Ben Huh, CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger, on Bravo's new show LOLWork (Bravo)

Ben Huh struck us as goofily affable when we met him at Bravo's Top Chef Kitchen restaurant three weeks ago. Sitting at a table with a Post reporter and a friend from Mashable, the CEO of the I Can Has Cheezburger network (which includes, among other properties, Know Your Meme, FailBlog and The Daily What) had a self-aware cockiness in his voice when he claimed he invented the phrase "internet culture." And though he was about to be rocketed into the world of Bravolebrities--the term Bravo applies to its various reality stars--he spent more time helping the table parse weird terminology than trying to sell himself.

We don't remember how the conversation got started, but at one point someone asked if you could call Furries (those people who dress in plush animal outfits at conventions, frequently with sex in mind) "anthropomorphic."

"No," Mr. Huh responded firmly. "That's when inanimate or inhuman objects take on human qualities." This, the star of Bravo's first attempt at a reality-sitcom told us, was "the opposite ... humans that want to be animals."

So what do we call them?

"Animorphs?" the guy from Mashable suggested, referring to the teen book series popular in the late ’90s.

"Animorphism," agreed Mr. Huh.

This was not the same character who greeted us last week at Rockefeller Center for lunch, a week after the premiere of  LOLWork. The "characters" on LOLWork are Mr. Huh's actual employees, who have  helped raise $32 million in funding with a knockout combination of cats and poor spelling. The show is a meta-subversion of The Office--an actual reality program self-consciously inspired by the latter's faux-documentary style. The first episode opens with employees sitting around at the company's Seattle headquarters, discussing whether or not it is appropriate to post a picture of a cat that appears to be dead.

"Okay, devil's advocate," begins Paul, a "Sideshow Bob" lookalike, according to Mr. Huh's gloss. "What if it's a dead cat, but we say it's sleeping? Is that okay?"

Will, Cheezburger's bearded content supervisor, fixes him with an icy blue stare. "I don't ever want to hear you say 'devil's advocate' ever again."

The moment is absurdly funny because it encapsulates how seriously these people take their jobs.

Mr. Huh was himself in serious form at Rock Center. Instead of regaling us with cat humor, he told The Observer how he had escaped Hurricane Sandy in order to make it to a conference on the West Coast. "I had only slept three hours in New York the night before, and suddenly all the airports were closing down. So I got a rental car and drove through New York, through New Jersey, through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. There is shit flying at the windows: panties, other people's windshields. I get to Pittsburgh, check into my hotel around 8, and find out that that flight has been canceled as well.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he said, interrupting his own story by way of reliving the frustration. "So I book another rental car, and I drove to Columbus, Ohio. I get to Columbus at 5 a.m. I looked at a map, it turns out I had driven the entirety of the storm." Despite a delayed flight in Ohio because of snowfall, he made it in time to deliver a keynote address at the Seattle Interactive conference.

"Once I start a project, I just need to finish it," he said of his journey. "I refuse to get stuck."

That sort of insane gumption would make for a good Dwight Schrute-esque character on LOLWork, but Mr. Huh hangs back in the early episodes. He comes off as brusque and all business, while the rest of the cast slowly develop their roles. (The cute hipster art director Sarah has a crush on Forest, one of the site's editors, at least two of the characters are in the process of coming out of the closet, the site's editor in chief, Emily, happens to be Mr. Huh's wife, and Will stands in as the "I know this is all ridiculous" Jim-like persona, clocking the highest number of  eye-rolls to the camera.)

"The show is not about me, it's about the company," Mr. Huh said. "Our goal is to make people laugh at least five minutes of every day." But that's what the website does. Why gamble with that comedic reputation by showing how the LOLCat sausage gets made? Mr. Huh, who plays many roles, answered, not as a Bravolebrity or a meme-maker, but as an idealistic tech CEO.

"The answer is obvious," he said. "We wanted to be a transparent company."

LOLWork airs Wednesday nights on Bravo at 11 p.m. EST

Justin Halpern, right, with William Shatner.

