The first time I saw a lolcat–those funny images of felines with grammatically questionable captions–it took me a minute to understand the joke.

“What’s with the misspellings?” I wrote the friend who’d IM’d me the link. “Cats are dumb and can’t spell?”

“Pretty much,” my friend replied.

“And they have bad grammar?” I wrote, still processing the idea.

“Yes,” he wrote. “Get it?”

I did. In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing.

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0’s big success stories–on track to top a billion page views this year–and its content is entirely user-generated.

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