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. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, “I Can Has Cheezburger,” published by Gotham Books.

I love lolcats. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Sure, they’ve been around for almost two years — but the site posts fresh new jokes every day, and I’m never disappointed.

But what draws me to the site even more than what’s funny is what’s sad. My favorite lolcats are not the rapscallions pining for “cheezburgers” or helpfully upgrading your RAM, but rather a brilliant and underappreciated subgenre of sad lolcats — tragic figures of grief, yearning and unrequited love. But I’ll come back to that.

What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past — the motivational posters of the ’70s and ’80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament — is that lolcats aren’t trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there. Even the YouTube cats of today perform characteristically catlike actions, repeatedly flushing toilets, dragging their paws along piano keys or getting flung off the ends of treadmills.

Lolcats are different in that the characters they portray — and yes, they are portraying characters — don’t represent cats at all. They’re a completely different kind of beast, mischievous (if incompetent) rascals, scheming for cheeseburgers and stopping at nothing to get them.

Take the lolcat that started it all, created by a Hawaiian blogger named Eric Nakagawa, who posted it in January 2007. The image features a cat with a crazed look of pure animal hunger, its eyes maniacal with desire, asking, “I can has cheezburger?” Underneath is the comment: “The Internet’s piece de resistance, the website’s raison d’etre.”

This ur-lolcat created such a sensation that Nakagawa turned it into a blog, spawning not only the eponymous Web site but also a whole mythology. The cheezburger has become the Philosopher’s Stone of the lolcats mythos — the most prized, cherished and elusive object in their universe. It is for this reason that, when a tiny kitten being sniffed by a Great Dane 20 times its size needs a quick escape, it says, “I iz not cheezburger, kthxbai.” It is for this reason that when a user finds a photo of a cat sitting by the window with its paws in its lap, the caption reads, “I iz waitin for cheezburger man. Does you have a money?”

The Web is now spawning a wave of next-generation lolcats sites that take the lolcats concept and run with it. There’s lolpresident, loldogs, and even lolhan, a site devoted to Lindsay Lohan that includes such classics as “I layded you an egg but I’z hidin it.”

There’s lolcats magnetic poetry, lolcats translators, even a lolcats Bible Translation Project that renders familiar verses into Standard Feline English. The Supreme Being in the lolcats cosmology is “Ceiling Cat,” a meme that began with a photograph of a cat peering down from a hole in the ceiling — “Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate” — then became so standard that this feline deity is now routinely worshiped.

Thus, Genesis 1:1 is rendered as, “Oh hai! In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez an da Urfs.” (Satan, of course, is represented by a black cat called Basement Cat.)

This is all funny stuff. But I submit that the true genius of lolcats lies in their tragedy.

In one classic example, one cat is crying, and another is hugging it and saying, “Don’t crai. We’ll get cheezburger someday.” It’s sweet and poignant and wistful all at the same time. Life can be hard, it says, and we don’t always get what we want, but even as we long for things we may never have, we draw succor from the reassurances of those we love. Sure, it’s ridiculous that what the cat is yearning for is a cheeseburger. But the cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger — it’s a symbol.

Here’s another: A brown and black calico looks out the window of his apartment only to notice a beautiful white female on the balcony across the way. His heart quickens, in the scenario I imagine, then he swallows hard and quickly looks away, unable to muster the courage to speak to her. The caption: “Evry dayz, 3 o’clockz … Mebe one day I sez meow to her.” Who among us hasn’t felt that longing and regret? Who among us hasn’t passed an attractive stranger in the supermarket or on the street, only to kick ourselves afterward for letting the opportunity slip between our fingers?

