(Photo: Dragon Painting)

The Huffington Post and YouGov collaborated on a very important poll of 1,000 U.S. adults meant to measure the attitudes of Americans towards robots. The results are pretty typical, except for one thing: turns out Americans aren't really that into doing robots (or they're lying).

Come on guys, live a little.

HuffPo writes:

58 percent of Americans said that robots will be cleaning our homes by 2030. But only 33 percent said that they'd like a robot servant.... (22 percent) said that they would let a robot care for an aging friend or relative....Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they believed robots will be able to fight in the military by 2030.

But when it comes to intimacy, Lieutenant Data and his ilk might be better off bonding with fellow non-humans (or animals). According to the poll, only 9 percent of Americans said they would "have sex with a robot if they could."

Guess you guys won't be having longevity orgasms anytime soon.

(Photo: Mr. Berry)

Back in April 2012, the HuffPo cabal-backed Soho TechLabs launched a social travel site called CasaHop that allowed users to "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more." Now, Soho TechLab's CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat that the incubator is shutting down CasaHop in order to focus more on RebelMouse, a tool for building social webpages that has seen explosive growth in recent months.

"CasaHop never gained the traction it needed," Mr. Berry told Betabeat by phone. "The timing was off. Airbnb is really in a winner takes all situation in this area. I hope one day someone is going to break out and make this an enormous idea because I love home exchanges, but too few people feel comfortable with other people staying in their place while they're away."

Mr. Berry said that CasaHop only spent a third of its investment money. It will be returning the remaining two thirds to investors in cash, and the other third will be accounted for in RebelMouse stock. "Only Lerer Ventures and I will get diluted," he added.

Despite this setback, Mr. Berry was eager to emphasize the success of RebelMouse, another Soho TechLabs venture, which aggregates users' social posts onto one main homepage.

"We’re reaching 1.5 million uniques a month, so just six months out it’s this feeling of traction," Mr. Berry said. "With hosts like GoDaddy, .01 percent of people actually like what’s on their domain name and RebelMouse has the opposite percentage. 98 percent of users with RebelMouse-powered domains are thrilled by it." Mr. Berry added that everyone from influential journalists to big companies to small businesses have adopted RebelMouse as their homepage.

"RebelMouse is the chance to build a CMS from everything we’ve learned about what’s happened to social and to build it ancitipating what’s coming and make it so that the people that understand social are the ones that can power the website," Mr. Berry said, adding, "It’s also a very direct reflection of who I am and what I've learned."

Despite all this excitement for RebelMouse, Mr. Berry acknowledged that it is a "bummer" to close CasaHop. "I wish CasaHop was bigger than Airbnb, but I think you have to be able to realize when something’s not working," he admitted.

Wise words.

The NowThis site (formerly called Planet Daily) currently pulls in newsy video clips from sites like Twitter, Facebook and--most typically--Buzzfeed, another Lerer Ventures portfolio company. The company's Twitter handle, @NowThisNews, is run by its social editor, Drake Martinet, who's also an adjunct professor at Stanford. Mr. Martinet said that 90 percent of the video content on the site is produced by the NowThis team.

"We're building a video news company, and today that means being native to the social web," Mr. Martinet told Betabeat by email. "We think of Twitter, Facebook and other social sites as our front page... thats where we want users to find and share our videos."

Last night, each time a state was called by one of the major news networks, NowThis tweeted a piece of ASCII art relating to that state. Seeing the graphics pop up on our Twitter feed every so often was a welcome break from typical political tweets--though not everyone enjoyed the flashback.

NowThis said it worked with noted Twitter ASCII artist Matthew Haggett, known on Twitter as "tw1tt3rart," to come up with the illustrations. "We wanted to try something ambitious and a little bit fun," they tweeted.

Check out some of our fav tweets in the slideshow.

Mr. Hippeau (Photo: Twitter)

Earlier today, Lerer Ventures revealed that the early stage investment firm--a powerful, active force in growing New York's startup ecosystem--has raised its biggest fund yet. While raw SEC filings first indicated that Lerer Ventures was raising $30 million, the deal closed at $36 million. That's more than $64 million combined in less than two years.

