In 2004, the most reliable way to find a picture of a cat online was to read a political blog on a Friday. Cat blogs were not a genre yet. They were a habit, a small weekly ritual that serious writers used to break up posts about election polling. Within three years that habit had grown into weekly carnivals, community aggregators, book deals and a two million dollar acquisition. Within another six years most of it had quietly vanished, and not because anyone stopped liking cats.
This is the story of the feline web between the Usenet era and the moment social feeds swallowed independent publishing whole. It has real dates, real names, and one very specific villain, which turns out to be a piece of software nobody hated at the time.
Table of Contents
- Before Cat Blogs, There Were Cat Newsgroups
- Friday Catblogging and the Accidental Birth of Cat Blogs
- The Golden Age of Cat Blogs, 2004 to 2007
- The Cat Blogosphere and the Community Behind the Pictures
- Cheezburger and the Year Cats Became a Business
- Why Cat Blogs Died, and Why It Was Not the Cats
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
Before Cat Blogs, There Were Cat Newsgroups
The feline internet predates the blog by roughly a decade. On Usenet, the newsgroup rec.pets.cats collected the questions people still ask today, about litter boxes, kidney disease, introductions between resident cats and new arrivals. The group’s FAQ documents, the closest thing the early web had to a knowledge base, were written between 1992 and 1995. The group eventually got so busy that it was split into six separate newsgroups, one of them rec.pets.cats.anecdotes. The original group no longer exists.
Alongside it ran the Fanciers, FanciersHealth and Gene-Poole mailing lists, active since 1993 and operated by a mixed group of breeders, exhibitors, show judges and veterinarians spread across several countries. These were not casual spaces. They were closer to professional correspondence with cats as the subject matter.
What all of this lacked was pictures. Text traveled cheaply on Usenet, images did not, and the whole architecture pushed people toward description rather than display. The same constraint shaped every early online community, from the bulletin board systems that came before to the forums that followed, a lineage we traced in the history of internet forums. Cats were already the most discussed animal online. They just were not visible yet.
Friday Catblogging and the Accidental Birth of Cat Blogs
The bridge from text to pictures came from an unlikely direction. Kevin Drum, writing at his independent blog Calpundit between 2003 and 2004, is credited with popularizing Friday catblogging: at the end of the week, in the middle of dense political analysis, he posted photographs of his own cats. Inkblot became a recurring character. When a reader wrote in to say her nephew liked him, Drum’s response captured the whole tone of the format, something to the effect of cats today, infrastructure program tomorrow.
Drum went on to write Political Animal for the Washington Monthly from 2004 to 2008, then blogged at Mother Jones from 2008 to 2021. He died in March 2025, and a striking number of the obituaries led with the cats rather than the policy writing. That is the tell. Friday catblogging worked because it was a deliberate break in register, a signal that the person behind the argument was a person.
The Carnival That Turned a Habit Into a Network
Laurence Simon, who wrote a blog with the memorable title This Blog Is Full Of Crap, did the thing that turned a scattered habit into an institution. He started the Carnival of the Cats, a weekly roundup of everyone’s Friday cat posts, hosted on a different participating blog each week. His scheduling logic was pure early-web pragmatism: he published on Sunday evening, when most people were offline, so that the roundup was waiting on Monday morning when they sat down at the office with their first coffee.
The archives let you reconstruct the timeline. The blog Mind of Mog hosted Carnival number 49 on 27 February 2005, number 117 on 18 June 2006, number 329 on 4 July 2010 and number 352 on 12 December 2010. The cadence is almost perfectly weekly across six years, which places the first edition in the spring of 2004 and shows the carnival still running at the close of 2010. Three hundred and fifty consecutive weeks of volunteer-hosted cat photography is a level of consistency most media companies never manage.
The Golden Age of Cat Blogs, 2004 to 2007
Once the carnival gave cat blogs a distribution system, the single-topic sites arrived fast. MyCatHatesYou had been posting nothing but cat photographs since 2000, a format that looks obvious now and looked eccentric then, in the same way the Hamster Dance looked eccentric until it did not.