In fact, there’s a whole species of the genus Lol devoted to the tragic: the “lolwalruses,” or “lolruses.” If lolcats are incorrigible little rascals, lolruses are romantic heroes, born to suffer, whose lives are dominated by the exquisite misery of love lost. The lolrus meme originated with a single diptych. The first panel displays the walrus lovingly cradling a bucket, a look of absurd delight on its face. In the second panel, a trainer is ripping the bucket away as the walrus looks on in helpless panic. And the saga of the lolrus and its beloved bucket takes off from there.

Clearly, I’m moved by these pictures. But what is it about the lolruses and the sad lolcats that is so gut-wrenching?

To try to understand, I turned to Bob Mankoff, the New Yorker’s brilliant cartoon editor. After all, a lolcat is just an image with a caption — in other words, a cartoon.

The first reason sad lolcats can be so powerful, Mankoff suggested, is their comedic structure. The meaning of a lolcat is rarely straightforward — rather, there’s a punch line of sorts, a layer of meaning you have to think about for a moment in order to grasp. So the punch line, the same thing that makes the lolcat funny, is what makes it sad. You could call these tragic strips.

The best example I know of this kind of cartoon is one by Charles Addams that depicts a male and female unicorn standing on a sliver of land in the rain as Noah’s Ark sails away.  Having arrived too late, all the unicorns can do is watch the ark recede into the distance as the waters rise around them. The image conveys so much regret — the idea that we were so close, that we could still have these magical creatures among us today if only we’d been more patient. It’s the sadness of missed opportunities.

But the unicorn cartoon still has the structure of a joke. You have to “get” the extra layer of meaning, grasping that the unicorns aren’t, say, marooned on a desert island, but standing on a mountaintop as the floodwaters surge around them. “It’s not just sad, because something that’s just sad — someone being killed, run over — we know what that feels like,” says Mankoff. “Here, you’re using a mechanism that’s usually involved in humor: the cleverness of getting it.”

A second major factor in the poignancy of the sad lolcat, I would argue, is the use of animals. The comic form is generally a prophylaxis against sentimentality. By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we’re able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony — which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.

Animals are also childlike and helpless. When we see a cute little dog in a New Yorker cartoon, it triggers the responses we have toward children. Cartoon dogs are childlike creatures: They’re cute and have big heads, big eyes, exaggerated, childlike features.

Of course, to express human emotions, you need an expressive face. “It’s cats, not scorpions,” says Mankoff. “It’s cats, not rats. If somehow on YouTube there was a rat flushing the toilet over and over again, we wouldn’t think it’s too interesting.”

It is because animals are able to move us so powerfully that many tragic strips use animals instead of people. In one New Yorker cartoon, a dog is lying on the couch, while another dog, his therapist, sits in a chair and takes notes. “They moved my bowl,” says the dog on the couch. The message isn’t really about the moving of bowls at all, but about our problems in life, our frustrations, our sense of being victims.

“The animals aren’t animals at all, they’re stand-ins,” explains Mankoff. “They’re hybrids we use as devices to talk about the feelings we can’t name in other ways.”

The same is true of the sad lolcats and the lolruses. Consider LolSecretz. It’s like PostSecret.com — which publishes anonymous bathroom-wall-variety confessions (“I had gay sex at church camp,” “I only love two of my children,” etc.) — except it uses images of cats. In one, a black cat says, “I just wishes I wuz white.” In a third, a world-weary cat with dead eyes gazes longingly at a knife, saying, “i killed mahself 6 timez … 3 to go.”

Just as the dogs in the New Yorker cartoons don’t represent actual dogs, these cats don’t represent cats at all, but people. By using cats, icanhascheezburger can access themes more tragic and poignant than it could using people. You wouldn’t enjoy a comic of an actual person fingering a blade and contemplating suicide — but when it’s a cat, you can accept it. You can even laugh.

And that’s the real answer to the puzzle. We’ve gone from cats as cats, to cats as scheming rascals, to cats as human beings. The sad lolcats represent people. We have seen the lolcats, and they are us.