Partners Ken Lerer, Ben Lerer, Eric Hippeau, and Jordan Cooper have backed some of the most high-profile companies from New York's new class of tech startups, like Warby Parker, MakerBot, OnSwipe, and Birchbox. Lerer Ventures has also had a number of notable exits, like GroupMe (acquired by Skype), Mr. Cooper's startup HyperPublic (acquired by Groupon), and Venmo (acquired by Braintree). In fact, the Huffington Post mafiosos--Ken Lerer and Mr. Hippeau are both veterans--have been so busy building "the largest infrastructure in New York for entrepreneurs" that they apparently haven't had time to move Venmo into the "Exits" list on the firm's website.

Betabeat spoke to Mr. Hippeau this afternoon after his firm's new fund and why we're in "the golden age for entrepreneurs in New York."

About a year ago, when I spoke to Ben Lerer, he attributed LV’s success partly to being at the right place at the right time. How much do you think that has been a factor in your growth and your place in the ecosystem?
Our growth is a reflection of the growth of entrepreneurship and startups in New York. So in that sense, we are definitely at the right time because this is the golden age for entrepreneurs in New York. There’s a whole infrastructure to support entrepreneurs. We’re a big part of it, but by no means the only part of it.

We also have four partners who, combined, have a lot of experience on the operations side--operating media, tech, and communications companies--as well as a lot of experience in doing venture capital investments.

In May, 2011 when LV first announced an East Coast-West Coast partnership to syndicate deals with Ron Conway’s SV Angel Partners, it was a big sign of support for your firm. Now, you’re much more entrenched in the startup scene. Would the partnership be as vital to your success if it happened now?
I have personally known Ron for about 20 years. He’s a good friend of mine as well as someone with whom I’ve co-invested over the years. We’re based in New York. He and his fund are based in San Francisco, so we’re very complementary to each other. And when we make a co-investment in a company, we bring our joint network of support, so that’s very meaningful for the companies.

Now, we actually co-invest with pretty much everybody in the marketplace. We are very collaborative and an investment is always a syndicate of people who come together to help a company.

Which other New York firms are in your syndicate?
All the very active investors in New York, such as First Round, RRE, Softbank, Thrive, High Line, Betaworks--just to name a few--are all funds and people that we have repeatedly done investments with.

Recently, LV named Stephen Colvin, the former CEO of Newsweek/Daily Beast as an executive-in-residence. Between that and Ken Lerer’s NowThisNews, is this a sign of LV’s focus on content startups?
We are interested in content, but by no means do we do content mainly. When we invest in New York, we invest in sectors that New York is good at. So there’s consumer, commerce, mobile, social, ad technology, publishing technology. There’s actually a lot of B2B, software-as-a-service type businesses, marketplaces. Having Stephen join the team is more of a reflection that we want to continually add resources to support our portfolio companies.

Andreessen Horowitz, for example, says they use the old-school CAA model in terms of how they structure resource to help portfolio companies. Do you have a model for the way you try to build an infrastructure for your portfolio or do you build as the need arises?
We do have a model. Obviously we don’t have the resources that Andreessen Horowitz has. [Laughs]

Who does?!
Yeah! But we do have an extensive network of support. We have not only our own colleagues, we have a group of analysts and a principal who are helping out full-time with the companies, but we have this extended network of people who are in our ecosystem that are advisors, or people we’ve worked with in the past, or people like Stephen Colvin that we can rely on for very specific tasks. We have a very big focus on making sure that we are constantly doing things that move our companies forward.

Considering LV’s rise, is there any downside to having really good deal flow?
[Laughs] I guess the only downside is that it can be sometimes a little bit overwhelming, but we do have a good system in place to make sure that we identify companies that are really promising. I actually think it’s a real asset!

Have you noticed one area of weakness among New York companies or something LV’s portfolio companies need help with--monetization strategies or partnerships with larger companies?
The common denominator with New York companies is that they’re constantly looking for qualified new employees. I can’t tell you how many open jobs we have within our portfolio, but it’s definitely in the hundreds, if not thousands. So identifying and recruiting and bringing good employees, particularly on the technology side, is one of the biggest challenges. But the companies always find ways. Some of the employees that they hire don’t necesaarily have to be in New York, given that a lot of the companies tend to be virtual.

