If you have been following our posts, you will know by now that we are not huge fans of the Associated Press folk, but today, we do give them credit for at least attempting to think out of the box, no matter how failed the attempt may have been.

It turns out that the AP had been in lengthy talks with Pet Holdings Inc., an owner of several network blogs designed to allow cat lovers to post silly feline pictures, or dare devils to post silly and yet painful stunts that they’ve done.  The deal was to use Pet Holdings and its blogs to syndicate AP content.  Given the nature of the content on the Pet Holdings’ site, whose true company URL is cheezburger.com by the way,  the move seems a bit of desperation, unless, and this was very unlikely to happen, the AP created a new content stream that aligned itself with the themes of these sites – something the AP would think beneath them.  We obviously do not agree, what would have been so wrong with the AP creating a spin off division that focused on lighter-fare news content that could be used for this type of syndication partnership.  In our minds they would have opened up another revenue and audience stream. — Again not a bad thing.

See a sample video from the Fail Blog, one of the Pet Holdings properties: