A coworker pointed me in the direction of this Houston Chronicle piece about LOLcats. Yes, for real. It’s hard to be a twenty-something, cutting-edge Internet hipster and read about cutting-edge hip things written by People Who Just Don’t Get It, but Dwight Silverman is not one of those people.

I remember when my sister and some of her “crew” were interviewed by the local TV station about Dance Dance Revolution. (This was back in the olden days of high school, when we Ruled The Mall. Oh, we were gods back then.) We still have the tape of the segment. I remember the anchor sounding fairly befuddled as she introduced the clip, and it was clear that nobody had really done their research before throwing this thing together.

Same with the proliferation of awful articles about All Your Base, which (as I recall) were all horrendously late and all sported that same tone of “Hey, we don’t think this is that interesting, so we’re not going to try very hard to explain why some people actually do find it interesting.”

But moving on. Silverman’s piece is as timely as something on an Internet fad can be–I Can Has Cheezburger has only been around for a few months, after all–and actually explains, with details, why someone might be interested in this. (I love the succinct etymology of “I’m in ur base killin ur d00dz.”)

I like this trend (if one can call one story a trend) of reporting on Internet Things with the same seriousness as offline things. (Business stories don’t count. Of course you’re gonna be serious when money is involved.)

Kudos, Mr. Silverman. Kudos indeed.