There's a perception that New York's startup scene is very open and accessible. But as things matures, the tendency is to get more stratified. How easy is it for a company to get a meeting with you?
We haven’t found any real difference in the past few years. New York tends to be very collaborative. Everybody is literally working together. Of course it’s competitive like any ecosystem, but it’s not, perhaps, as intensively competitive as it is on the West Coast. The players are well-identified. The players tend to be very constant and consistent. There’s really no other way of saying that this is as collaborative an ecosystem as you could possibly imagine.

In terms of where you’re allocating the fund, besides sectors like content or commerce, is there another factor you look for in potential investments?
Sure. We’re looking for teams that have big ideas whose time has come. The factors that matter to us are: Is it a big idea? Is the timing for this idea right? And is this the right team--are these the right people--to be doing this? Clearly the trends are mobile, social--on the B2B side, the use of consumer Internet technology for the workplace. We’re starting to see more and more marketplaces that are developing. All the things that you would expect New York to be good at because New York is the fashion, media, finance, commerce capital of the United States. So all of these industries--and plus whatever else you can imagine--are being transformed and disrupted by technology and this is where we want to be.

Can you give an example of a company that you’ve invested in that represents “a big idea whose time has come”?
I don’t think I would do it justice because we have 135 companies. So, I would rather not!

QLabs (Photo: Foursquare)

Good news, Silicon Alley denizens. After much demand from fellow gossip-mongers, Betabeat has decided to resurrect your favorite recurring Friday feature. Welcome back to Rumor Roundup! Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

THE SUN SOMETIMES SETS ON THE AOL EMPIRE Multiple sources have told Betabeat that AOL Ventures plans on shutting down QLabs--the press-shy experimental think tank in Soho located at 670 Broadway. "The time frame must be darn near immediate," one source told Betabeat, alluding to some urgency around winding down existing projects. "It's dead," said a source with indirect knowledge of the decision. "Their funding ran out," the second source added, speculating that the initiative had a set funding size, but "nothing yielded."

During a rare visit to QLabs in May, Betabeat discovered that the 4th floor space functioned as sort of the yin to AOL Ventures' investment yang--with both organizations trying to keep their corporate parent nimble.

QLabs hired a number of hackers who collectively decided on ideas to pursue. After some market research, the team, which operates non-hierarchically, churns out a prototype in six to eight weeks. If the minimum viable product fails to take off, it gets scrapped. The unspoken expectation, QLabs director Chris Danzig told Betabeat in May, was that it would produce a hit within two years, or roughly five months from now. “It’s very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks,” Mr. Danzig said back then. “But I’d much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that’s not working.”

In an email, Mr. Danzig said, "As a general policy we don't discuss the lab with the press (only the lab products)."

QLabs managed to get traction on at least two products, the incubator told us in May: Framey, which lets users post video comments on websites, and Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that pivoted into an events recommendation tool for the Huffington Post.

The recently launched HuffPost Labs, which operates like a startup for online news experiments within the Huffington Post, also works out of QLabs.  (Codecademy and Turntable.fm were working out of the spacious environs this spring.) But HuffPost Labs director Connor White Sullivan told us that the two incubator-like organizations are distinct. "We get our budget from HuffPost," he said of his budding four-person team. "All I can tell you is they're excellent engineers that built good products."

"As we refine our strategy, we have become more focused on our innovation agenda," an AOL spokesperson told Betabeat. "This was one component of a broader portfolio in AOL Ventures.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS A cadre of Silicon Alley citizens–including Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste and CNET columnist Ben Parr–headed to Vegas two weeks ago for some end-of-summer partying and ended up having a meet cute with Ron Jeremy. Turns out that the notorious porn star likes hanging with the tech set. He showed up to the same mid-day party Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Parr were attending. "Ron Jeremy just came to our private party," one source told Betabeat. "He told us about his rap song with Lil' Wayne who the Hipset guys are close with.” Oh Mr. Carter, say it ain't so?

WWJD? Apparently some trolls have signed Instapaper founder and bombastic blogger Marco Arment up for an email newsletter he certainly didn't authorize. "Thanks to whichever of the trolls signed me up for all of these Jesus email newsletters yesterday," Mr. Arment tweeted. "Not a good week for liking other people." Following a very public spat, perhaps it was someone at The Verge?

