Only 98 days left until ROFL3 kicks off, and we are starting to really pick up steam! Next up we have Jonti Picking, known better as Weebl of Weebl’s Stuff. You may remember Weebl from such things as Badger Badger Badger, Narwhals, and Magical Trevor.

He will be rolling through town, providing some good laughs and memorable meetings for everyone in his path!

Happy Friday y’all!

Most recently working with her old pals over at Buzzfeed as their Senior Creative Strategist, Lindsey has been active in the blogosphere and social media realms as the former Social Media lead for the Barbarian Group and blogger for Urlesque.

As you can see, Lindsey is a funny gal and we are stoked to welcome her to the party! You can check out here personal blog here or check up on her musing over at Buzzfeed!

Back for 2012, Joel Veitch of rather good is going to be back in Cambridge again for some love and lols and lager (perhaps not all or in that order). Since then he has continued to keep the Internet chuckling with claymation videos of Royal Wedding and all other amusing videos.

More big news soon! The week only gets more exciting from here

Exciting news ROFLers. Say welcome back to David and David DeVore for some more after dentist shenanigans! We had so much fun last time that we decided to get back together for another round of good times. So check in on the boys or watch the interview from ROFLCon II to get pumped in the coming months!

That’s right y’all. Mr Chuck Testa of Ojai Valley Taxidermy is locked in and ready to come out to ROFLCon. Nope! Chuck Testa has been used on current events such as the death of Steve Jobs and Muammar Gaddafi as well as on such childhood memories as Mufasa’s tragic end and the hard to cope with end of Albus Dumbledore, and even worked into some notorious Internet scandals.

Hope you are as excited as we are to meet him! More updates and registration info soon!

Sherrod DeGrippo of OhInternet and encyclopedia dramatica will be coming to the stage this Spring complete with wit, sass and a love of dogs (seriously, she really loves dogs) to kick some ass, no names required.

Yup, he’s back. An oldie, but a goodie, Mr. Jay Maynard will be once again making an appearance in the hallowed halls of MIT. As many of you know we have been thrilled to have Jay in the past and nothing has changed about that!

Have a Happy Holiday season, yo! More soon

And here is your chance, Mr. Alan Schaaf creator of imgur (image-er) is coming to see you, IRL.

Imgur has become the standard for quick image sharing, and is currently using over 50TB of bandwidth a day. That is a lot of people trying to show off their new puppies (I’m looking at you, Reddit)

More announcements to come soon!

Yup — it’s time now for a very special, first-time-ever, one-day ROFLCon Summit. In just under two weeks on October 1st, we’re absolutely thrilled to be bringing together everyone once again for a truly epic celebration of the internets in Portland, Oregon. Speakers to include a truly, unbelievably badass cast, including:

• Chris Poole, Canv.as / 4Chan
• Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
• Sherrod DeGrippo, encylopediadramatica / OhInternet
• Andy Baio, Waxy.org
• Rob Beschizza, BoingBoing
• Jason Scott, Textfiles / Archive Team
• Eric Fensler, GI Joe PSAs / Fensler Films
• Danny O’Brien, NTK.net
• Neetzan Zimmerman, The Daily What
• Ben Huh, The Cheezburger Network
• Aaron Peckham, UrbanDictionary
• Bennett Foddy, QWOP / GIRP

No kidding, and that’s not the end of it (yeah yeah yeah we’ve sent Chuck Testa an e-mail already SO OBVIOUS GAWD). We’ll continue to update over on our Twitter as we creep up on the event, as well as on the special site that’s been spun up specifically for the Summit (which also contains the schedule so you can see how everything all fits together).

There might also be a six-foot paper mache Forever Alone head. Just putting that out there.

Registration is now open for $35, with a full day of sessions, post-conference party, rad schwag, and other awesomeness (ALL the awesomeness) included in that. Due to the constraints of the space (at the palatial offices of W+K), we’re capping attendance at 300 — they’re going fast, so snag ‘em while you can.

If you’ve got any questions/concerns/hate mail, drop a line over at halp@roflconsummit.com, or drop me a line directly at tim@roflcon.org.

(above: actually a legit mural that got done for the conference. Yup, we’ve been busy).

Wow, it’s been awhile. What’s up, internets?

Your friends over at ROFLCon have decided that we’re going to do a small sort of shindig in advance of the big, bad ROFLCon III in 2012.

We’re calling it “The ROFLCon Summit.” October 1st, 2011. Portland, Oregon.

More to come. But for now, we’re gonna just put this here.

Photo by Doc Searls

The next ROFLCon won’t be until 2012. But you need a hit of ROFLs RIGHT NOW! What will you do?

