The Web simply can't get enough funny cat pictures. Or dog pictures. Or sleeping cat pictures. Or pictures of people failing. Or creative approaches to fix things. The Cheezburger Network has grown dramatically, racing to the point where they are seeing a billion page views every four months, after it took nearly two years to reach the first billion. Growing the company on rapid scale is no accident, as the network has focused its business objectives on its customers, aiming to remove distractions and obstacles that could hinder potential growth.

Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, said the company focused not on how many features they could push into the network, but instead on simplicity - letting the users dictate how the business would grow. And the company is realistic about what it aims to do. They aren't out to make a billion dollars in profit, or to change the world.

"Our mission statement is to make people happy for five minutes a day," Ben said today at Blog World Expo. "We kept hearing from our audience members, 'You make us happy,'. When you allow your users to dictate how your business will operate, and can develop a thick skin, that is how you grow."

If you have spent any amount of time on social networks, or received any e-mail outside of your office, you probably have encountered work from Cheezburger Network. From I Can Haz Cheezburger and I Has a Hotdog to the FAIL Blog, GraphJam, There, I Fixed It, E-mails from Crazy People and It Made My Day, the company is trying to reach a broad audience through more sites and more content, based on user feedback. In fact, today they announced a new site featuring sleeping animals, called Daily Squee, which is reminiscent of the also popular and off network Cute Overload.

The sites' mantras are pretty simple. Post funny pictures with custom captions. Ben said that human nature has a tendency to admire complexity, but rewards simplicity, and that through introducing complexity, it has an inverse effect on your business' ability to scale. Instead of investing in expensive custom software and hardware, Cheezburger utilizes standard products including WordPress, JS-Kit, YouTube, Google Apps, cloud storage and open source applications, keeping costs low.

While some of the network's sites may seem fanciful, they are thoughtfully planned out and new proposals are theorized frequently, and target those who may not yet be avid fans of the network. Ben theorized that half the company's traffic was non-critical and transient, while 30 percent of traffic constituted the regulars, another 15 percent were fans, and an elite 5 percent were people who show up every day, multiple times a day. He suggested that businesses focus on the greatest population that could migrate to higher devoted level (in this case the 30 percent), as that will increase the total number of fans, and discourage targeting the site by scaling to the power users, who are typically edge cases.

Beyond keeping its audience happy for 5 minutes at a time, Ben said the company frequently thinks in small time allotments, saying, "If I had wanted to work four hours a week, what would I have to do?" and asking, "If my users had forty seconds on the site, what would they want to do?" Key to satisfying these short term visitors? Eliminating distractions and removing barriers.

The goal is to keep the company in touch with what the users wanted, and purging common mistakes that come from within, including ego, pride, assumptions, sacred cows, secrets, coverups, and individual reputation. The result is one big fat happy network.

The rate at which information is being produced shows no sign of slowing down, and humans are adapting to the onslaught of this so-called firehose by having shorter attention spans and filtering out information they aren't much interested in, so that it fades into the background as noise. In parallel, information is getting ever decentralized, and conversations are taking place in an infinite number of places, which makes the task of participating in every relevant conversation a practical impossibility. As this has happened, the model of dedicated Web sites, and even blogs, can look extremely outdated - aiming to act as centralized destinations in a world of streams. Edelman vice president Steve Rubel, who recently moved his blog to a lifestreaming format, based on Posterous, explained at Blog World Expo how he takes on the stream and helps his clients gain visibility in the fast-moving world.

Rubel, who created the highly popular MicroPersuasion blog back in 2004 and updated it multiple times a day before moving to the lifestream earlier this year, said "we are reaching a critical breaking point" when it comes to the information firehose, adding, "information is going to continue to scale, but human attention doesn't scale, so we have to think about how each of us manages it."

You no doubt have seen some of the more aggressive ways to tackle information overload including "In Box Zero", "Mark All as Read Day" or even "E-mail bankruptcy" - all essentially differing forms of throwing in the towel and admitting failure. Steve quoted recent studies showing that the average person in the US visits 111 different domains in a month, and approximately 2,500 Web pages a month, as people are making choices in terms of where they spend their time, and what pieces of information they choose to respond to. And one of those places that usually isn't getting a lot of their attention? Company Web sites and old-fashioned blogs.

Steve suggested that one of the major reasons that Twitter exploded was because it centralized all these diverse conversations and put them in one place, also leaning on short forms of communication, adding that on average, people only read about 20 percent of the Web page before moving on. Much of the reason for their shorter attention spans? More data, coming ever more quickly.

"Everything is moving faster now, whether you like it or not," he said. "It's like a sushi duck moving past at 100 miles an hour with 1,000 different options. How do you make sure you get selected and stand out?"

Instead of fighting against the stream and forcing people to come back to the originating hub, Steve started to think that maybe his blog "didn't matter as much any more", and appeared "archaic". Now, he is posting content, via Posterous, to his lifestream and also each of the spokes (like Flickr, Delicious, etc.) and participating where that content gainst traction - essentially creating a very customizable hub and spoke model that has his own personal brand and the flexibility to put the right content in the right place.

For companies and businesses looking to take on the streams, Steve highlighted three major imperatives to not only just broadcast, but to ensure quality engagement - including ubiquity, multiplicity and diversity of message, and finally, discovery and visibility. The new lifestream-powered Web sites would enable companies and brands to be "everywhere stakeholders are spending time", and enable the opportunity for different stories in different venues in different formats, avoiding a one size fits all approach.