SECRETS OF THE SOUL Whoever said ladyblogs are just for ladies clearly hasn't met NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky. Professor Shirky copped to enjoying advice columns on the women-focused site The Hairpin at a reading at HousingWorks Books. “My favorite bit of anonymity on the web is this thing that Edith Zimmerman runs on the Hairpin, called 'Imperfect Advice from Strangers,'" he said. "Which is the best name for an advice column, ever.”

Ms. Zaleski (LinkedIn.com)

Planet Daily, the video startup from Ken Lerer, is putting some of that $5 million in venture money to work with a big hire. Poytner reports that the would-be "CNN killer" has poached the Washington Post's executive director of digital news, Katharine Zaleski, to serve as managing editor.

From the email that went around the Post: 

After two and a half years inspiring and leading digital change here at The Post, Katharine Zaleski is returning to New York to take on a new role as managing editor of a startup media venture under the working name, “Planet Daily”. The idea is to build a 24-hour video channel for the mobile and social web. For Katharine, it’s a chance to get her old band back together: her key partners in the new project were her associates at The Huffington Post, Ken Lerer and Eric Hippeau.

Are Mr. Lerer and Mr. Hippeau indeed getting the old band back together? We reached out to Lerer Ventures, but they had no comment.

Mr. Lerer (lererventures.com)

Do the guys over at Soho Tech Labs ever sleep? It would appear that the answer is no. Not only are they busy incubating social home exchange service CasaHop, which soft launches this week, but they're also working on a video news startup aimed at the "Jon Stewart set." Today, RebelMouse CEO and ex-HuffPo CTO Paul Berry told Business Insider that the previously-unnamed video startup has been giving a working title: Planet Daily.

According to an article published last month in AllThingsD, "the service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs."

Planet Daily will be a collaboration between Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media, a video startup that Mr. Lerer invested in last year.

The only issue with the idea of starting a live news network dedicated to the young and the liberal? According to a profile in Esquire, Mr. Stewart apparently wants to do it himself--and we have a feeling there's only room for one "Roger Ailes of veracity" on the Internet.

The name "Planet Daily" is apparently a working title, which is good because if the team wants to nab the URL planetdaily.com, it appears they'll have to fight a middle-aged mom named Penny for it.

Mr. Lerer (via lererventures.com)

Huffington Post cofounder Ken Lerer is apparently at work on a stealthy startup aimed to "attract a generation of Web natives who watch Jon Stewart but not CNN or Fox News," reports Peter Kafka at AllThingsD. Internet locals who love Jon Stewart and loathe cable news . . . wait, is he talking about Betabeat??

The startup is so stealth it doesn't even have a name yet, although it's already hiring. The service will function as a joint venture between Lerer Ventures, Mr. Lerer's seed stage VC firm, and Bedrocket Media Ventures, the video studio and incubator he cofounded shortly after selling HuffPo to AOL for a cool $315 million.

According to Mr.Kafka, Mr. Lerer is "telling potential investors and employees" that he will have an active role in the new project, along with Eric Hippeau, the former HuffPo CEO who joined Lerer Ventures as a venture partner last February, and Bedrocket's Brian Bedol. Although we hear Mr. Lerer is "definitely not" pitching investors.

"The service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs.

While Bedrocket has landed four YouTube “channel” deals for its programming, the new venture won’t be confined to any particular platform. Lerer and company have been promoting the idea that the service will rely heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for distribution."

Going out where the people are (on social media), rather than asking them to add another site to their mix and visit your platform? That does sound native! Now if only these "relatively unknown reporters, not established/expensive TV folks" the startup plans on hiring for on-camera work could be as funny as Mr. Stewart.

Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the fledgling startup incubator formed by several Huffington Post refugees, announced via an inaugural tweet today that they're recruiting early founders and employees. The company, backed by Lerer Ventures, was originally announced in Ad Age in January; it will be lead by a team of ex-Huffpoers, including founders Paul Berry, Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, as well as former Huffington Post president Greg Coleman. As we previously reported, the new incubator will be housed at 560 Broadway, the current home of Lerer Ventures.

Mr. Berry certainly has his hands full, as he will serve as the CEO of Soho TechLabs, as well as the CEO of RebelMouse, a "social curation platform."

Soho TechLabs has defined itself as an incubator focusing on a slew of "minimal viable products" which will be released into the marketplace and then tweaked according to public reception. The project would sound a lot like Betaworks, if Betaworks wasn't so ideologically opposed to being called an "incubator."

