Baratunde Thurston- The Onion
Teresa Wu (My Mom is a FOB)
Serena Wu (My Mom is a FOB)
Christian Lander (Stuff White People Like)
Lisa Nakamura (University of Illinois – Champaign) [Moderator]

The internet is often painted as white and nerdy, but that’s just not the case. This panel will discuss the history, current status, and future of race on the internet. How is race signified online? Is the internet segregated? How are we doing on that digital divide? Why do black people take over Twitter at night? What DO white people like? Can non-Asians laugh at “My Mom is a Fob”? Will it ever be possible to have a rational discussion about race online??

Recorded by: @wphillips49 & @devanjedi
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Lisa: An amazing panel who have managed to make race funny. Race is really difficult for Americans to talk about. With the end of multicultural education. Race has become a really contested, hot button issue especially with new Arizona law. Now the Internet causes a digital divide; people of color don’t have the same access. People used to think that the Internet would make things more civil; but when people are anonymous things does not remain civil. The internet is a place where internet memes are becoming political. When something claims to be apolitical “just for the lulz” have the potential to be racially transformative. Couple of questions: the way that internet memes have become platforms for real conversations about race (not just for the lulz). High school students just cannot talk about race. Often begin sentences with “I’m not racist, but….” MySpace suffered white flight, fragmentation by race on the Internet. The panelists should talk about real conversations of race that have come up through Internet.

Baratunde: It’s a pleasure to be surrounded by Asians. Give it up for the Asians. Give it up for Lisa. I gave a talk at SXSW called How To Be Black Online. My name is Baratune, web editor for The Onion, co-editor of a black political blog and science show. How to be Black, also name of my book. Why are black people important? Assertion. Proof: we look good. History proves black people are the future. Rock N Roll. Hip hop. Ass/lip injections. Black people spend $. My qualifications: 32 years experience being Black. Lifetime experience. Some of my friends are black. I’ve watched The Wire.

Baratunde: Imagine there was a white racial profiling cookie that followed you around the internet and asked you if you belong there.

[Shows a chart of home broadband by type of folk, by race. Mobile internet use in another chart.]

Baratunde: When tethered and wireless access are considered together, the gaps in online engagement disappears. Black people on Twitter, the tweets come out at night. At night, you will see black people! They’re everywhere. The dozens is a tradition where people diss each other. [quotes Wikipedia on the dozens] The dozens: ribald banter, gives examples of the dozens on Twitter…”how black are you” Twitter mini-war. Back and forth about who is blacker. A couple thousand Tweets, a fun game between two dudes trash-talking in public.

Baratunde: On Twitter, at night you can find a bunch of Twitter #hashtags like #IfSantaWasBlack. Because of the nature of the Internet, everyone can see what you’re doing. Like “I don’t think this is a very good neighborhood.”

Baratunde: According to Edison Research, of the monthly Twitter users, 24% are African American. 3% Asian, apparently you guys are right here (pointing at fellow panel members). Twitter users are very frequent SMS Users. Most popular TV shows in US, #9 is BET Awards.

Baratunde: Maybe black people are not building, just using technology. I was in NYC in SoHo. She was looking for 80 Van Dam St. The address she had was wrong. She said “They don’t want us to use this stuff. How do I figure it out?” At the same time, in the barbershop all the people had smart phones, arguing about Androids, iPhones.

[Baratunde plugs @BWBconference and Jack & Jill politics]

[Baratunde makes a joke about how the Asian girls have a notebook/pen and him, a black man, has a laptop.]