So I was shocked last month to read that Hatewatch was shutting its doors. First started in 1995 by a Harvard Law School librarian named David Goldman, Hatewatch was the first major site to track online hate groups — the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, Klansmen, black nationalists and gay bashers who saw the Internet as their chance to spread their messages to the world. It attracted incredible media coverage, helped to focus public attention, provided a reference for law enforcement and attracted 1 million visitors a year.

But Goldman thinks that Hatewatch has done its job. “We have succeeded in fulfilling the mission we set for ourselves,” he wrote in a farewell message posted on the site. After six years of heading the volunteer-run organization, Goldman was ready to move on. Bolstered by news that hate sites simply weren’t proving to be such powerful recruitment tools as many had feared and by indications from other anti-hate organizations that the prognosis wasn’t as dire as once believed, Hatewatch’s founder argued that while hate groups once flourished in the shadows, they simply couldn’t thrive under the bright lights of the Internet:

From the beginning, these organizations’ self-proclaimed desire to create a digital “white revolution” was carefully monitored and documented by civil rights organizations, Hatewatch among them. The standard and often repeated quote was that the “Internet is the greatest thing to happen to hate.” Much to our joy it has in fact been one of the worst.

Goldman says the slumping Internet economy was not a factor in the decision to shut down Hatewatch. Although Hatewatch was a registered nonprofit agency, it got scant funding. At the same time, it required very little money to run. Hatewatch benefited from the efforts of hundreds of unpaid volunteers every month, and Goldman and the four other employees never drew a salary. It was simply time to pass the torch.

“I felt as if I needed to step back from the material itself — and, hopefully, for people to see the vacuum that was left by Hatewatch to step into that. I’m not a professional civil rights activist. I’m a librarian by trade.”

Goldman’s decision to shut down Hatewatch was roundly criticized by other anti-hate organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. If hate sites had turned out to be less threatening than expected, wasn’t that due, in large part, to the efforts of sites like Hatewatch? A closer look at how hate groups use the Internet suggests that, if anything, Hatewatch was due for an expansion.

Hatewatch has always been controversial. Film critic Roger Ebert famously attacked it, and debated Goldman at the Conference on World Affairs. By linking to hate sites, Ebert argued, Hatewatch gave free publicity to haters, providing a “virtual supermarket” of hate tools for bigots of all stripes. While other sites, like the ADL’s, flagged the lies and distortions on hate sites, Hatewatch merely provided links to sites — where the groups could describe themselves however they wanted.

Still, Hatewatch was an effective tracking tool. If the Internet was going to turn small, isolated groups into a large, organized movement, Hatewatch was going to ensure that such an expansion took place in the open. And it succeeded in that goal, drawing thousands of visitors a day and extensive media coverage.

But Hatewatch’s success was limited by its own design. In fact, Hatewatch was based on a number of largely unfounded fears about the way that hate on the Web would proliferate.

Until recently, common wisdom held that the Internet would cause the number of hate groups to grow out of control. A recent advertisement sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center reads, “On the day of the Oklahoma bombing, there was one hate site. Now there are over 2,000.”

But many critics have questioned these numbers. For starters, they make no distinctions about the nature and severity of individual sites — from hardcore white supremacy sites to sites that include racist jokes or a recipe for a pipe bomb. Second, it has always been hard to differentiate between the Web sites of major hate groups and organizations consisting of a lone member. How many people does each of these hate sites represent? Third, the increase in hate sites — like the increase in the overall number of Web sites — partly reflects the fact that more and more people and organizations are getting online. Adding to the confusion is the fact that many groups have more than one domain name and operate multiple sites. Taking all of these factors into consideration, a more conservative estimate by the Southern Poverty Law Center puts the number of hate sites closer to 400.

Another fear was that the Web would become a major recruitment tool for hate groups. But there is no statistical evidence showing that the Web has led to an increase in membership. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the membership of hate groups has remained about the same over the past few years.