"We're a NYC-based incubator working in the social space," reads one Soho TechLabs job description, adding that they're looking for employees for "an exciting well defined project." With so many tech bigwigs backing the venture, we'll undoubtedly be hearing a lot more from Soho TechLabs as they ramp up for launch.

But we can't help but wonder what Huffington Post Media Group president Arianna Huffington must think of her former coworkers' newest project; we only hope she'll weigh in after she's finished in the bathroom.

UPDATE:

Ben Regenspan, who is Soho TechLabs' "CTO, until they get annoyed at my tweets," tweeted at us with some important details that may entice potential hirees to apply:

Mr. Peretti.

Jonah Peretti’s office has two glass walls, two white walls and no decoration except for a giant, multicolored rectangle, with blue and violet hues fading upward and coalescing into a tight little rainbow wheel at the top. The Brooklyn artist Cory Archangel, a friend of Mr. Peretti’s, makes these “gradient paintings” with one click in Photoshop, blows them up and sells them for lots of money, Mr. Peretti said. It is, in his words, “kind of a joke.”

Mr. Peretti, 38, a navy-eyed, wavy-haired nerd-king with a machine-gun giggle, was a cofounder of the Huffington Post before he moved on to other things. He likes these gradient paintings a lot. His Twitter page is also a gradient. Mr. Peretti, a career mischief maker with a “great, sort of trollish sense of humor,” as one former employee put it, likes jokes best when they’re subversive. He’s infamous for arguing that Mormonism is superior to Judaism because of its growing numbers, a shtick he uses in presentations. As a grad student at MIT in 2001, he ordered a pair of custom Nikes embroidered with the word “sweatshop,” extracting a series of awkward emails from an unlucky customer service rep. He forwarded the emails to a few friends, who forwarded them to their friends, and so on. Literally millions of people have read them.

“I didn’t really know anything about the sweatshop issue, but I ended up on the Today show with Nike’s head of global PR, debating sweatshop labor,” Mr. Peretti told Betabeat on a recent Friday afternoon at the shiny new Flatiron headquarters of his company, BuzzFeed, which has spent the past three years cornering the market in items along the lines of “The 30 Best Taco-Related Crimes Ever” and “Sexist ’60s Coffee Ads.”

In December, BuzzFeed announced a surprise move that furrowed brows throughout the media industry. The site was bringing on a news reporting team and had poached Politico superstar Ben Smith to run it. “It was, to many, a bit as though Jane Lynch, at the height of her popularity on Glee, had announced that she was leaving the cast to participate in a season of Celebrity Apprentice,” wrote Tom McGeveran at Capital New York.

Mr. Smith was impressed by Mr. Peretti, who took the reporter out to lunch at techie canteen Lure in Soho and battered him with visions of BuzzFeed 2.0: serious news scoops vying for attention with the web gags. It would be a site that resembled the dizzying editorial mix readers find in their Twitter and Facebook feeds, a sticky alternative to all those tired “commodity news” sites, with their comprehensive self-seriousness and dryly logical architecture.

Reporters often try to feed readers their vitamins; as journalism professors are fond of saying, “Don’t give ’em what they want. Give ’em what’s good for ’em!” The new BuzzFeed wants to give ’em both. “The Facebook News Feed and your Twitter stream are filled with fun items, personal updates and news,” Mr. Peretti wrote in an email to Betabeat. “As social sites become the way people discover content, readers expect a very diverse mix. News on BuzzFeed is part of a much larger shift in the media industry toward social content. The shift has already happened, but we are just starting to understand what it means.”

Mr. Smith scoffed at the notion of editing such a beast, but he was intrigued enough to recount the conversation later to his wife, who asked him: Wait, why don’t you want to do this? After a bit more waffling, he did—largely because he was impressed with Mr. Peretti. “He actually has his arms around the media ecosystem, how information is distributed, at a level of sophistication that is hard to fake,” Mr. Smith told Betabeat.