If you happen to be at SXSWi next week, you’re in luck: Tim, Diana, and Christina will be presenting on the history and future of ROFLCon. Come hear us swap hilarious never before heard behind-the-scene stories, share insights that we’ve gathered along the way, and ponder what’s next. Oh, and there’s plenty of time for Q&A, of course! To give you a sneak peek of what we’ll be talking about, we’ve each written blogposts about different angles that our panel will cover:

* Diana, on ROFLCon’s humble origins
* Christina, on the challenges of representing multiple internets
* Tim, on what lies ahead

So! Whether you are a close ROFLfriend or just curious about what this ROFLCon business is all about, we hope to meet you at:

Tim Hwang, Christina Xu, and Diana Kimball on
Internets, How Do They Work? Lessons from ROFLCon
at SXSW Interactive

Tuesday, March 15 at 9:30am
Hilton Salon F/G
500 East 4th St.
Austin, TX

(Informal meetup/reunion lovefest to follow!)

Yeah, yeah, yeah – we’re finally making a post on this here blog. I know what you’re thinking to yourself: FUCKIN’ MIRACLES.

Greeting everyone! It’s been awhile — hard to believe that time flies so quickly. ROFL2 was about eight months ago now, but seems like just the other day we were sitting at MIT, chomping down on some donuts, depriving ourselves of sleep, and seeing the most massive collection of the wonderful and internet-y exploding all round. It’s sort of a mind blowing experience.

We’ve been getting a good bunch of e-mails recently about if and when ROFLCon 3 will be making an appearance. To answer both:

1) Will it happen again? YES. It will. Rest assured.

2) When will it happen again? The first ROFLCon took place on April 2008, ROFLCon II took place on April 2010. Accordingly, we’re now thinking that ROFLCon III will be happening in Cambridge, MA on April 2012. In addition to an obsessive love of neat and tidy scheduling — we kind of like the added perspective of doing it every other year and bringing you only the best of the internets, like the Olympics or something. Besides, there’s always the slim chance of the Mayans being right and us avoiding the whole hubblaboo of conference planning altogether.

So ROFLCon 3. April 2012. Set your timers. That being said, we’re still planning some smaller events, meetups, and all the rest in the interim, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements on that!

OH AND YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING ABOUT THE VIDEO - you may have noticed that a good amount of the conference video from May still hasn’t made its way up here, though we’ve gotten some biggies up in the past few months. We’ve been struggling with getting the raw content over to a format that can be uploaded easily to Blip/etc (the original was recorded in Ogg), which is what’s caused some of the delay. Looks like it will take awhile longer, but it will eventually get online. That being said, if you can’t wait and you’re of the geeky persuasion, you might want to take a crack at it yourself – it’s available on the internet archive.

We’re very happy to announce a slew of exciting things happening on Saturday that you definitely don’t want to miss. They all involve internet celebrities AND/OR dancing! What more could you ask for?

***Dance with Matt Harding***

Matt, of “Where the Hell is Matt” fame, is shooting one of his famous dancing videos at ROFLCon this year at 1:30PM on Saturday during the lunch break. If you are interested in learning a short dance and becoming internet famous, there will be a group leaving from where the pizza is 5 minutes before, or you can just make your own way over here.

***ChatRoulette Bingo, Round Two, FIGHT!***

Dr. Beth Coleman and her CMS.100 class have created a ChatRoulette Bingo game for ROFLcon participants and fans of emoticon-based games everywhere. The first sound on Friday was EPIC.

There will be a repeat session on Saturday from 1 – 2 PM during lunch in the Bartos lobby of E15. Beth reports that initial playtests saw “lots of laughs, participation, and full frontal nudity…” What’s not to love??

***TopatoCo Signing Schedule***

Thanks to the amazing comic artist wrangling skills of TopatoCo VP Holly Post, a wide assortment of webcomic masters will be available to autograph things, shake hands, and kiss babies throughout Saturday at the TopatoCo merch table outside 26-100.

11-12 Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics
12-1 Zach Weiner, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
1-2 Wes & Tony, Amazing Superpowers
2-3 Emily & Joey, A Softer World
3-4 Jeph Jacques, Questionable Content

***ROFLafterparty at Machine’s No Tomorrow***

I was going to write something clever, but I can’t top this poster:

ROFLCON AFTERPARTY AT MACHINE!!!111!!one!!!1!1!!one!
1254 Boylston Street., Boston, MA
21+, $5 cover ($10 after midnight)

(Many thx to Mike McKay and the No Tomorrow team for getting up close and personal with the Goatse hands to make this poster, and for having us!)

