We’ve just released an updated version of our sports lolz site, Up Next In Sports. The changes that we’ve made serve as the first step in a series of improvements we have planned for all the sites on the Cheezburger Network.

What did we change?

1. Added a bigger, bolder, more awesome logo
2. Added 3 links to the navigation bar (including a link to our new site directory)
3. Shuffled the right column to the left column. This makes everything fit together more nicely on the site

Why?

We’re tweaking the sites on Cheezburger Network to make them more attractive, more enticing for people to contribute and easier to find new sites and lolz you might like. We have a number of improvements planned and we’ll be releasing them in stages across sites on our network in coming weeks. Forthcoming changes are designed to make it easier for us to launch more sites, with more content and features, and ultimately, a faster, better overall experience.

Comments

We’d love to get your comments as we make these changes. Without your contributions of funny pictures, captions, comments, and votes, sites on the Cheezburger Network wouldn’t be much fun to visit, so we hope you like the changes we’ve made.

Did you know that Cheezburger publishes a growing family of 34 humor sites? Well if you didn’t, you’re not alone. Until I started working here a few months ago, I didn’t either.

We’re taking the first step in changing that today.

We proudly present the Cheezburger Site Directory for your viewing pleasure. It’s a handy index of all the sites that we make here at Cheezburger HQ. Sites in the Directory include familiar favorites, like I Can Has Cheezburger and FAILblog as well as all of our newer sites such as:

• Epic Win FTW
• Friends of Irony
• Oddly Specific

We’re creating new sites regularly (usually one a week), so if you always want the latest in Internet funny, check back often.

Do you like the Cheezburger sites?  Would it make you happy to know that your work makes millions of other people happy every single gosh darned day?!

If so, we may have just the opportunity for you: we’re looking for a few good men and women to help us wrangle the Interwebs and facilitate joy and happiness:

• Someone experienced in designing web sites to help create the future Cheezburger
• One or more people that are super awesome designers to create t-shirts for LOLmart Shirts
• A developer who loves getting their hands dirty in the code
• And we’re nothing without super web savvy content moderators

You get more info and apply for these job openings over at http://jobs.cheezburger.com.  And, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to work at Cheezburger, here’s a behind the scenes video…enjoy!

Want your designs to be seen across the Cheezburger Network? LOLmartShirts.com has the opportunity for you!

• Do you love the interwebz?
• Do you love the Cheezburger Network?
• Do you know your memes?
• Have you seen our LOLMart Shirt of the Day site?
• Do you think that you can do better?

The Cheezburger Network wants to hire some great artists to do shirt designs, and as an added benefit you will be able to get your work shown to our millions of fans in our network.

Currently, we’re looking for part-time, contract designers in the US and Canada.

How to apply: Easy!  Visit http://jobs.cheezburger.com/job/detail/4089-lolmart-shirts-designer and submit your information.

If your favorite color is blue, you may or may not be given preferential treatment.

If you run your own WordPress blog, and you’re fan of Cheezburger, we have just what you’re looking for: LOLPress.

Created by John Hawkins over at 9seeds.com, LOLPress is a plug-in for WordPress that will allow images contained within posts to be submitted for captioning to the Cheezburger Network through a tooltip popup.  In addition, there’s a link in the tooltip popup that allows users to see all the captioned versions of that image.

You can download the plugin here and see a demo here.

Thanks to John and his team for contributing this to both the Cheezburger and WordPress community!

Starting today, when you log in to cheezburger.com you will have a My Votes tab on your profile page. The tab is only visible to you (just like your My Account tab). Many times, I remember seeing a really great lol while voting, but I was unable to find it later. The My Votes tab was created to solve this problem. You can now browse through your Win and Fail votes, and then share them like any other lol on cheezburger.com.

Many thanks to all of you who noticed that the names of all of your friends had disappeared from your profile page and let us know that feed of friend activity that obscures names isn’t very useful. We agree completely and have fixed the problem. Thanks!

As many of you know, we have a little store for Cheezburger delectables called LOLMart.  We’re proud mama’s and papa’s this week because we’ve made some exciting additions the store.

Anybody who knows anything knows that LOLs are fun and bring the laughs, but now they can also help make difficult decisions, too!

That’s right…we’ve introduced our version of the old time classic Magic 8-Ball: the Magic Cheezburger.  Next time you find yourself in a jam, a pickle, a dilemma…just ask the Cheezburger because it has all the answers you’ll ever need!

We also have a few t-shirts in the store, but many Cheezfrenz have been asking for more.  So, we’ve introduced an entirely new t-shirt store called LOLMart Shirts that will be filled with designs inspired by Cheezburger and the Interwebs.

LOLMart Shirts is a shirt-of-the-day-style store.  In other words, each shirt will be available for a limited time only, typically just one day, but sometimes more. Check back every day to see if there is something you like, and if there is be sure to order because it won’t be there long.

A whole bunch of people sent this clip in to us. When I first saw it, I wondered why they replaced Trebek with some old guy who doesn’t even have a mustache. I guess that’s a fail on my part.

There have been some questions about why the Trebek would choose to use a fake Russian accent when saying the name of the category. I have two theories about this:

1. Russian, along with many other Slavic languages doesn’t have any definite or indefinite articles, so many Russian speakers who go on to learn English have trouble with them. It’s easy to imagine a movie where the Soviet double agent says to the spy in a thick accent, “Get in car. I take you to embassy”. Missing articles have become a sort of linguistic shorthand for “I’m from Eastern Europe”. As the phrase “I can has cheezburger?” is missing an indefinite article, Alex Trebek misinterpreted the LOLspeak for a vague inference to a native Russian speaker struggling with English grammar.

2. The picture used in the original I Can Has Cheezburger lol was from an ad for a Russian brand of cat food. Alex Trebek must know this because he’s such a huge fan of the site and he used the accent to give an oblique shout-out to his fellow hardcore fans who also know the history behind the original image.

The second theory is obviously more likely. Way to go Alex! Almost makes up for losing the ’stache.

When I first met Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh a little more than a year ago, I was reminded of the early days of MTV and ESPN, when people thought that dedicated channels for just music and sports were preposterous. Nobody could be successful showing just music or sports all day. The idea of a company built around a network of humor sites, headlined by lolcats and people hurting themselves might seem just preposterous at first, but it actually works.

After really getting to know the sites and actually meeting a bunch of fans, I realized that a better old-media metaphor is the newspaper funny pages. It’s funny, social (“Did you see yesterday’s Dilbert?”), short-form, new at least every day, and you can enjoy it from your office (except when killjoy employers block FAIL Blog videos, I wonder if they also cut Garfield out of the newspapers in the lunchroom).

A new example: Seattle’s online-only newspaper, the Post Intelligencer has started running lolcats from in the comics section of the site. Nice!

I’m personally hoping that some newspaper, print or online, will include Pundit Kitchen content as part of their opinion section. Seriously. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better political cartoon than this one.