Along those lines, Sean Savage, blogger extraordinaire and coiner of the phrase “flash mob” to describe these weird internet organized clusters of people doing weird things way back in the day (and by back in the day, I mean 2003, which is like going back to Mesopotamia in internet time), has just let us know that he’ll be attending said event. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Sean will establish a new phrase to describe what’s been going down since that fateful April weekend.

Confidential to the uninitiated: don’t know what a flash mob is? CHECK IT.

Matt Harding, who had a sweet panel with Tron Guy at ROFLCon, has just released his 2008 “Where the Hell is Matt?” video, and it’s awesome. 42 countries in this one! Pretty astounding – take a look and see how many places you recognize. Or have heard of.

There’s a somewhat pervasive belief that the super tech-savvy, Web 2.0, internet aficinado, 21st century hipster types tend to congregate on the coasts of the country rather than concentrating at all in the middle. We, however, don’t believe this is true. For that reason, we’re hoping to throw a fiesta of some kind in the third largest city in the country, Chicago, the home of the best damn pizza in the country and two of the best baseball teams in the league.

We’re enlisting the fine soldiers of the middle for help and advice, whether you’re a company who might consider sponsorship, an internet celebrity who missed out on the Boston extravaganza this April and wants to jump on the fun train now, or just a fan of the tubes. So, troops: what kinds of things would you like to see come to a theater near you? Any thoughts on where you might like to see something happen? Do you just want to help in some way? Hit me up at carrie AT roflcon dot org with your ideas, thoughts, and love.

as a side note: I realize I may annoy the south Chi-town crowd by posting a picture of Wrigley Field rather than the Cell. In honor of year 100 for the Cubbies, I felt I had to. Sorry.

Now available, courtesy Respectably French: The YouTube Stars, Anonymous, Work It, Move It, Bang It, Bump It, and From Wordpress to the NY Times with Christian Lander (Stuff White People Like).

As always, everything else is available here or at Archive.org. Enjoy!

edit: don’t believe me when I say how badass it is? Check out this post about how much the segment rocks.

The press page will be updated pretty continuously, so keep your eye on it! There are some really good analyses and discussions of what went on during the weekend.

And do let us know if we left something off! It’s hard to track these things down sometimes.

Be sure to RSVP! Attendance is likely limited due to awesome Cambridge venue restrictions.  Totally so much going on Friday night, it’s not even funny.

First on the list is Dr. McNinja creator Chris Hastings. Check it!

And be sure to keep an eye on our press page before, during, and after the conference. It’ll get updated continuously with articles, blog entries, and whatever else we can cram onto it that’s vaguely relevant.

Hugs to those folks who have been supportive of us enough to write about us! We <3 you.

So if any of you (like many of us on the ROFLTeam) are fans of South Park – an incredibly traditional and classic television show – we hope you watched last week’s episode, “Canada on Strike.” There was a pretty epic fight among several of our favorite internet celebrities, including Tay Zonday, Tron Guy, and Sneezing Panda. We like to think that ROFLCon’s existence nudged this plotline into place. In any case, we really hope our conference turns out a little better than what eventually happens. Like, we don’t want a bloodbath.

Watch the full episode here!

Anyway, here’s another triumphant and relevant coup for ROFLCon – Purple Tornado, a great marketing company in LA, is helping us out for realz! They focus haaardcore on internet marketing and have a real solid understanding of the potential for new media advertising and PR. They’re also just cool people, and will be coming to the ‘Bridge to schmooze and mingle with all y’all in April. Just six weeks to go. Yeah seriously. We’re so stoked, and you should be too.

As y’all might have noticed, ROFLCon has ballooned into a pretty huge event, far beyond what any of us on the team could have imagined back in ‘07. That’s meant hardcore searching for help from partners, friends, and all of you folks in internet-world to help make this conference the best it can be. We’re always really thrilled when a company wants to help in some way, so imagine our delight when Super Deluxe notified us that they’d like to sponsor ROFLCon.

Now, I don’t think Super Deluxe needs much explanation since they’re huuuuuge and awesome. But if you’re just joining us from old media land, they’re behind a lot of the best creative comedic content on the web today. Their list of featured artists and comedians is pretty amazing, and includes Brad Neely, Bob Odenkirk, Tim and Eric, Maria Bamford, Fark TV, and the list goes on and on and on. Needless to say, Super Deluxe offers a kickass collection of videos and animations. Do yourself a favor and watch something (anything!) on the site real quick.

So basically, we’re so pumped about this partnership that we can’t even stand it. Ballllller.

Remember way back in 2004 (it seems like ages ago, doesn’t it? how things have changed…) when we all thought that there was NO WAY a president with 40% approval ratings would ever be reelected? Well, much as you might try to suppress any memory of that cold November evening, we have a new guest arriving in April whose internet fame started with Bush’s 51% mandate.

Sorry Everybody is a picture gallery of Americans apologizing to the world for reelecting Bush four years ago (with a smattering of “it’s okay” letters from foreigners, one of my favorites being this one). I’m happy to say that one of the guys behind the site, James Zetlen, will be joining us at ROFLCon.

Take a look at the photo gallery — it’s interesting to see the kinds of people who voted against Bush, how they frame their objections (some are quite serious, some are a bit less so), who people are actually angry at, and how much some of the pictures look like weird lolcats. Or, alternatively, take a look at the photos to relive the pain or pleasure you felt when you found out that we’d have another four years of this guy.

Along those lines, amazingly enough, we recently got word that Harvard’s own English/Visual and Environmental Studies rock star, J.D. Connor, will be speaking at our humble conference. He teaches courses on Hollywood and the 1960s in both departments, and is also a pretty ridiculous fountain of knowledge about internet culture. Prior to joining the professorial ranks at Harvard, he was the ‘Fraymaster’ on one of my favorite means of procrastination, Slate. The Fray is quite a reader discussion forum; you can see how it’s different from normal flame-y web forums here. We are really, really stoked about his involvement with the conference, both in terms of his incredible behind-the-scenes advice and, now, his being on a panel, moderating discussions, and/or making sure the conference doesn’t devolve into a silly famefest. Badass in so many ways.

the man himself — don’t mess.

POTW (on Yahoo) has posted a great entry and accompanying video about the most memorable videos of 2007. They offer some pretty solid commentary about the role of the internet in contemporary culture and the ostensible democratization of fame — solid work. Start gettin’ nostalgic about the past year on the web, and start gettin’ pumped for THE NET 2008.

Viacom is taking their biznass to the online world. They’re releasing Paramount’s clear Academy Award nominee “Jackass 2.5″ over the internet for free instead of on DVD or in theaters. I suppose if you’re going to release a movie over the web like that, the Jackass movies are the kinds that’ll do well. Tons of the most watched viral videos on YouTube or College Humor are just people acting like douchebags. It also enables them to build up a community around the movie — the movie will certainly attract attention to jackassworld.com, currently under construction, where users will be able to submit original content (WONDERFUL idea — haven’t they gotten sued enough?) and blogs and such. It’s certainly one of the first experiments of its kind, and I’m excited to see how other major studios react. If it’s successful, we might see a whole new mode of expression for big Hollywood, which could be really sweet. Or it could crowd out the ‘little guy’ viral video that we have come to love so much. That doesn’t sound so sweet.

Top news on Yahoo shows a video from 1967 that supposedly predicts online shopping and email. Apparently because it’s so accurate, people think it’s a hoax. But nope, I learned rather recently (from a class, no less!) that a pretty similar conception of the internet to what we actually have was first conceived way back about 40 years ago. Check out the Wikipedia entry on the ARPANET, for example. Take that, Al Gore.

As far as developments on our conference, we’ve been doing some pretty exciting stuff behind the scenes. More to come later as things develop. Vague, no? I promise it’ll be cool. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to get the latest.

“This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (“leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters.”

It would seem that ‘w00t’ is the 2007 word of the year.

The AP article on the choice is a bit more interesting. The president of Merriam Webster, John Morse, makes a fabulous comment about why it makes sense that w00t would be the word of the year: “It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language. It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other.” True that, John. That’s one of the things that we hope to examine in the image macro (i.e. the Lol-whatever) panel: how the internet has changed communication and language. Here’s a question, though — w00t has been in the popular lexicon for a few years now, why now?

Also of note to techies: ‘facebook’ was #2. Not the website or the noun, like the verb: “I facebooked her, and she deleted her relationship status last night! What could it mean?!” Or, “I facebooked my professor and he has no friends :’(.” Or, the ever popular “I facebooked your mom last night.” This is not to be confused with “[de/un]friend,” “[un]tag,” “poke,” or “drunk post.” I think “facebooking” in this sense is more akin to facebook stalking, also an amorphous idea (my conception is that it involves looking at the profiles of people you don’t know so well to acquire information that you would not otherwise get). So say most of the entries on the Open Dictionary, anyway; I tend to agree.

One option is a panel of animators and web comics artists and writers, which could yield some interesting chatter about art on the internet and how it might function differently than offline art in some way. Another idea is a panel on politics and memes, since the internet is the newest communicative resource for those folks who take the big plunge and run for office, and some pretty crazy stuff is springing up as a result (who woulda thought Chuck Norris and Mike Huckabee would end up making a video like that?). Another panel could look into the new presence of big business in memes and viral videos for marketing, and what makes a meme/video successful on the web.

We’ll definitely be talking to our guests to figure out what sorts of things they’d like to discuss at the conference, but we also want some input from you folks. Who would you like to see on panels together? What do you want to learn more about? Holla back!

More below…

Yesterday, a few of us met to do website stuff, partner and sponsorship stuff, and otherwise try to find some more memes to invite. Well, getting hyped up on Wired.com’s Underwire blog turned out to be really great for the latter task, because Underwire readers are now voting on which memes they’d like to see at our conference. Among the currently top-rated were those ever-so-famous two girls and their handy cup. Now, we’ve been having a debate as to whether or not we should invite these shock memes, but I guess we figured at that point that there’d be no harm in trying to track ‘em down.

