Some internet trends are destined for greatness: movie spin-offs and billion-dollar sponsorship deals. But not all of them. As you read this, hundreds of geeks are hunched over laptops wasting their valuable young brain cells making LOLcats. It’s very simple. Find a picture of a cat (or other cute creature). Add a stupid caption in large white text. Post the image on a message board. The name comes from LOL – Laugh Out Loud.

Why? Why? While their pre-history is unclear, LOLcats first appeared in online forums such as SomethingAwful.com (the site contains a lot of very juvenile humour and bad language) in 2006. These forums are like huge chat rooms where internet memes are born and evolve. Their users adopt and reject new in-jokes all the time. By January 2007, the now hugely popular LOLcat blog “I Can Has Cheezburger” was launched. By June 2007, LOLcats should be dead, having gone the way of the Hamster Dance (warning: very irritating site).

Linguistic analysis: In April, ICHC posted a helpful guide to speaking LOLcat: “Step three: Misspell everything. There’s no wrong way to do this.” Text-message style abbreviations are essential: “OK, thank you, goodbye” can be reduced to KTHXBAI. Other blogs have attempted to explain the intricacies of LOLcat syntax. Anil Dash writes: “The evolution of these grammars online can be very difficult to track down.” David McRaney has written an even longer and more fun-sucking explanation of the Lolcat phenomenon: "The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades."

Build your own: Things got easier for the LOLcat generation in April, when LOLcat Buildr appeared – a super-simple web page which lets anyone turn any picture into a LOLcat. There’s even a button to send your creation to ICHC.

Why cats? Most of the cats come from Cute Overload, a blog which collects all kinds of (unadorned) cute animal pictures. Everyone likes cute animals, right?

Update: Since this story was written, Lolcats have taken over the internets. Blogger Stephen Granade recreated the Star Trek 'Trouble with Tribbles' episode as a series of Lolcat images. Then Gawker created Lolgays (warning: men in glittery thongs). There are also, inevitably, plenty of LolGerbils (warning: several misspelt references to gay sex).

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