In the age of the Internet and easily accessible television, both have been combined in some way more than once, from popular shows getting webisodes, to Twitter accounts getting sitcoms. Now, however, an Internet commodity will be getting its own reality series. Bravo has announced that the empire built on sort of funny pictures of cats and typos, I Can Has Cheezburger?, will be getting its own reality series.

It’s not uncommon for YouTube videos to be taken down due to copyright claims. Granted, some are justified, but the unjustified kind happen as well. One might even say it happens with alarming frequency. Usually, these takedowns involve some sort of media that someone could ostensibly copyright, making things an issue of who owns the rights to what. Recently, a YouTuber by the name of eeplox had a video flagged for copyright violation despite the fact that it contained nothing more than a discussion of wild salads, a few shots of plants, and some natural birdsong. Rumblefish, music licensing extraordinaire, seems to think it owns the exclusive copyright to one of those things.

AT&T has caught a lot of flak recently for throttling unlimited data plans down to practically unusable speeds. AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans a while ago, the only remaining users with unlimited plans being those who were fortunate enough to be grandfathered in. AT&T asserted that the throttling is to keep their network from being overtaxed, but many users feel more like AT&T is just trying to shove them over to a tiered plan. A new study by Validas, a wireless bill analysis firm, sides with the users showing that data usage on unlimited plans is comparable — almost identical — to usage on unlimited plans.

R.L. Stine is probably best known for his young adult horror series Goosebumps, which graced the tissue-paper thin pages of Scholastic book order forms for most of the 1990s and early 2000s. What you may not know is that Stine is an avid Twitter user, and last week took the opportunity to tweet out an entire horror story, 140 characters at a time. It’s no Welcome to Dead House, but it’s a reminder that Stine is a master of brevity in storytelling. It also features a haunted kitchen, so there’s that.

Remember how the price of Whitney Houston’s “The Ultimate Collection” nearly doubled within the hour following her death? Remember how it got knocked back down and there was just the slightest chance that it could have been unrelated to price-gouging since Sony gave a vaugely plausible story? Now, The Bodyguard, a film in which Houston starred, has been yanked off Netflix streaming. Why? Because the rightsholder (which is most likely Warner Bros.) saw that “there was an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies.” No two ways about it.

There are a lot of reality shows out there, but curiously –or uncuriously, depending how you look at it — they can be pretty easily stratified into several incestuous categories. You’ve got your “war” shows, and your “swamp” shows, and your mixes and matches. It’s painfully easy to come up with plausible sounding show names like “Ice War Truckers” or “Cheese Road Masters”. In any event, these shows really can be distilled down into some distinct categories, which is exactly what this Venn diagram from the folks at Vulture does, poetically I might add.

The Entertainment Software Association announced yesterday that its support of anti-piracy legislation in general and the Stop Online Piracy Act in particular is unwavering, despite the dissenting opinions of many of its members. Many of the companies in the ESA like Nintendo, Sony and Electronic Arts have fought to be removed from lists of SOPA supporters as a reaction to the horrible consequences the bill could have if passed and the significant PR problems they’d face as supporters, but if the ESA still supports SOPA, it’s pretty much all for naught. No matter what they say, they’ll be supporting SOPA, at least tacitly, unless they leave the ESA or get it to change its tune.

Black Friday. You’ve heard about the crazy mobs, the tramplings, the stampedes. With the number of people running around on Black Friday, if you watched them hard enough, you might even be able to learn something about swarm intelligence. And where people shop. It’s probably that second one that prompted the Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia to track their customers’ movements via cell signals.

By now, you have may have noticed that there are a lot of cat videos on the Internet. It’s not simply because people like them, but because the corporate powerhouse Kittywood has been professionally producing nearly every cat video on YouTube. At least, that’s what this video would have you believe.

While being a dead-on satire of viral videos, the lengths to which corporations will go to make something viral, and hollywood itself, this does raise an interesting question: Is a world where all cat vides are professionally made more or less horrifying than a world where millions of people put an astronomical amount of cat activities to film just because they can? Think about it.

(via Neatorama)