After a dozen years of searching, I found the greatest thing on the Internet. Yes, it’s a webcam. No, it doesn’t involve porn.

Here’s the premise: Six Shiba Inu puppies lounge around in a soft foam bed, with no visible means of financial support. Granted, this is the same exact plot as “Friends,” but the puppies are much less formulaic.

Now, by no means am I a dog person, though I’m open to the possibility they might be delicious. This is not to suggest I would actually eat a puppy; I know a lot of you readers are dog people and would be outraged that I even suggested such a thing, or that, because Shiba Inus are a breed of Japanese hunting dogs, I would douse them in Teriyaki.

But thanks to the puppy cam, I can’t take my eyes off them, and neither can anyone else. And how could we? How could we risk missing a single precious second? What if Ando (blue collar) rolls over and wakes up Ayumi (yellow collar)? What if Autumn (purple collar) shares a toy with Akoni (black collar)? What if Amaya (red collar) licks her own private parts?

This is why, a couple weeks ago, my girlfriend called me in the middle of the night with the urgent news that Aki (green collar) had sneezed. My reaction was not outrage that my phone rang at 1:30 a.m. because some Internet dog had an allergy. It was sadness that it might be days before I see him sneeze again, and it was probably really cute.

A lot of people are wise to the puppies’ exploits. According to the web cam’s statistics, by yesterday afternoon nearly 515,000 people have visited the site more than 6.5 million times, for a viewing total of 5.6 million hours. Granted, I am personally responsible for 3 million of these hours, but the remainder is still a lot. The average visit to the Web site lasts more than 50 minutes, and an average viewer has spent almost 11 total hours watching these dogs.

Extrapolating further, if these people had instead spent the 5.6 million hours at a $10/hour job, it would have caused a $56 million boost to the economy. And if the hours had instead been spent at a $125,000/hour job, we could have paid for the $700 billion bailout package.

The webcam began as a way for the puppies’ owners, a married San Francisco couple, to check in on the dogs from work. The couple is trying to remain anonymous, though the puppies are unemployed and expect handouts, so they are probably owned by Nancy and Paul Pelosi. The venture would have remained private had the word not been spread by a scrappy, barefoot young tech wizard named Johnny Webcamseed.

Anyway, the honeymoon is coming to an end. Over the next few days the puppies, who were born Oct. 7, will be split up and given to loving homes where they will receive individual attention and special care. This disgusts me. I want those puppies to grow up in their cramped little bed, where their antics can amuse me and enrage PETA. If the Shiba Inus’ departure is the kind of change Barack Obama has brought this country, I am outraged.

Wait a minute. Maybe Obama can adopt the six dogs, instead of saving a shelter pup like his family was hoping to do. The webcam stars already have sky-high approval ratings, and the president-elect could win over conservatives by taking the dogs on a hunting trip and shooting some hapless elk or something. Plus, the first time he gets embroiled in a scandal, he can just throw a webcam on the Shiba Inus to give us a heartwarming distraction.

But that probably won’t happen, so you’ll want to log on to the webcam, available at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/shiba-inu-puppy-cam, before the dogs are gone for good. In the past week, the dogs’ current owners decided to keep one of the pups, and even announced plans to continue aiming a webcam at it. Ustream.tv, the site that hosts the video feed, offered free webcams to the future owners of the other five dogs.

But spin-offs are never as good as the original, so once that happens I’m going back to watching “Friends” reruns. Sure, the cast members aren’t as smart as the dogs, but at least some of them are housebroken.

Scott is a third-year law student. He doesn’t really want to eat the puppies. Well, maybe just a nosh.