12.08.09 - 12:00AM
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Urlesque Staff

Lifetime Achievement Award -- 2009 Urlies

topic:
2009 Urlies

Lifetime Achievement -- The Cheezburger Network

From LOLs to fails, Ben Huh and his Cheezburger Network have amassed an entire network of wonderful niche sites much to the delight of web surfers everywhere.

Even if you surf the Web only occasionally, there's still a 99.99 percent chance you've gotten some good ol' belly laughs from Ben Huh and the Cheezburger Network. Don't recognize the name or the misspelled entree? That's because you might not be aware how many of your favorite sites the team at Cheezburger is actually behind. Cheezburger's parent company, Pet Holdings, launched in 2007 with the Internet's favorite adorable nonsense site that soon become a worldwide Web phenomenon: I Can Has Cheezburger -- an immense (and still growing) collection of Lolcats, or adorable kitty pictures captioned with hilariously misspelled words which came to be called "Lolspeak.") While Lolcats can be found all over the web, I Can Has Cheezburger is a thriving community of do-it-yourself lulz, where members are constantly uploading new photos to caption, while PH creates spin-offs like the dog-centric Lolsite, I Has a Hot Dog and the celebrity-centric, ROFLrazzi.

But that's not where the reign of Pet Holdings ends. Branching out from adorable animals, Huh and his team have since then covered everything from bad hair days (Don't Judge My Hair) to real estate (Lovely Listing) to the realm of FAIL (FAIL Blog) -- and everything in between. Recent new favorites include Autocomplete Me, a site spawned from the Web's love of Google Search's autocomplete option that hilarious fills in the blanks of a search item, and 2009 Urlies Single-Topic blog nominee There I Fixed It, which is dedicated to the most amazing DIY creations the world has to offer.

Huh and the rest of the Cheez team have a bona fide knack for taking seemingly fleeting Web trends and turning them into permanent crowdsourced communities, where members not only contribute to the site's collection, they make sure to comment on and joke about the material. But most importantly -- they have something to share with their friends.

And don't even get us started on their LOLmart.

All 2009 Urlies Winners