Theresa and Serena Wu: We are not sisters. We have two blogs, My Mom Is A Fob and My Dad Is A Fob. DOT COM. But what’s a FOB? Fob is more of a concept, if you take 24 napkins from Chipolte, if your mom wipes your dog’s feet before it walks into the house… then your mom/dad is a fob, that’s fobby. Stands for “fresh off the boat,” we’ve taken it and repossessed it, from derogatory to something endearing. Cute. No longer a slur, is about pride in bridging cultures. We both grew up in the Bay Area, all parents from Taiwan, we are second-gen Asian Americans. On the blog we talk about communication/language barriers. Even though we’re technically minorities, we NEVER felt like minorities (85% Asian high school). We didn’t have a football team… even PTA newsletter was bilingual. People say it’s easier for us to embrace culture, since we were the rule, not the exception when we grew up. Blog is a collection of stories, photos, whatever, because they want to share these experiences, not mock. We are NOT just making fun of our parents — it’s about sharing these experiences. The question is, are we furthering stereotypes? We don’t think so, we show how parents are fun, we’re dispelling the notion of a “typical” Asian American household. These stories are unedited, content from all backgrounds, unbiased, first-hand-accounts. The website makes people appreciate their parents, and as long and you’re not laughing maliciously we’re ok with it.

Christian: Writes Stuff White People Like. It’s 150 things that white people like, so you can infiltrate and exploit white people. MySpace is digital Detroit. A place where only minorities and indie bands remain. My background, this panel reminds me a lot of my high school. Two year on my high school football team. With Sri Lankans and Chinese, I was one of the fatter guys. We practiced when the transvestite prostitutes “shift” ended. They were Canadian, so they had a good sense of humor. As a 15 year old boy, you realize you have options! I went to Jarvis Collegiate– for the richest neighborhood, public housing, new immigrants. Kids from all those neighborhoods went to the same school. It was an interesting experience. We had a cricket team. And an awesome badminton team. An interesting mix of race, class, immigrant. Rich white kids, poor white kids all in one school. Stuff White People Like was from this experience you were called a banana or a coconut or a twinkie or an oreo, based on your skin color and the white inside. That’s where it came from. The concept that things you like could be branded as white came from my experience in high school. I’m really familiar with derogatory terms for white people in Chinese and I can order dim sum. That is the extent of my language knowledge. That portal was closed.

Christian: Has a white person ever had TMobile Sidekick?

Baratunde: danah boyd did.

Audience man: Paris Hilton!

Lisa: When you do that, what is the response and most shocking thing that has been said to you? RaceFail is a genuine aspect of this. What is the impact from public?

Serena: When people first respond to the site, they aren’t sure how to use the word. “Do we say f-o-b, or fob.” Once we were interviewed by a guy in Seattle, every question was asked really carefully… whenever you put something racial out there, people get nervous. So non-Asians aren’t sure if they are “allowed” to laugh at the stuff on our website.

Theresa: We have gotten really positive feedback from the Asian American community, in the 2 years since we’ve had the blog we’ve mainly gotten positive feedback. Maybe 5 negative emails, but otherwise it’s been really positive.

Baratunde: I’ve gotten a wide range of feedback. YouTube has been the best, most “intelligent.” They called me a dumbass, liberal, welfare sucker. Most interesting are through email — they feel safer. Europeans ask over email, where they see me as an American commentator — how is it different? There is often a knee-jerk reaction of “Why are you talking about that?” People are very annoyed that these things keep coming up. People would rather avoid it, do we have to do this again.

Christian: I got hate mail 20 minutes ago. Title: Please Shut the Fuck Up.
[reads the entire, hate-filled email.]

Baratunde: He called you “chief.”

Christian: Yeah, it’s derogatory like calling me “big guy.” I get more anonymous comments that are really angry that want all these diseases to befall me because I said white people like yoga and expensive sandwiches.

[Talks about another email he got that he got]

Lisa: What does anonymity do?

Christian: Didn’t the clan wear hoods?

Baratunde: How do you deal with race on Twitter? All the ugly boils out to the surface. Even a debate about healthcare ends in the N word or you’re gay or something because there is no accountability. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have anonymity, but it’s the price you pay.

Lisa: Can you talk about why Stuff White People Like crossed over?

Christian: It’s hard to figure out why it crossed over, and I got lucky I think… it’s hard, it’s an update on what people consider white humor. People knew all the old ones, mayonnaise, golf, and dancing badly, I mean I know white people like these things, and then when I made the list, put it online, and the white people actually get there, they saw more than the standard jokes and got really weirded out by what they saw… they also go click, yep yep, I know this asshole. Also on the race aspect, I put my own picture up there, wanted people to know I was also making fun of myself. Until then people assumed I was black and they were SO disappointed to finding out I was white, it would be so much more subversive if I were black. We even pitched a show to FOX; they passed though.