Mr. Peretti is personable and energetic. He tends to reposition dramatically when the conversation turns to a new idea: from excited, with his hands behind his head, to thoughtful, with his tightly crossed, to relaxed, propping himself up with one arm as he absentmindedly scratches an ankle. The man David Carr described as a “viral marketing hotdog” is an exalted member of the New York viral media mafia, the group of internet noisemakers that includes people like video entertainer Ze Frank, uber blogger Jason Kottke, virtual stuntman Alex Blagg, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Texts From Last Night cofounder Lauren Leto, and Chris “Moot” Poole, the god of the greatest meme factory of all, 4chan, many of whom mingle incestuously through hubs like the MIT Media Lab, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and the Free Art and Technology Lab.

Mr. Peretti’s sudden fame with the Nike sweatshop emails was an accident. But he wondered if it would it be possible to make viral happen, again and again.

Perhaps you remember BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, the website of a white couple who protested too much? Or maybe the Rejection Line, a fake phone number that let suitors down easy with a soothing voicemail? Both were weekend projects Mr. Peretti cooked up with his sister Chelsea, a standup comedian and writer for Parks and Recreation—experiments designed to see if he could replicate the viral effect. “When we were doing our early joint projects, people kept asking us if we were making money off our ideas,” Ms. Peretti wrote in an email. “We kept having to tell people no.” She added, “It feels great to know how far we’ve come and that now we are both millionaires. And by ‘both,’ I mean just my brother.”

Mr. Peretti angled his expertise into consulting jobs and teaching gigs at NYU’s ITP lab and the Parsons School of Design, and the Huffington Post, where he invented what he called the “mullet strategy”—smooth, professional content on the front page, with messy, user-generated stuff buried in back—honed the site’s SEO, and created FundRace.org, a searchable database of campaign contributions.

In 2003—which, on the timeline of internet memes, would be four years before LOLcats, five years before Stuff White People Like, and seven years before People of Walmart—Mr. Peretti opened his “Contagious Media” class at NYU’s ITP lab by drawing two curves on the board: a spike followed by a plateau, versus a spike followed by a drop. Useful technology tends to spike, then flatten out, but it holds because it’s useful, he told the class. Viral media has an even faster growth rate, but plummets into obscurity after it peaks (although “Black People Love Us” is still in the top 10 Google results for “black people”). “You got your kicks, and you’re off to the next thing,” explained Paul Berry, a former student Mr. Peretti eventually recruited to be CTO of Huffington Post. (Mr. Berry recently left to launch a viral media incubator, in which Mr. Peretti is an investor.)

Sketching graphs and tracking email forwards isn’t as fun as, say, clicking on BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle. But intentional virality takes work. BuzzFeed’s white-walled, bullpen-style office is quiet, with 20-somethings hunched over in office chairs, pacified by headphones, clicking and clicking. We tried to peek—what were they looking at? Photoshop. A website we didn’t recognize. Was that Facebook? These editors employ the spaghetti-to-wall strategy, posting a wide variety of items rapidly throughout the day while watching BuzzFeed’s internal metrics to see what hits.

Check out BuzzFeed's new office [SLIDESHOW] >>

The site has become adept at repackaging content in creative ways. Perhaps the best way to present the contrasts between presidential candidates, for instance, is not an article but 20 captioned photos. BuzzFeed employee Andrew Kacyznski, a 22-year-old student who seems destined for The Daily Show due to his compulsive C-SPAN trawling, is making an art of telling stories through video mashups.

That said, the goal isn’t for everything on the site to go viral. “You could have that as your goal, I guess,” Mr. Peretti said, “if you like to be a delusionally positive thinker.”

It wasn’t too much to ask of his class in 2003, though, who were told to build viral websites. Whoever got the most traffic got an A. “The point of this class is not useful technology,” Mr. Peretti told his students.

Mr. Berry, who was in that class, teamed up with another student to build a website called Dog Island, a paradise for canines whose fictional creator, “Linda Reyes,” believed passionately that dogs should be removed from Manhattan for their own well being. The site had an elaborate backstory suggesting Chinese dog meat processors might be involved, and included a link to the “Dog Exportation Act” on a fake version of the New York City Council website. Hours after Mr. Berry put up a few posts for Dog Island apartments on Craigslist, it went viral. Craig Newmark, overwhelmed with inquiries and furious emails, sent a confused note two days later; next the students received an email from a justice on the New York Supreme Court who said her cell phone was ringing off the hook with complaints. “She was so pissed off at Linda,” Mr. Berry said.