If publishers could collage a portrait of their ideal consumer of novelty gift books, it would probably look something like this: begin with a hapless urban 20-something whose life is “out of control” (Fuck! I’m in My 20s). She has an iPhone and sends a lot of text messages (Damn You, Autocorrect!). She continues to find the idea of the hipster amusing (Stuff Hipsters Hate, Look at this Fucking Hipster, Hipster Hitler, Hipster Puppies). This imagined reader thinks her parents are darling, whimsical creatures (Dads Are the Original Hipsters; My Mom, Style Icon), worthy of affection on the basis of their ineptitude, outdated tastes and bluntness (When Parents Text, Crap at My Parents’ House, Sh*t My Dad Says).

Her sexual desire is infantilized (Hot Guys and Baby Animals, Bangable Dudes in History) but it might be because her male counterparts (Fuck Yeah Menswear, Bike Snob, Total Frat Move) fail to inspire lust, perhaps since they favor lunch food to libidinous interactions (Scanwiches, Insanewiches). She has a knowing love for old-timey things like thank you notes (ThxThxThx) and used books (Forgotten Bookmarks). She cares about grammar enough to make fun of people who don’t (The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks) and has a well-developed sense of irony (Awkward Family Photos, White Girl Problems, Rock Your Ugly Christmas Sweater) and sarcasm (Dear Blank Please Blank, Passive Aggressive Notes, Humble Brags). Most important, she shops at Urban Outfitters.

Welcome to the world of the memeoir.

Once upon a time, back when blogging was about writing long, self-involved posts and sharing feelings and insights, bloggers got book deals to write novels or memoirs (ah, the good old days of 2005). Now there’s a different formula for web-to-book success: start a Tumblr or Twitter feed with some combination of puppies, fear of protracted adolescence, horrific Americana, text messages from your friends or photos of your parents; add a dose of nostalgia, regret or chagrin, promote it all over the Internet and wait for the literary agents to find you. And they will find you—there’s a whole crop of them, growing in number everyday.

In 2004, Byrd Leavell was, in his own words, “this broke 24-year-old agent” who tracked down and signed a Lothario blogger named Tucker Max. “Originally, I couldn’t give Tucker Max away,” recalled Mr. Leavell in a recent phone call. When he finally signed a book deal, “I think it was a $7,000 advance.” Since then, Mr. Max has sold almost two million books—one of the most successful blog-to-book transformations ever. His bro/new media credentials thus established, Mr. Leavell took another risk in September 2009, when he signed a Maxim senior named Justin Halpern who had a Twitter feed called Sh*t My Dad Says. At that time, Twitter was only three-and-a-half years old, and the first wave of Twitter-based books was just starting to come out. As for Mr. Halpern, he had started his feed a month before. He had 500,000 followers.

“At this point it’s easier because people are starting to trust me more,” said Mr. Leavell. With Mr. Halpern’s input, the two decided on a strategy that compiled Mr. Halpern’s quotes from his father’s foul-mouthed observations into a series of David Sedaris-like essays. A long auction ensued. “I was really proud of the cover letter. I had a line that said ‘This will be the book that all other Twitter books are defined by,’ or something like that,” said Mr. Leavell. It turned out he was right: Sh*t My Dad Says, the book, spent months on the best-seller lists and was even made into a (short-lived) sitcom starring William Shatner.

However, the transformation from Twitter to humorous essays was not without some bumps. “At first, the covers they sent us, they were trying to do ‘Here’s my twitter feed book,’ like bubble script on coffee cups,” said Mr. Leavell.

He insisted that the project needed to be presented as a book that people could read, a strategy he has carried over with other Twitter-based clients, such as the authors of another Twitter feed, White Girl Problems. Hyperion is releasing that book, White Girl Problems, as a novel, complete with requisite chick lit stiletto heels on the cover. “You create a fictional protagonist,” said Mr. Leavell, as his recipe for a successful transformation from Twitter to book.

“I don’t think that anyone should print out a Tumblr or a Twitter feed and call it a book proposal because those things aren’t books. They’re Tumblrs and they’re Twitter feeds,” said Kate McKean, an agent who represented the bloggers behind the New York Times’s best-selling lolcat books I Can Has Cheezburger and who has converted the Twitter feeds Fake AP Stylebook and Historic Tweets into books. “I’ve always thought since the blog to book thing started that it has to be a book as well as a blog,” she continued. “Highly episodic novels or nonfiction books are kind of tiresome to read because every time a little episode ends you give the reader a reason to put the book down. If it’s just tweet, tweet, tweet or short post, short post, it’s one of those books that you dip in and out of.”