Lisa: How has your life been since then?

Christian: My life since then has been awesome, I get to travel around, it’s been amazing. Fantastic.

Lisa: How has the segmentation been on the internet?

Baratunde: We are making a false separation between races. “Why do black people use Twitter disproportionately?” It’s possible that it’s 1/4 black. I don’t think the question is different because of the technology. Twitter is ready made for things like ‘the dozens’ to have a high velocity dissing circle, like a chat room or a school yard where we live out who we are. It doesn’t surprise me. Certain video games or certain movies have the same kind of correlations.

Serena: I don’t know why more Asian people like using Xanga. I think it just spread virally, friends share stuff with their friends.

Christian: The white people like The Huffington Post.

Lisa: Why is race an issue on the internet? Isn’t everyone on equal footing? Because of anonymity?

Christian: I know what we get OFF the internet. The internet, even though it’s a huge part of our lives, we still meet in person… like this conference. Then when you put in the anonymity things change. So there’s a ton of horrible racist stuff in the comment section on my site. If I were to delete it, I’d be deleting the person who posted it. I figured that you needed to put it out there and confront it. It’s all there, all the time — no matter what video you put online, almost immediately all this racist stuff comes out, and I think it’s important to show that. Confront it.

Theresa: In your book (to Christian), you mention cyber types. You say the internet is privileged, a white space, and so most people assume authors online are white. A lot of online blogs that deal with race, especially Asians who blog, actually want that voice, they actually want to be visible, not be anonymous.

Lisa: When you publicly put out a discourse about race, you are now a forum for where that will happen. There is a lot of shocking stuff, Christian has a 100 this minute. Have you had the opposite where someone had an epiphany.

Baratunde: A year ago New York Post published police shooting a gorilla and saying someone else will have to write the stimulus. I went on MSNBC to talk about if it was racist. And to talk about the psychological effects and why it was important. We were on air in 4 minutes which is long for TV, then we did 2 rounds each on YouTube 7 minutes, then 5 minutes, creating a debate in the infinite YouTube. He blogged it on all of our sites in our own communities, at least if there are people who are decent you can have a dialogue.

[Baratunde and Christian go in to a mock fight about bicycles -- fixed gear vs. free gear]

Serena: While we didn’t set out to teach people about our culture, it does make people more aware of the dynamics within our families, and the complex nature of Asian American households.

Theresa: And some Asians may have been stereotyped, may have tried to assimilate completely. So we’ve gotten emails what say “Oh thank you for showing me this, my mom does that too, and it makes me feel less alone.”

Serena: I’ve also gotten an email from this white guy that used to hate Asians, and when he stumbled across your blog it reminded me of that transition period.

Christian: I’ve had a lot of professors and TAs write and say… the book talks a lot about white privilege, and white people HATE talking about this, it’s really hard, and the profs and grad students send their students to the site, which forces the students to confront the class issues. Like, REI is white, you’re pricing kayaks, come on. And at least then the conversation is easier, and humor is the entry point. Not jammed down their throats with critical theory.

Lisa: We all know that the lulz is a really affective tool, attention is the scarce commodity. Ethan talked about memes from other countries. We may end up with many local internets. I’m wondering about who the audience is, is it a broad audience, is a racialized audience. Is that a good or bad thing?

Theresa: Our audience is a little more racialized, though we never intended to target a specific demographic. But we do talk almost exclusively about Asian American experiences…

Serena: We don’t say “only Asians invited,” it just ends up that way. We get submissions from other groups, about Russian moms…

Baratunde: For J’n'J politics, which is a black political middle class blog. Jack and Jill was an organization for upper middle class blacks. J’n'J politics is not affiliated with that; it is 40-50% black. I’m honestly trying to talk to everybody. The black people are more like a sigh of relief, confirming their existence. For others, it is more accessible. When it works. When it doesn’t, the “Asians don’t get it”.