#0 – Actually get to MIT! But once you’ve arrived, check in to Foursquare at ROFLcon II.

#1 – Upload your pictures to Flickr. Tag your pics with “roflcon.” Join and send your photos to the ROFLcon Flickr group so that they’ll appear in the stream on the homepage. License your pictures with a Creative Commons license, so we can feature them in our blog posts!

#2 – Make sure to follow @roflcon on Twitter to stay current with conference updates. Use the #roflcon hashtag, or search for #roflcon to see what other attendees are blabbing about.

#3 – Have questions during any of the panels? Use our nifty backchannel feature! If you want to feel shiny, visit http://roflcon.backchan.nl with your mobile phone to use the mobile-optimized Backchan.nl

#4 – Watch the homepage for liveblogs of all those panels you missed.

#5 – Or, if you don’t feel like reading, watch on of the live video streams from each panel room!

#6 – If you get lost on MIT’s campus, be sure to check out this handy-dandy notebook webpage.

#7 – Perhaps you fancy some food? Check out this Google Maps page!

#8 – Feel like you need some drinks instead? Browse this alternate map!

#9 – And, of course, you want some WiFi, right? If you find yourself in the Media Lab, use media lab 802.11. For all the other rooms, use MIT GUEST.

#10 – And, as always, check out the online version of the schedule here.

Dr. Beth Coleman and her CMS.100 class have created a ChatRoulette Bingo game for ROFLcon participants and fans of emoticon-based games everywhere. The first session will take place from 11 to 1 AM on Friday in room 633 of E14, right next to where reg is going down. There will be a repeat session on Saturday from 1 – 2 PM during lunch in the Bartos lobby of E15. Beth reports that initial playtests saw “lots of laughs, participation, and full frontal nudity…” What’s not to love??

Additionally, many of our guests will also be selling their swag. These include the people behind Chad Vader, Wondermark, Chainsaw Suit, Keyboard Cat (they’re bringing the sweater!!), Stuff White People Like, Regretsy, FU Penguin, and I Can Has Cheezburger. Meanwhile, MemeFactory will be asking you to participate in some “meme iteration” exercises for their performance. So far what we know is that it involves dancing, photography, and worksheets. A+++.

So, the cat’s out of the bag at this point, but just wanted to officially give the big shout out here that ROFLCon II will be streaming all of its panels live for free, thanks to our good friends over at Mozilla Drumbeat and the Open Video Alliance.

You’ll be able to access it here.

And, for all you geeky, geeky Free Culture nerds out there — yes it’s true: glad to announce too that we’ll be officially streaming in HTML5 and open video (Theora, specifically). We’ll also be releasing all the raw video from the conference out on the Internet Archive under CC like we did back in 2008. So, booyah to that.

As per our dire predictions, this evening ROFLCon II has officially sold out all tickets for the event. Unfortunately, there will be no waiting list for this year — we’re already straining at the limits of what we’ve got on capacity, and want to avoid causing the floor to give way or something crazy like that.

That being said, you won’t be left completely out in the cold, thanks to our fine friends at Mozilla Drumbeat. Stay tuned for details!

And it’s looking pretty sweet — check it out…

After some logistical wrangling, really great news today to confirm that Super Art Fight, a terrific traveling show of competitive comics-drawing showdowns/street fights, will be conducting a three-round megastar session at ROFLCon II!

At the masterminding and MCing helm are organizers Rosscott Nover (who produces The System) and Marty Day. They’ll also be joined by lovely and talented guest commentator Kris Straub of chainsawsuit.

We’re particularly excited about this session of ROFLCon II since it’ll be a way to see some of our cavalcade of webcomic artists in action. In particular, we’re excited to announce (tentatively) that our bouts will include:

* JOHNNY WANDER VS SATURDAY MORNING BREAKFAST CEREAL

* SECRET ASIAN MAN VS SUPER ART FIGHT COMPETITOR JAMIE NOGUCHI

Super Art Fight CHAMPION Jamie Baldwin and Chris Impink will also be participating in a tag team.That’s all, stay tuned for more details!

As I mentioned a few days ago, things have been heating up here at ROFLCon headquarters as we rumble into April, and it looks like (happily) that we’re going to sell out the event.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up today that we’ve officially run down to our final seventy-five tickets for the conference. Given how things have been going, we expect that registration will be closing sometime in the next week and a half or so. We’ll close as soon as we sell these remaining tickets.

So, make your time — if you want to come to ROFLCon II, it’s definitely worth swinging by and registering as soon as possible!