The Internet Needs More Cats

Although bountiful collections depicting engaging felines generate huge interest, jovial kittens lead many newbies online. Photographs quickly radiate strong temptation unto various web xenagogies. Year-round zeitgeist arises because cat devotees enthusiastically flock to web sites boasting voluminous volumes of cat images. Everybody loves a cat picture.

A simple Yahoo search for the word 'cat' retrieves over 492,999,999 results. Perusing such a massive milieu might consume somewhat longer than a lunch hour. Enterprising government employees conceivably consume entire careers viewing and downloading significant chunks. Actually, to be fair, Yahoo only makes available the first 1000 results. Only the most tenacious sentient human browsers venture beyond the first few million pages.

Given that virtually everyone owns a cat or knows someone who owns a cat, each of us should feel responsible for uploading more pertinent images to the Internet photo pile. Sitting on the sidelines waiting for others to pick up the slack cannot and will not be tolerated. Get moving: expect extreme measures of guilt should you choose to enjoy the fruits of other people's digital cameras without contributing your own feline masterpieces to the general online collection. Do not look at another cat picture before submitting your interpretation of a tabby sleeping on a quilt or a Maine Coon toying with a yarn ball.

History tells us that optimal cat imagery is achieved by associating a caption to a photo. Certainly capturing and uploading a cute picture contributes to the greater good, but sprinkling on a pun or a grammatically incorrect textual anthropomorphism exponentially increases the likelihood that your digital handiwork will go noticed. Search engines absolutely adore pictures of cats accompanied by text about pictures of cats.

A domain encompassing some form of the word cat cannot fail. Enterprising entrepreneurs expend extreme energy identifying unique domain names. Rest assured that cats.com might not be available: plan to venture into the .biz or .cc TLDs (Top Level Domains) in order to reserve a domain name that doesn't contain double-digit hyphens or underscores. Think long and hard before purchasing I-Love-My_Cat-Online.cc. Your family might remember it, but squeezing it onto a business card becomes problematic.

Yahoo, Google, and Bing all provide convenient search engines retrieving veritable plethora of previously published images.

Don't steal them.

The Internet hates cat photo thieves. Cats hate them also, but cats can't fill in the DRM forms, so you're pretty safe there. Anyway, expect strenuous objections from online publishers should you elect to appropriate their work. Generate your own content with your own camera.

Should find yourself the proud owner of a cat centered in a couch, snap a few digital images, upload them to your computer, and attack them with suitable editing software. We don't need to see your entire chesterfield: your cute kitty will suffice. Trim away the 90% of the sofa that doesn't look like a cat. Remove the Starving Artists oil painting you snagged at the Holiday Inn tent sale. Show us the cat: we'll be happy and everyone in your neighborhood sharing your bandwidth will be relieved.

Yes, cats are popular. No, the popularity does not extend to other furry creatures. Yes, a groundhog perched on two legs sniffing the back yard for spilled Oreos might be cute. No, the grubbing groundhog does not deserve publication adjacent to darling kittens battling over a sock full of catnip. Yes, a cat makes a darling indoor pet. No, possums are hardly romantic, endearing, attractive, reputable, or worthy of web page enshrinement.

Shoot your cat, with your camera. Leave the wild beasts of the backyard to government-funded biologists.

We conclude that cats rock and the Internet needs more of them. Do your part.