Bobbie Johnson quickly stepped in proclaiming that cats are for nerds and making sure we’d seen i has a HOTDOG and FailDogs. Robin reminded us of Upside Down Dogs too and Jimbob was quick to defend the dog faith and come up with a cunning theory that somehow Cats = Mac and Dogs = PC, after my claim that there was a direct correlation between a love of cats and a love of technology.

Katy even went on to question the relative ‘social media worth’ of other animals like parrots and Iguanas, then Grant threw a random one in the mix reminding us of Oolong the rabbit – a former internet phenomenon that’s now in a heaven-like hutch looking down on all this nonsense.

Anyway, I suggested that the ultimate Cats V Dogs Web-Off should take place to settle this once and for all and have spent a bit of downtime this evening listening to this rather good Kitsune mix (Nice one Phil) and deploying some crude research tactics to get the ball rolling – What’s the most popular on the web? Dogs or Cats?

Well in all honesty I thought cats would win it hands down, given the HUGE popularity of things like LOLcats, ICHC, StuffOnMyCat etc. But I was wrong. After checking Google, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and Technorati – it looks like in terms of sheer volume of mentions – the dogs have it with 6 to 1 wins.

Or do they? Every time dogs seem to beat cats, apart from when you get to the ultimate test of all – pure unfiltered Google results. As this is surely a measure of the whole web and everything on it (sort of) – I’m declaring cats as being the winners. Not that I’m *cough* biased or anything.

Here are the results, blow by blow.

(Oh and today there’s even been some anti-cat propaganda being floated around the web, in a bid to skew the real results)

Google Trends (Search Volume, all years): Dogs 1 : Cats 0

Twitter (Twist, last 30 days): Dogs 2: Cats 0

Technorati (Any authority, all mentions): Dogs 3 : Cats 0

Flickr Results (Keyword search): Dogs 4 : Cats 0

YouTube Results (Keyword search): Dogs 5 : Cats 0

Delicious Results (Tag search): Dogs 6 : Cats 0

Google Results (Total hits): Dogs 6 : Cats 1

So, it’s refreshing to see equally as important things like Upside-down Dogs pop up. [Thanks Ian!]