Christian: I cast the widest net possible, since everyone on the internet is either white or annoyed with white people…
[crowd laughs]

Lisa: Is there a difference between how racism and homophobia is dealt with on the internet?

Christian: The racism stuff’s for the internet, the homophobia is for the X-box live…

Serena: On My Mom’s a FOB, you see that a lot of Asian American parents are afraid of gay people, which is a stereotype that sometimes gets undermined by the site itself. One of our highest-rated post was about some kid’s mom, who was finally starting to understand her kid was a homosexual…

Baratunde: J’n'J politics was started because there weren’t a lot of black political blogs, but there were gay black blogs. It has come up some on our blogs, but not a lot. More on our comments.

Lisa: Do you moderate comments?

Baratunde: We try. In the beginning, we were happy to get comments. 2008 was our big swing year because we were saying things about race. And things got out of control. I shouldn’t have to tell you what not to say. Grownups are worse than kids, because they know they shouldn’t do it and still do.

Serena: We used to moderate comments more. But now the community self-moderates. Actually I’m surprised by the lack of hate.

Theresa: Plus we have loyal readers, they back us up whenever someone posts mean stuff anonymously.

Lisa: Is there going to be a 2nd generation my mom is a FOB? Like drives a Camry and watches ice skating.

Serena: Maybe at some point… but I don’t know.

Lisa: Can a fixed gear helicopter be a meme?

[Christian laughs about that]

Lisa: What about avatars and race, people changing their appearance in avatars of other races? What does your Mii look like?

Chriatian: Exactly like me, I go for accuracy. It also depends on who you play in a video game, as a white male I don’t need an avatar, everyone looks like me already. They’re trying to change that, but the protagonist is almost always white anyway.

Baratunde: I will tag on to Christian. Resident Evil featured slaughtered black people by a white protagonist. Wouldn’t it be a more educational game if you had fighting colonialism? I don’t have an idea about the people who use avatars.

Serena: I’m just here to talk about my website, I don’t know about avatars. I just use my face…

Baratunde: I was once the_swine_flu on Twitter, which was a picture of a pig who did not like people.

Audience question: What do you think about someone acting a different race online?

Christian: At least they won’t end up on Dateline…

Baratunde: We should do that. We should show up at their house and say “You are not really Indonesian”.

Christian: You’re the racist one now.

Baratunde: It does bother me. Hip Hop group said “Blackness isn’t a race, it’s a state of mind.” No, bitch, it’s a race. Socially, economically, it is a race. There are more productive methods of understanding people of other races like talking to them.

Audience: What does your family think because the previous generation had this minefield that you are now frolicking in.

Christian: My dad tries to take credit for everything. Well — I’m Canadian, and we’ve been making fun of white people for a long time. But my dad says I steal all his jokes. The thing was, growing up, his neighborhood was so diverse… race was something people talked about.

Serena: My mom laughs even though I don’t think she knows what any of it meant. My dad just says he doesn’t get it, looks once and then never looks again. But my mom doesn’t really understand why it’s funny, I have to explain it to her.

Baratunde: My mother, when she was alive, was great. Was born in the 1940s, was in the streets marching, made me memorize all the countries in Africa before you can have fun outside. When I was doing public things, she was very supportive. Her big concern was remember why you are doing it because it’s easy to get sucked in to the machine. I try to keep it in mind but it’s not all in my hands.

Christian: I just have to say, Question 6 is brilliant, “Let’s talk about Jersey Shore; does it propagate stereotypes about orange people?”

Lisa: You all chose to write about race, how racist do you think things are these days and the Internet is helping?

Serena: For Asian Americans, I think it’s improving. Not because of our website, that’s what people do at work, but like other Asian American blogs, they discuss identity in an open honest way…

Baratunde: It’s hard to know. Writing about race chose me. With the Obama thing, it’s uncovered a lot of ugliness. Pew Study that I read, because I’m a nerd: white people get really angry with Democrat president. But with Obama this is the angriest they have ever been.