What’s more, many people have long worried that the Web would not only provide a forum for hate but could actually provoke people to violence. In 1998, Salon suggested that hate sites on the Internet might be “the main culprit behind the epidemic of hate crimes,” citing the murder of Matthew Shepard. A “Dateline NBC” special report called “Web of Hate” reported that Benjamin Smith — the 21-year-old college dropout who went on a shooting spree in Indiana and Illinois in 1999, firing at African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Jews, and killing two and wounding nine — had been inspired by the rhetoric he found on the Web site of Matt Hale’s group, known as the World Church of the Creator. But aside from a few anecdotal reports, there is currently no statistical evidence to suggest that Web sites directly provoke people to violence. Evidence may yet surface linking Web sites to violence, but so far, that connection is not as clear as people feared it would be.

Hatewatch may indeed have overestimated the number or significance of the hate groups it dragged into the spotlight. But if anything, the group underestimated the task at hand. When Goldman announced the demise of Hatewatch he was, in effect, conceding that Hatewatch had outlived its usefulness. Instead of closing shop, he should have expanded it. Hatewatch’s job was far from done.

For one thing, the Internet still provides a virtual community for haters in rural locations. It gives a scattered group of people a means to communicate with one another in secret, trade goods, sell things, publicize their events and potentially inspire others to action — without the threat of interference from anti-haters. Many haters have trouble finding a place to meet in the brick-and-mortar world where they won’t encounter opposition from anti-hate activists. Hale, for instance, can hardly hold a meeting without getting attacked by protesters. And Klansmen are regularly outnumbered at Klan rallies by anti-hate protesters. For these people, the Internet is a safe haven.

Web sites may not offer a reliable count of how prolific hate sites are (or how numerous their members), but they act as introductory brochures to the ideology of a particular group. Most sites don’t change much over time, and they aren’t places people return to again and again. Instead, people might make contact via a Web site, and then quickly move on to text-based, person-to-person venues such as discussion groups, chat rooms and e-mail. “That is really where you see discussions of ideology, discussion of tactics, things that give you insight into what’s going on in the movements,” says Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report.

The anti-hate community overestimated the impact of the Web and underestimated the importance of chat rooms, newsgroups and e-mail. For Hatewatch to focus on Web sites alone — as opposed to other forms of Internet communication — was anachronistic. “Everyone was going crazy over these sites,” says Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee. “I think there’s a parallel with how the stock market was going crazy over Internet-related things.”

Hatewatch should also have expanded to track haters’ fundraising. The Internet has proved to be an unexpected financial boon to many white supremacists, particularly those involved in the genre of music known as hate rock, helping them do more business and raise more money for their cause. William Pierce, one of the world’s most notorious racists, paid $250,000 to acquire Resistance Records and its Web site. This year he expects to do more than $1 million in business, much of it through Web orders. “There’s a whole world of e-commerce out there centered around hate,” says the ADL’s Jordan Kessler. Sometimes, haters sell items that are not clearly connected to their beliefs, so they can make money without their customers knowing who they’re doing business with. By keeping track of how hate groups are raising money, Hatewatch could have helped people who might inadvertently be supporting them.

Hatewatch should also have expanded beyond its exclusive focus on hate groups per se. The latest trend in hate organizations is “leaderless resistance,” in which haters are encouraged not to join groups but rather to become “lone wolves” and act alone. The rationale is that by joining a hate group, a hater becomes known to civil rights organizations. By promoting solo activism, hate groups also protect themselves from legal liability they faced in the past, as when Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance, was found guilty of inciting murder and jailed after three members of his group beat an Ethiopian student to death in Portland, Ore. By tracking these exchanges, and free-agent haters, Hatewatch could have provided useful insights into how organizations like the World Church of the Creator operate.

Where hate flourished less than expected, Hatewatch worked, and where hate flourished more than expected, Hatewatch could have done more. As professor Donald Green of Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies puts it, “If a stop sign augments traffic safety, why tear it down?”