The stream is real. Whether you call it the flow, as Stowe Boyd has, or the River of News, as Dave Winer has, the firehose is pushing more data our way faster than ever. IT could be that the lifestream is an answer.

For more on lifestreaming, make sure to check out Mark Krynsky's Lifestreamblog.com.

Social media is a tool. Last month I said social media is infrastructure, and I have compared Twitter to the new e-mail or a parallel Internet. Because of this, enterprising folks are finding ways to leverage these new tools for practically every facet of business, not just for social media marketing, or daily minutiae, but for rallying the community to support charity. I've talked a lot about the #BlameDrewsCancer phenomenon, featuring my good friend Drew Olanoff, but as we learned today at the Blog World Expo this morning, he is not alone in his efforts to leverage social media communities to take on cancer and other causes. The panelists all agreed it takes effort, persistence and consistency, making an abstract illness personal, real and tangible.

Drew has been relatively lucky in his challenge with cancer. His battle with stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma is very possibly nearing its conclusion, with 10 chemo treatments out of 12 behind him, and positive feedback from his doctors. But not everybody has a happy ending. Jay Scott, father of Alex from "Alex's Lemonade Stand", told us about how his daughter passed away at the tender age of 8 1/2 after fighting with cancer her whole life, and devoting her efforts to raise money the only way she knew how - selling lemonade on the family's front lawn. Jay and his team have rallied to continue her cause and make it into a movement that has inspired hundreds of thousands.

The tools that Jay, Drew and others have used to punch cancer in the mouth are the same tools we all use. Drew said, "It's not rocket science, it's word of mouth. If you have a passion, be passionate about it and use the tools in front of you." But he added it takes a ton of effort. He said, "It's not Field of Dreams here. You have to go after people and be aggressive. Whatever got your attention, I don't care what it is, I got your attention. All these tools are is platforms for people."

Meaghan Edelstein, who battled cervical cancer and won, said the main push from social networks is in the name itself: social. She said, "You have to get people excited. People are on social networks because they want to do something, so give them something to do."

But as you can imagine, fighting a faceless killer and rallying people to a cause is not as simple as setting up a Twitter account and Facebook page and watching the activity roll in. It takes serious work that is genuine and personal.

Meaghan said to "be authentic" and be a real person with real messages, and recognize that the smallest blog or least-followed Twitter account is just as important to embrace as the household names. "You are not too good for anybody else, and you have to remember that," she said. "You have to thank them and participate. That's what makes things authentic and social. If you don't have these things, you have to get out of the arena."

But all the effort in the world won't make a difference if the story doesn't sell.

Jay said "you have to have a good message, and if it is powerful, people will tell their friends about it," adding, "I can't believe how powerful retweets are. It helps if people have a million followers, but it also helps from those people who have ten followers."

When cancer took on Alex Scott, and took her away from the world much too soon, it may have been a short-term win for cancer at huge expense to her family and us all, but it turned out to be a massive mistake on cancer's part, because the cause has lived on and Alex has become a symbol for rallying for a good cause. Each of the day's panelists made it clear that their battle with cancer had gotten personal and their community has come to their aid.

Find out more about the causes:

• alexslemonade.org or @alexslemonade
  
• blamedrewscancer.com or @drew
  
• spiritjump.org or @spiritjump

A few of this summer's acquisitions featured a scrappy upstart much beloved by the Web masses getting absorbed by a larger, more-established acquirer - with two of the more prominent examples being Intuit's buy of Mint.com and Facebook's takeover of FriendFeed. And amidst the ensuing responses, I saw two truly oppositional reactions - the first from people who swore they would never use the larger company or service because they hated it or didn't trust it, and the second, from people who now thought it was "safe" to use the smaller service as it finally had some parental supervision.

I recognize that some people have a greater tendency to accept risk in their lives, including risk to their data, than do others. Some lines of business and people operating those businesses are as a rule conservative - not venturing to buy one company's goods until they have done a full background check on the firm's financial stability, or have seen a flurry of similar use cases from peers. Others flock toward a series of early adoptions, where a personal relationship with a site's founders or employees is possible, thanks to the product's newness. And no doubt, the two sides rarely agree on a set strategy.

What are the underlying concerns both parties may have?

For Those Who Favor Big Companies Over the Upstarts

• A small company may not have taken all necessary precautions to protect their data, making it vulnerable.
  
• A small company may not have longevity, and if it expires, so too could your data.
  
• A small company may grow desperate for funds and could sell your personal information.

For Those Who Favor Small Companies Over the Giants

• A large company is more likely driven by sheer dollars than by customer service.
  
• A large company may have a history that contains questionable moves.
  
• A large company may act unilaterally in terms of how your data is used.

In parallel with the two acquisitions I had mentioned, there have been a few isolated cases of the smaller company putting itself up for auction, essentially turning its user base into a marketing list for sale to the highest bidder, whether or not that may contain personally identifiable information, or possibly passwords. But in parallel, you can see people who strongly dislike Google, don't trust Microsoft, or think that Facebook is evil. I even saw a post go up yesterday saying that Cisco was evil. The bigger they are, the bigger a target they are.

I tend to trust companies rather than distrust them. I am an optimist. I think there is a possible point where personal relationships with the founders trumps a robust multi-tier support system or flashier GUI. But it's not for everyone. What are your thoughts, and do mega mergers change the way you perceive your data being protected?