Christian: The wrong kind of white people… that’s what we call them.

Baratunde: It’s been worrying to see ugliness. When you normalize and mainstream ugly ideas it’s a bad thing, like Glen Beck. In some ways the Internet makes things better in some ways worse. It’s more about change.

Christian: What I see is, the changes that happened in the ’60s, the institutionalized racism, has been “fixed.” But at the tea parties… what people don’t understand is that what they’re doing is also horribly racist, but they don’t see it that way. Because it’s not institutional in those ways it used to be. As far as the internet goes… it brings out the best and the worst… my site got linked to a white supremacist site, they added things like “ethically pure babies,” “Mein Kampf,” etc.

Baratunde: The beautiful thing about the Internet is that it gives everybody a voice. The problem is that it gives everybody a voice.

Audience: I wrote the original hate speech policy for YouTube. How do you balance the freedom of expression and preserve that dialogue. Where do you draw a line between hate speech and offensive speech. It never felt right to completely sweep it under the carpet.

Serena: Some companies are overly sensitive… we tried to submit our website to Apple but they rejected the request for an app because of “objectionable content…” and there was no objectionable content.

Baratunde: You say Apple Hates Asian People!

Baratunde: The policy in YouTube, how was it implemented.

Audience guy: The scale is very hard.

Baratunde: I’m very loathe to promote restrictions on speech. Personal attacks, threatening comments, lives or safety. Our own blog policy is being refined.

Christian: I have to say, hatred towards white people has actually worked out pretty well for us.

Baratunde: I don’t know. I’ve drawn a few lines about personal threats, but I don’t know. I think there is value in seeing beauty and horror. Free speech is a part of what we need.

Christian: And a failure to recognize these people, you get the (false) sense that they don’t exist…

Audience: How does this translate from race to religion? Muslims face the same issue. On ChatRoulette either I see dicks, or I get called a terrorist because I’m brown.

Baratunde: Show them your dick.

Christian: It’s tough. It’s hard to say how that plays out.

Baratunde: Part of my frustration with raise is that we’ve done shit. Now it’s white people’s turn. Similarly, we need to stand up for people you are being confused with.

Lisa: Serena and Teresa said that it’s just something for people to look at at work. The things that people choose to look at is what these people have accomplished so let’s give them a hand.

Muhammad Saleem (msaleem)
Andrew Sorcini (MrBabyMan)
JD Rucker (OBoy)
Amy Vernon (AmyVernon) [Moderator]

Few subgroups online have been as rumored about, hated on, or wrangled with as the elite power users of Digg. But what’s this world actually like? Join the leading users of Digg as they discuss the often hidden culture of poweruserhood, their relationship with the site, the various intrigues that go on, the experiences in rising to the top, and the broader questions about the future of these platforms.

Recorded by: @flourish & @devanjedi
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Amy: I’m known on Digg as amyvernon. I’m the top female Digger of all time, which means I’m in the top 20. Just need a shirt that says “top vagina.” To my left is Andrew 4300+ front pages, Muhammad Saleem 2000+, JD has about 500.

Mo: Hi, I’m msaleem on Digg, Twitter, other social media sites. I work at the Chicago Tribune helping them form some sort of digital media strategy.

Andy: I’m Andy Sorcini, a film editor by trade, and when I’m not doing that I spend my time finding cool things and trying to get as many people to see them as possible.

JD: JD Rucker, I work for a company does social media promotion on Twitter, Digg, so on.

Amy: The three also host a show called The Drill Down and have a long and sordid history together. We’ll start off talking about how we got in to Digg.

Andy: Why don’t we share the video first? This is a video I made for – Digg had a party to celebrate their millionth user. So they called for submissions for people to make their own video describing what Digg means to them, so this is a video I made for that competition, the life of a Digger.

(showing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhLoghrZ9vE)

Amy: Basically a lot of people are wondering ROFLcon is about the meme, so why are we here? Every meme that is on the internet will be here, and us. Every meme that exists comes to Digg. Some birth on Digg, some catch on, brought to life, and we pound them into submission to death. Kanye West fiasco had thousands on Digg, and many hit the front page, by a day later was declared dead when the rest of the world started hearing about it. What brought us to Digg?