The Smoking Gun recently published some court papers that reveal who the guy who made 2 girls 1 cup, so that made our (my) search a little bit easier. His name’s Marco Fiorito, and he’s a Brazilian fetish filmmaker. You can read a little more about his history on the court papers; I won’t get into it. But anyway, thus began my Google search, and it was more than a little bit difficult. His companies are now defunct, or at least don’t have websites of note, and it was only after about an hour that I was able to find a little bit of supposed contact information.

So I found this email address that’s presumably legitimate, and I realized I had another problem. I do not speak a word of Portuguese, nor do I know how common English is in Brazil. So I shot off an email in Spanish about “una conferencia en Harvard sobre el internet y los memes” (I know, probably not any better than English, but I tried). Now all we have to do is wait and hope…

What’s great and awful and sad about these animations, as Dean pointed out to me, was that they’re in .swf format and are pretty graphically unique (read: terrible yet charming). More importantly, though, is that while we can see them now, it’s unclear as to whether we will be able to in the future. How do we know our operating systems in the future will jive with .swf files?

And what about Youtube? These crucial viral videos that we all know and love exist, in many cases, only on the internet. Should we be making efforts to ensure that we preserve some of these things in a more permanent format? If we see that as an important mission and then do that, does the removal from the network change some aspect of the video, so that it loses something essential to whatever made it an important aspect of our culture? How, then, can we protect what’s out floating in cyberspace?

I think it goes without saying that we want future generations to know the importance of Soulja Boy or Numa Numa for this generation, but the question of how to do that is a real tricky one.

Okay, so I realize now that most of my blog posts like this are just raising questions and offering no real answers. Sorry if that’s annoying, but I’ll probably keep doing it, as I have many questions and few answers.

I think it’s so interesting that the internet allows for, or is encouraging, classic celebrities — i.e. those from Hollywood or the offline music world — to also form an online presence, after some of these viral videos and memes have become accidentally more famous among our generation. Part of Funnyordie’s niche in the internet world is that it bridges the gap between old school and new school celebrities. I mean, you can find videos on the site from Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Bill Murray, Danny DeVito, Willem Defoe, and others. Maybe this whole thing is some kind of adaptation to our increasingly internet-oriented world. Young Hollywood, at least, is starting to get it.

I mean, the Landlord video alone has something like 40 50 million views and basically took no money and little effort to make (I’m presuming these facts; unless you think that asking a two year old to get her drink on takes any effort). Compare that to a film with a $50 million budget that grosses $150 million, and that takes maybe six months to a year to film; more time than that for pre- and post-production stuff like writing and editing. Not to mention promotion and marketing of the film. Side note: if anyone’s watched NBC in the past two months or so, you probably know more about Bee Movie and Jerry Seinfeld than you ever wanted to. Sometimes you know exactly how much a movie is going to suck by the lengths they go to to make sure you’ve heard of it. Same goes for License to Wed (sorry, John Krasinski, but it did suck).

But anyway — both are arguably different kinds of fame, but internet celebrity and Hollywood are starting to cross over like whoa. What’s going to happen to the big budget, highly promoted film if a video that takes two days and no cash to make generates more, though admittedly different, consumer interest? I think it’s ridiculous to say that Hollywood films are going to fall by the wayside because of the internet, but there’s something going on that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Consider another question: if you’re a marketer for a company that wants some product placement somewhere — I was just watching Pulp Fiction the other night, and in the famous OD scene, the Game of Life and Operation were on a table, which was hilarious and entirely appropriate — where are you going to put your product? Low-budget viral video or the next movie from the Brat Pack?

Comment if you have thoughts! We want some chatting on the blog going on.

Just got word in the wee hours of the morn that the founder of the infamous 4chan.org, moot, is coming to our humble event. 4chan.org is basically a massive web forum for ridiculous photoshops, image macros, what have you. The site itself gets a huge amount of hits a day and some of the most popular image macros probably came from 4chan users in some form or another — tracking down that sort of stuff is hard, of course. It’s also been embroiled in some controversies, which you can read up on Wikipedia.

In terms of what we can now do at the conference, we have a sizable group of people behind forums and amalgamaters of information and images in particular, and that gives us a lot to work with. It will be interesting to see what all these folks can say about the appeal of some pretty ridiculous memes, the actual social community that builds around a site like 4chan, stuff like that.

Sidenote: if any of you folks out there care about the logistical or planning aspects of ROFLCon, the team had a really great meeting late last night about our overall vision and what the hell we need to do now that the internet is actually coming to Harvard for a weekend. Expect some great changes to the website in the future, as well as more information about exactly what to expect — this is not simply going to be a meet and greet for internet celebrities; we’re gunning for some real academic discourse about internet culture as a whole and the place of internet memes in society. And we’ll have a whole lot of fun too, to be sure.