Dog Island got the most hits in the class, something like six million pageviews. One other project got close: WhatIsVictoriasSecret.com, which was just pictures of girls vomiting.

The failures were as instructive as the successes. Mr. Peretti fondly recalled “gangster henna,” a fake website about hardcore prison tattoos created with henna, which flopped.

Why did Dog Island go viral, while gangster henna did not? There are no rules, but there are guidelines. “Most things aren’t viral” is one of Mr. Peretti’s catch phrases. The thing can’t be too complicated, and it almost always has to be original. “Oftentimes when people see something that was viral, they will copy it, and then that thing will be less viral,” he said (like those books that are made from Tumblrs?). Novelty is viral; humor is often viral, as are things that inspire awe or a strong emotion other than sadness. “For the most part, if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it,” he said. “You don’t want to upset all your friends. I’ve met activists before who come to me and say, ‘Help me make my campaigns viral.’ And then I’ll say, ‘OK, let me see what you’re working on,’ and then their campaign is literally pictures of starving children that are literally about to die.”

A lot of Mr. Peretti’s strategy has to do with appealing to people’s vanity: You want them to feel good about themselves for discovering a thing and proud to be the first one to show it to their friends. That means that some things aren’t “shareable”—sex tapes, nasty stories and celebrity dross, for instance, which Mr. Peretti calls “guilty pleasures.” Those tend to be spread by email and word of mouth, which are much less contagious than social media.

Nostalgia does well, though—“25 Foods You’ll Never Be Able to Eat Again” was a hit. But a wacky premise isn’t as key an ingredient as one might think; the all-time most viral post on BuzzFeed is “The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011,” which might offer a clue about the motivation behind Mr. Peretti’s shift into straight news.

BuzzFeed is more than a blog, though. It’s a testing-ground for technology that monitors the web, scanning for content that is about to blow up, using a proprietary algorithm that watches the type of traffic heading into a story, photo series or video and acts as an early-warning system when something has the potential for exponential popularity. At that moment, BuzzFeed flows the item into a rotation of prominent positions on the site, helping to catalyze its rise. It does the same thing for advertisers, making millions of dollars in revenue a year, the company says, by running sponsored content from brands like Coke, Kraft and Disney, and supplying its sponsors with a dashboard and metrics.

There’s something chilling about all this—the systematic monetization of the internet’s forest of delights in the service of corporate marketers. It all used to be so innocent: a hallucinating hippie makes an unintentionally funny video of a double rainbow and uploads it to YouTube, where it lies, a diamond in the rough, until it’s stumbled upon by an internet explorer. Serendipity is the great magic of the internet; distilling it into a formula seems wrong.

Then again, it might be just what the media business needs. BuzzFeed recently announced a $15.5 million round of outside funding, is up to about 70 employees, and Mr. Smith is hiring reporters.

Check out BuzzFeed's new office [SLIDESHOW] >>

We tried to get Mr. Peretti to give us a peek at the crystal ball. Why news? Why now? Are memes over—just a phase we all went through, like a collective adolescence of the internet?

“Novelty items, memes and cute kittens all have a bright future on the social web,” Mr. Peretti reassured us, “but increasingly they will have to share the stage with substantive content, original reporting and breaking news.”

In early January BuzzFeed broke the news of John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, forcing CNN to admit “news of the endorsement was first reported by BuzzFeed Politics.” (LOL.) BuzzFeed’s arrival has resulted in some grumbling from political hacks, but it’s largely been greeted with optimism. Media critic Jack Shafer, now at Reuters, hailed BuzzFeed in a column as “the daily newspaper … reborn again.”

Of course, what BuzzFeed is doing—original reporting of serious issues alongside aggregation, listicles, snark and video mashups—is not so new. The Huffington Post has a similar mix, as does Gawker and … everyone. A recent headline on The Atlantic’s website read: “Science Can Neither Explain Nor Deny the Awesomeness of This Sledding Crow.”

“They’re very aggressively carving out parts of political news that has even a faster metabolism than Politico,” Mr. Shafer marveled of the politics team. “I imagine the entire staff is heavily dosed on Adderall.”

He’s a particular fan of mashup wizard Andrew Kacyzinski, he added. “That kid is the greatest thing since garlic toast.”

[Want more? Full transcript of the interview with Mr. Peretti is here.]