JD: I started the goal was to drive traffic to my own site. It’s a challenge. Got to have quality, must hit the pulse. You can still enhance your chances by getting the right submitters, certain techniques. But overall must be high quality content. Recently I’ve only submitted other stuff, not my own.

Amy: So you don’t submit your own stuff?

JD: You can’t just submit your own stuff. You have to have diversity in domains, quality of content. But I don’t submit my own stuff any more. Other people do.

Amy: Andy has had so many front pages, every 4-6 months; someone says he must be banned.

Andy: Somehow I control the front page even though my ratio is about 30% of what I submit gets to the front page. And that is less than 1% on a weekly basis of all the stories that are on the front page of Digg. But somehow I “control the front page” according to these people, and uh, the way that I came across Digg was through DiggNation – I came across the podcast first. And we should probably talk about how Digg – the ingenious way they publicize themselves. You tell that story a little better.

Mo: Kevin Rose, the creator, created the site in opposition to mainstream media where some editor decides “these are the stories we think are important” and we consume it like drones. He decided to flip that around – it’s a democratically created news front page. When he was first creating the site the social media site of the day was Slashdot and delicious to an extent. And these guys at that time were on G4 TechTV and they had their own tech shows and a very geeky audience. And he decided to go onto this show and pretend that he didn’t know what Digg was about, and that was Digg’s coming-out party.

Andy: Digg’s subversive self-promotion coming out party. But we uh -

Andy: I think what kept me there was that I felt like I had this venue where I could find all this cool stuff on the internet. And when something of mine got to the front page – I mean more people look at my submissions on a daily basis than the NY Times. That was a couple years ago, I don’t know if that’s the case anymore, NY Times has kind of shaped up there. But that was fairly impressive to all of a sudden have this audience where I could guide the eyeballs to all of this great stuff on the internet.

Amy: How about you Mo?

Mo: The ability to communicate something you’re passionate about to hundreds of thousands of other people – something that everybody wants to do. Let’s say you’re an Apple fanboy, they’re announcing a product, you submit – everyone sees it. The real reason to stick around on Digg though is the reason we’re here and on this panel. We’re trying to figure out how memes are formed and how they spread. We can’t find where they’re formed, but the role that Digg and other social news sites play is actually getting those memes to a mass audience. You do a search on any meme, and you can see not only are those stories are getting thousands of Diggs/millions of plays, they get remixed and those go through the same system and get similar exposure.

[show screen with a simple search for 'keyboard cat' on Digg]

Andy: If memes are viral then we’re like the sneezers.

Amy: The top one here is a mashup of 3 Wolf Moon and Keyboard Cat. The 3 Keyboard Cat Moon.

Amy: How people get really pissy with each other on Digg. Sites getting angry at each other. For burying them. Or sniping, Diggers camping out to submit the first picture of the day.

Mo: For being a site that’s all about giving power back to small publishers, Digg is a little confused when it comes to implementation. And you’ll see sites that are more mainstream (NY Times, Cracked.com) have an easier time getting more exposure on Digg. As a result of that community members within Digg, when they’re starting out, they want to submit the stories they think have an easier chance of getting to the front page. Rather than trying to submit stuff that they think /should/ get noticed, they submit stuff that would already get noticed. You see Digg users competing with each other to submit from these sources, so they can become the “secret masters of Digg.”

Andy: Digg has kind of put a stop to that recently because they’ve basically locked it down so you can only submit one URL to the site at a time, you can’t duplicate the URL.

Amy: But we were talking about car sites that would accuse the other of sniping the others submission and threatening to call out lawyers.

Mo: So in addition to this you have Digg users fighting and mystery created around people who are able to get to the front page, because a lot of people believe that there’s a handful of people who control the front page of Digg.

Amy: The auto space is brutal on Digg.