Like Mr. Leavell, Ms. McKean, who has an MFA from the University of Southern Mississippi, has encouraged the expansion of Twitter feeds into full-form essays. The book version of Fake AP Stylebook ended up being something of a sarcastic commentary on celebrity-driven news coverage. But another book she ushered into being, Historical Tweets, took the opposite tack, an illustrated picture book with all the fonts and formatting of the website itself.

Some agents prefer to think of the concept and then mine the Internet for content. Laurie Abkemeier, a literary agent with DeFiore and Company, decided a couple years ago that the world needed a book about ugly Christmas sweaters. She went onto the Internet until she found Brian Miller, Adam Paulson and (the appropriately named) Kevin Wool, three guys in Indiana who sold ugly Christmas sweaters from their website, www.UglyChristmasSweaterParty.com.

“I literally looked at every site related to ugly Christmas sweaters to see who would have the biggest platform for this book,” she remembered in a phone interview. “When I reached out to them, they were totally game for it.”

She proposed they write a book about how to throw an ugly Christmas sweater party, released last month as the Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book from Abrams. It has 152 pages of sweaters and party tips, including how to judge a contest.

Ms. Abkemeier says that she usually looks for talent on the Internet only when she has a particular concept in mind, generally preferring the traditional content mine of her slush pile.

The adaptation game can be more difficult with Tumblrs or blogs that involve user-generated content. Monika Verma, the agent who transformed the website Damn You, Autocorrect! to a book, said that she found the site from an aggregator of popular websites. “I think I had seen it online—I don’t know if it was BuzzFeed or another viral aggregate,” said Ms. Verma. “It’s such a relevant issue now that everyone has smart phones.”

Ms. Verma has also sold book versions of the websites Bangable Dudes in History, Things That Suck, Things Younger Than John McCain, and Fuck Yeah Menswear (which makes fun of overdevotion to men’s fashion). But how does one turn a chronology of images into a book? With Damn You, Autocorrect! Ms. Verma had the blogger, Jillian Madison, add a list of the 10 most common autocorrect mistakes as well as original autocorrects never posted online.

Like the Internet memes themselves, these books are likely to serve future generations as not much more than a microcosmic documentation of a blip in time—what will Texts From Last Night be worth to us in 30 years? Humble Brags? Passive Aggressive Notes? (Who remembers Rich Hall’s Sniglets, from 1984? Or even further back, from 1968, Bennett Cerf’s Treasury of Atrocious Puns?) And what do we do with a darker strain of Internet memes that has surfaced lately? Few shoppers would likely buy a book version of Pepper Spray Cop, or the catastrophic financial true stories of Occupy Student Debt, or Photo Shop Looter. And as quickly as the memeoir has arrived it might disappear again—a victim of Hollywood, which has caught on to mining Twitter as a way to find writers for its own media. The days when New York literary agents could pluck the low-hanging fruit of Twitter and Tumblr are already gone and the bloggers themselves are savvier than ever—those featuring user-generated content now require their fan base to sign releases for photos. Even for the biggest agents, the competition has gotten fierce.

“It’s tough now,” said Mr. Leavell with a sigh. “All the big Los Angeles agencies have whole divisions of online talent scouts.” He recently tried to sign up the author of Your Aunt Diane, a Twitter feed in the persona of a Santa Fe hippie feminist doula/jewelry designer with a mailbox shaped like a clitoris whose Tweets say things like “Your Aunt Diane’s holistic hangover cure: persimmon juice, milk thistle, green tea, 45 minutes cunnilingus.” Mr. Leavell called, but even though the author had only 20,000 Twitter followers, he arrived too late.

“It’s crazy it’s so tough now,” he lamented.

ewitt@observer.com

While we're Mr. Krugman is very excited about the $1.3 million he's receiving for this thing, we were a little surprised to see that in his absence, his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, has turned into a repository for LOLCats.

Under the headline Limited posting for the next few days, Mr. Krugman presents the image at right with the brief note:

At least he didn't ask a colleague (for the time being) to fill in for him. Then again, if he had, it might've made even less sense.