When I met Charlie Schmidt, midway through the accidental fame convention, he was at the bottom of a lecture hall, surrounded by a small knot of onlookers. The owner of the most famous cat on the Internet was holding court.

“If you held her and kept moving, she’d go into a stupor,” he was explaining. “But if you held her and didn’t move, she’d bite you.”

Wild-haired and garrulous, Schmidt was retelling the story of Keyboard Cat, his keys-playing, blue-shirted orange tabby, who became an accidental global phenomenon last year. He was divulging the secret behind the stupefied expression on the cat’s face, the expression that charmed – or at least mildly diverted - untold millions, spawned thousands of remixes, tickled Jon Stewart, stormed CNN. For Keyboard Cat, mass appeal came fast and furious.

Schmidt, and no fewer than 1,000 others, converged in Boston two weeks ago for ROFLcon, an unlikely conference devoted to online culture - that lumpy stew of memes, running jokes, cat pictures and workplace distractions that simmers away online. Once the preserve of freaks and geeks, online culture is increasingly the subject of the mainstream’s fickle affections. And this makes people uneasy. Are the motley stars of the Internet the mainstream entertainment of tomorrow? Or still the laughing-stock of yesterday?

I’d trucked down to Boston to see for myself, without any clear idea of what I was getting into. The conference promised a discussion of how Web culture was going mainstream, but the mainstream is never as much fun as a niche-culture gong-show. One young man spent the weekend walking around dressed up as Rick Astley, hoisting a boom box playing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and narrowly avoiding the wedgie he so richly deserved.

Another panelist showed up in a full-body unicorn suit and proceeded to tell nothing but lies. Mahir Cagri – Internet-famous of 1998 for his barely-coherent “I Kiss You” website – arrived, and pronounced, incoherently, that he was still pissed off at Sascha Baron Cohen for allegedly basing Borat on him.

As much as anything else, though, the event seemed like a convention of people who had stepped on cultural landmines. Over and over, the story was retold: one moment I was minding my own business, and the next moment the world showed up at my doorstep.

Schmidt’s case was typical. Back in 1984, Schmidt wedged his beloved cat, Fatso, into his baby son’s blue J.C. Penney shirt. Then he turned on a video camera and puppeteered the stupefied cat into plunking out a tune on a synthesizer.

It took a modest 25 years for fame to come knocking. Schmidt uploaded the clip to YouTube, where another man had the idea of combining the sanguine cat (now, alas, deceased) with videos of a man falling down an escalator. The effect was comedic. It spawned 4,000-odd remixes, millions of views, and the fleeting attention of the mainstream establishment: national television, cable networks, itinerant newspaper columnists. Now Schmidt is selling Keyboard Cat t-shirts.

Guest after guest told variations on the same story: The young women who founded My Mom is a FOB – in which second-generation Asian immigrants gently mock their parents – that became so popular they got dragooned into speaking as experts in online race, despite really having no thoughts on the subject. (“We just came to talk about our website,” one pleaded, faced with yet another audience question about the construction of race on the Internet.)

There was the young Irishman who, bored at work, started editing Garfield out of Garfield strips for comedic effect, until even Garfield’s creator signaled his support for the project (albeit in precisely one e-mail), and the two guys from Chicago who, on a lazy afternoon, started dubbing X-Men cartoons with the catchphrase “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”, a phrase so catchy that the filmmakers wrote it into X-Men 3. (The movie was still terrible.)

Unsurprisingly, much of the talk was about how to cash in. Book deals and t-shirt sales were popular. The Internet-celebrity career-path seemed to go like this:

Step 1: Become accidentally famous.

Step 2: Panic.

Step 3: Quick, sell something!

By common agreement, the faster one got to step three, the better.

Nobody really seemed to know what to make of it. Here were all these people who had been picked up by the mainstream, whirled around the dancefloor for their 15 minutes, and put down again, dazed and puzzled by what the wider world makes of them.

On one hand, they had the attention of millions, which is something few people will ever achieve. On the other hand, online fame – capricious, random, often entirely unwelcome online fame – would be at the bottom of the pantheon had reality television not slipped underneath just in the nick of time.

But Web culture is here to stay. The Internet itself is mainstream now, which means that its whims and fads will find an audience of millions each time, even if that audience is only using it to kill five minutes of their afternoon. And the often unwitting souls who populate this world will learn to play along.

As today, some of them will be confused. Some of them will be bemused. And some, like Charlie Schmidt, will just have a good time. You could say that’s the spirit of the Web.

“Have you seen the original shirt?” he asked. Fatso herself had played herself off this mortal coil years ago, but her shirt was upstairs, in the hall, framed in glass with a bronze inscription beneath: “KEYBOARD CAT’S ORIGINAL SHIRT.”

Passerby were gawking. Schmidt grinned.

“It’s like the Shroud of Turin.”