But the coolest GIFs as of late have come from the rise of Cinemagraphs, where creators take an image and animate one aspect of it, looping it together seamlessly to create an illusion of video where there is none—the image of a woman's skirt ruffling in the wind, or of a taxi seen in a reflection, driving past a café window.

These days Gifs range from small, repeating film grabs embedded into blogs as a sort of illustrative punctuation, to the spectral Cinemagraphs of Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg.

Les tendrils.