re the ones out there creating really interesting stuff, right? It used to be the domain of artists to push the envelope. And now geeks are getting into culture creation. It’s really awesome to see that. People should do more. People should participate more. People should publish more. Take control of their voice. And I think that it’s pretty awesome that we have all these tools out there that allow people to do this freely and that people are embracing it. And you know, we should be proud of that.

George Jones is the editor in chief of Maximum PC. He probably likes cheeseburgers a little bit too much for his own good.

Got a suggestion for who we should interview or a topic you’d like to explore? Comment below, or email him directly.