Click to viewInternational Talk Like a Pirate Day has spawned far more than its fair share of bad attempts at humor in the form of press releases from Internet startups. Even companies like Google and Facebook have indulged themselves. Please, leave the comedy to the professionals from the venerable Ask a Ninja franchise. Creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine are promoting their book, The Ninja Handbook, with a live call-in show on Ustream.tv featuring everyone's favorite pirate-hating ninja — which may be the first intentionally funny live video broadcast in the history of Web 2.0.

Ze Frank, whose awesome series of daily two-minute Web videos ended last year, told a New York audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater he landed a movie deal with Universal. As NewTeeVee points out, Frank follows in the footsteps of the Ask A Nina guys, who are remaking Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and the co-founder of HomestarRunner, home to the series "Strong Bad Email," who just landed a deal to direct a movie with the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. It's great to see entrepreneurial videobloggers crossing over into mainstream media, but you have to figure that the blowback from struggling screenwriters and low-level TV and movie producers is going to make all the bitching about blogger book contracts sound positively celebratory. After the jump, two of my favorite Frank videos.

Wayne McClammy, a director for The Jimmy Kimmel Show and The Sarah Silverman Program, apparently didn't get on "Hollywood's radar" until two sketches for Kimmel, I'm Fucking Matt Damon and I'm Fucking Ben Affleck, took the Internet by storm. The kids love YouTube, and the kids buy tickets (or so I'm guessing the theory goes), so he gets the nod to shepherd the Cool School script through production. McClammy isn't the first talent to get a movie deal based on the strength of his Web and television work — Ask a Ninja creators Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine are working on an update to the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes franchise. Not exactly prestige projects, but it's a start. After the jump, a McClammy appearance on Kimmel-produced Crank Yankers.

Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine will write the script for a remake of 1978's Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! The pair are best known for the campy Web video series Ask a Ninja. Their latest episode and a clip from the 1978 film, below.

As I've mentioned, LOLcats is just a cuter version of Caturday, an old forum tradition of posting cat pictures with captions in broken English on Saturdays. Caturday itself is just a more formal version of the image macros that have floated around ever since the Internet found pictures. Every popular Internet meme is in fact a lamer version of a more obscure one, including Lazy Sunday, the Rickroll, Badger Badger Badger, Hot or Not, Ask a Ninja, and Chuck Norris Facts. I've traced them back to their edgier ancestors.

A tipster has leaked us these screen shots of how Marc Andreessen and company plan to integrate Google's OpenSocial platform into Ning. Make sure you're sitting down. We've got a ninja.

NICK DOUGLAS — "I'm thrilled to now add being part of a Super Bowl commercial to my list of accomplishments." Sad. But that's what one of the actors says in a promotion called My Bowl Ad, another chance for has-been internet stars to milk one more appearance out of the fame from their year-old YouTube video. But this is only one of the four paths that the career of an Internet celebrity (or "webtard") can take after the first 15 minutes.