The Infinite Cat Project and Stuff on My Cat
In 2004, Mike Stanfill launched the Infinite Cat Project, a crowd-sourced chain in which each photograph shows a cat looking at a monitor displaying the previous cat. It began when Paul Hamilton posted a picture of his cat Frankie on a forum and another user photographed his own cat contemplating the image. The chain ran for thousands of entries. It is the purest artifact of the era, a project that could only exist because people had digital cameras, a scanner-free workflow and absolutely nothing better to do.
Stuff on My Cat, built by Mario Garza around his patient sleeping cat Love, started with office supplies and spare computer parts balanced on a napping animal and escalated to remote controls, shoes and empty pizza boxes. Yahoo! and GQ both named it one of the coolest sites of the year. Chronicle Books published Stuff on My Cat as a print book in 2006, which made it one of the first cat blogs to convert web attention into a physical product.
Cute Overload and the Rules of Cuteness
Cute Overload, created by Megan Frost around 2005, was the most professionalized of the lot. It did something none of the amateur sites attempted: it wrote down the theory. The site’s Rules of Cuteness codified seven characteristics that make an animal photograph work, including paws held in the air, fisheye-lens distortion, and animals mimicking human posture. Editors applied the rules in captions, which turned a photo blog into a shared critical vocabulary.
The recognition followed. Cute Overload took the People’s Voice award in the blog category at the 2006 Webby Awards, won Best American Weblog at the 2007 Bloggies, and won Best Topical Weblog at the 2009 Weblog Awards. Quantcast measured an average of 33,700 visits per day during 2011. On 18 January 2016, the site announced it was closing down.
Running in parallel, Catster took a completely different approach. Launched in 2004 by Ted Rheingold and Steven Reading, the team behind Dogster, it gave every cat a profile page, friends and a diary. It was a social network where the users were cats and the typing was done by staff. The brand outlived nearly all its contemporaries: Lumina Media folded the 1965-founded magazine Cat Fancy into it in 2015, Belvoir Media Group bought it in 2017, Pangolia acquired it in October 2023, and the print run ended with the November/December 2023 issue.
The Cat Blogosphere and the Community Behind the Pictures
The part of this history that gets left out of most retrospectives is that cat blogs were a social network before social networks, with all the obligations that implies. On 27 April 2006, Robyn Harton, known in the community as Mom Robyn of HotMBC, published the first post on the Cat Blogosphere, writing in the voice of her cat Sanjee. The site became the central news hub for hundreds of pet bloggers: announcements, events, jokes, and, more than anything, news about sick animals and sick humans.
It moved from Blogspot to WordPress on 1 January 2007 and passed through a chain of volunteer editors, ML Sherwood, Sue Strong, Morgen Pittman in January 2013 and Paula Gregg from April 2018 until her death on 2 May 2022. Terry Frum runs it now. The site’s Rainbow Bridge section, a running memorial for the community’s dead pets, has been maintained continuously for close to two decades. Harton credited earlier bloggers as the inspiration, among them Psychokitty Max, Timothy Dickens, Laurence Simon and Jay Dyke’s comic strip The Mows.
The carnival format spread sideways too. Weekend Cat Blogging, hosted by Clare at the Australian food blog Eat Stuff, pulled food bloggers into the same ritual: cook something, photograph the cat who supervised. Edition 22 went up in early November 2005 and editions 26 and 27 in December 2005, which puts the launch in the middle of that year. It ran alongside Weekend Herb Blogging at Kalyn’s Kitchen, part of a whole ecosystem of themed carnivals that functioned as the recommendation algorithm of the blog era, except operated entirely by hand.
Cheezburger and the Year Cats Became a Business
On 11 January 2007, Eric Nakagawa posted an image he had found on the comedy site Something Awful, a wide-faced cat with a caption in deliberately broken English, and put it on a domain he had just registered. His friend Kari Unebasami had sent him the cat pictures after a bad day at work. By May 2007 the site was taking up to 1.5 million hits a day. In September 2007 a group of investors bought it for two million dollars, and Ben Huh built it into a network of sister sites under Pet Holdings, plus a book that reached the New York Times bestseller list.
