I CAN HAS PAGE 1 ON DIGG. The LOLCATS Are Officially Taking Over The Internet

Their presence can no longer be ignored. The LOLCATS have invaded the internet and probably your office if it's anything like mine. Just what are these LOLCATS aka ICAN... It's a compound of LOL (laughing out loud) and cats (yea the animals). It is basically an image macro featuring cats. An image macro is an image with text superimposed on it. For some reason these are incredibly amusing, funny, and addictive like fake tans are to guidos.

Some common conventions used are sans serif font, all caps, silly spellings of words (HAI for hi, Bai for bye), exclamations, and many captions start with "IM IN UR VERB, VERBING YOUR NOUN." The caption is basically a speech balloon or thought bubble of the cat in the image or a description of the image. It often reads like baby talk specially since a lot of the cats in the images are kittens. Here is a brilliant LOLCAT example. You can find lots of these on the popular ICANHASCHEEZEBURGER.com and image sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket.

LOLCATS are an evolution of the O RLY image macros that feature owls. Another similar image macro that can be found often labled as LOLCAT are pictures of walruses with captions about buckets (spelled buckit). There really is no limit to what animal pictures you can use and you need not pigeonhole yourselves to adding text to animal pictures. Here is a great example of an LOLCAT inspired image macro. It doesn't stop there either. It has spawned LOLDOGS, LOLBOTS, and even a new coding language often called LOLcode.