Matt Schlicht and Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni, the teenage minds behind OpenHulu, have created a lolcats-Robert Scoble mashup called LolScobles. What does Scoble think? "Just find a goofy image of me and go to lolScobles.com. Oh, boy. That shouldn't be too hard!" Thanks for being a good sport, Bobby!

Before humans took pictures of cats, added funny captions, and spent their free time viewing said photos on the internet, our early ancestors enjoyed painting depictions of dogs. These early LOLDog paintings lacked captions and are much rarer than LOLCats—which is probably why the painting to the left fetched $66,000 at an auction last night. Click for more early LOLDog analysis, and their evolution into the LOLCats we know and love today.

Will more than one publisher fight over your book, aiming to be the highest bidder? O, the dream! Remember, the LOLCats book went to auction. The "very nice literary agent" over at Pub Rants explains the process.

LolSecretz, that wonderful mash-up of Post Secret and lolcats, has called it quits. The pressures of facing redundancy and dealing with real life overwhelmed the two charming-looking bloggers. So, we mourn the death of a big, bright flash in this oddly shaped pan. It was great. And that is not untrue. Gudbai, frenz.

Yesterday, we wondered about the surely awesome proposal that resulted in the two-day auction of the forthcoming book for I Can Has Cheezburger?, tentatively titled "Professor Happycat's Guide to Lolcats." Half an hour later, said proposal landed in our inbox. Thanks, publishing elves! "The world is going crazy for lolcats," it begins. "Lolcats are pictures of cats with funny captions. No, srsly." It gets better!

The book version of I Can Haz Cheezburger was sold after a two-day auction, Galleycat reports. Boy, we'd love to know what that proposal looked like. Literary agent Kate McKean explains that they won't be simply "slapping some lolcats on the page for the book." No, it will clearly be much more sophisticated than that. [Galleycat]

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.

Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.

Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale has exploited the LOLcats meme to mock Paul Addis, the would-be arsonist who tried to burn down The Man, the wooden statue at the center of the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada. Inevitable. Brilliant. Wish I'd thought of it first. (Image by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

The Internet is boring. Even the most interested/interesting man I know, artist and dandy Jonathan Grubb, is bored with it in eight ways. (Granted, he's also super-excited; the man equivocates like he's running for president.) Grubb's insidery analysis speaks to those embedded in the dot-com industry, but here's a wider view of why the Internet is boring, starting with the pinnacle of mediocrity called LOLCats.

LOLcats: Tearing friendships apart. [Achewood]

First there were lolcats. Then there were lolgays. Lolgaycats were the next logical step, clearly. Thank you, fourfour.

For days now, the most important site on the whole internets has been unavailable due to a server move. We speak, naturally, of I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, the number one hotspot for relaxing pictures of LOLcats. (Don't pretend you don't know about pictures of cats altered to assert script-kiddy humanoid opinions and actions. Don't pretend!) To get us through this horrible gap in our LOLcat consumption, we've wasted most of the morning assembling our very own set of LOLgays. Mmm, Fridays.