Structurally it was still a blog. Reverse chronology, permalinks, comments, an RSS feed. But it was the first cat site where the blog part was invisible to the audience. Readers arrived from a link, scrolled, laughed, left. There was no author to follow, no Friday ritual, no host rotation. The captioned-image format it industrialized had its own separate technical history, which we cover in the piece on image macros and Impact font, and its imageboard ancestry runs through sites like 4chan and oddities like Longcat. What matters here is the economic lesson the industry took from it: cat content scaled beautifully, and the blogger was the part you could remove.
Why Cat Blogs Died, and Why It Was Not the Cats
In March 2008, at O’Reilly’s ETech conference, Ethan Zuckerman gave the talk that produced what became known as the cute cat theory of digital activism. His line has aged well: Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers, Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats. His argument was that activists in repressive countries are safer on ordinary platforms, because shutting down the nation’s favorite photo site provokes far more public outrage than killing an obscure activist tool.
Zuckerman was describing a migration that was already underway. Facebook launched News Feed in 2006 and Twitter started the same year. Suddenly the cat photo did not need a blog, a carnival host, or a Sunday roundup to reach anyone. It needed an account. The infrastructure that cat blogs had built by hand, distribution, discovery, community, was now a default feature of platforms that did the work automatically and for free.
The number that tells the story is the collapse of RSS. Forrester found that about 7 percent of US online adults used RSS feeds at least weekly in 2008, and just over 4 percent the following year. Google Reader, launched in 2005, was the connective tissue of the whole independent blog ecosystem, the thing that made following forty small cat blogs practical. Google announced its retirement on 14 March 2013 and shut it off on 1 July 2013, with senior vice president Urs Hƶlzle citing declining usage. A petition to save it collected more than 50,000 signatures within hours. It did not matter.
So the cats did not leave. The container changed. The audience moved to YouTube, then Tumblr, then Instagram, and cat blogs became cat accounts, which then became cat channels. What was lost in the transfer was authorship: the carnival host, the rotating link roundup, the reader who knew your cat’s name and medical history. What replaced it was reach, at the cost of every relationship being mediated by a ranking system. The full arc of how feline images kept mutating after that, from captioned photos to algorithmic slop, sits in our complete history of cat memes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the first cat blog?
There is no clean answer, because the format arrived before the label. MyCatHatesYou was posting nothing but cat photographs from 2000, which makes it one of the earliest single-topic examples. Cat discussion online is far older, going back to the Usenet group rec.pets.cats and the Fanciers mailing lists that have run since 1993.
What was Friday catblogging?
A convention popularized by political blogger Kevin Drum at Calpundit in 2003 and 2004: end the week by posting photos of your cats instead of analysis. It spread across the political blogosphere and was collected weekly by Laurence Simon’s Carnival of the Cats, which ran from around spring 2004 well past 2010.
Why did cat blogs disappear?
Distribution moved. Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter both arrived in 2006, RSS usage fell from roughly 7 percent of US online adults weekly in 2008 to just over 4 percent a year later, and Google Reader shut down on 1 July 2013. Without feed readers and blog carnivals, small independent sites lost the machinery that brought them readers.
Is anything from the cat blog era still online?
Yes. The Cat Blogosphere, founded on 27 April 2006, is still publishing under editor Terry Frum, memorials included. Catster survives as a website under Pangolia after ending its print edition with the November/December 2023 issue. Cute Overload closed on 18 January 2016.
What is the cute cat theory?
Ethan Zuckerman’s 2008 argument that political activists are safer on mainstream platforms built for trivial content, because censoring a site full of cat pictures angers a much larger public than censoring a dedicated activism tool. It is also the sharpest statement of how much of the modern web exists because of animals.
Conclusion
Cat blogs were never really about cats. They were a way for people to build small, slow, reciprocal networks at a moment when nobody had invented anything better, and the cat was the friendliest possible excuse. The carnivals ran for years on volunteer labor, the memorial posts were written by strangers who meant it, and the whole thing collapsed the instant a machine offered to do the distribution instead. If you want to see what that ecosystem produced, the archives are mostly still there, waiting, like a cat sitting on a keyboard that nobody types on anymore. For the wider picture, see our history of internet memes.
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