Mo: So in the auto space you have only a certain number of stories in certain topics be on the front page. When you’re competing for that one space on the front page you have publishers and they’re fighting with each other. The incident I was talking about this one company thought the other company was maliciously attacking their content, and they actually got lawyers involved.

JD: It’s competitive because like Mo said there is a limited number of slots on the front page. It’s about getting the links, credibility. Google uses the front page as credibility. Very few stories make it to the front page out of thousands. Among automotive stories only 2-3 will make it in a day, it does get ugly. When we’re at these panels we try to convey these things and lawyers get involved friends and enemies get formed. I’m talking in code now.

Andy: It gets fierce! Y’know there’s kind of a secret subculture too – when enough users reach a certain level where they become popular and they’ve submitted so many things that they’re frequent popular submitters on Digg, they tend to find each other and clump together, and we form cliques naturally, organically. We don’t actually go out trying to form cliques, but it happens as a matter of course as you become successful doing it [Digging] on a daily basis. A lot of it used to be through IM but we discovered IM got really spammy and we got inundated by people who just wanted us to put their stuff on Digg. So we had to come up with secret backchannel ways to talk to each other. You guys want to talk about some of the ways we communicate within, at the risk of – ?

Amy: Mental telepathy? Don’t tell anyone.

JD: There are sites like xkcd that allow you to get to the front page easily. If you can get to the front page, it’s a flag that you will Digg other people’s stuff.

Mo: The description of the panel specifically said there would be no sharing of secrets! But – you guys have seen how there’s hesitation on certain topics… Digg has a love/hate relationship with publishers/readers and there’s a tension there. If you seem to be manipulating things, boom, you’re banned. So people tend to be very guarded about it. You get thrown out of the community and you’re out forever.

Amy: I have heard of people changing their IP address, but I don’t know them personally. From the questions “I saw this panel on Reddit yesterday.”

Mo: So… social news and social bookmarking, it’s the biggest. They’re talking about Digg. Digg’s not the only game in town – Reddit’s really good, Stumbleupon’s really good, and then you get into some niche sites. Redditors will regularly say “Digg users – all they do is see what’s popular on Reddit, submit it to Digg and it becomes famous a day late,” which is why there’s a comment up there saying “I saw this panel on Reddit yesterday.”

Amy: Some of the funniest comments on Digg are “I saw this on Digg yesterday”

Andy: There’s a reason for that! There’s a difference in the lag time between when something is submitted and front pages on Digg and Reddit, because of their user bases and size.

Amy: On Digg I rarely hit the front page until 15-20 hours of submission. Some people take just 5 hours, it seems like an accident to me. Some interesting questions: Are we cultural anthropologists or asshole bouncers (throwback to Ethan Z’s keynote). An interesting question. By submitting the things we do, we are those bouncers.

JD: When you get to the level where you can get to the front page, you have great responsibility like Peter Parker. You can take a white rabbit in a snow storm and get it to the front page. If top Digger submits it to Digg, you can get it to the front page of Digg. You have to make sure you’re not submitting shit.

Andy: Exactly. With the status that we’ve accumulated there’s a responsibility we have as well to our followers to – not! We have to make sure not to submit crap, basically.

Mo: There’s a question about Digg and the NY Times, that sometimes Digg is fun and funny but NY Times is probably more valuable – but you have to remember that Digg is a product of its community. Maybe the stuff on the front page isn’t “quality” to your definition of it but it is what the community wants. There’s another site called NewsTrust that rates news – you’re not voting it up or down – is this story a good story, or is it biased? Is it timely?

Andy: But do they do breaking news?

Mo: That’s not really the point – I mean, they’re a community judged news site, not community curated.

Amy: I would like to address Nick Douglas. ROFLCon was not an inside job.

Amy: A whole bunch of people are really happy that we are not online, and submitting to Digg. There is Missbabyman, mrbabylean, oldboy. People copy names. If the avatar looks the same as one of them, someone. No one ever Diggs without reading a story, ever .

Amy: Why do you spend so much time working for a website that profits off your labor? Does Digg profit?

Mo: That alone is a very interesting question. The thing you need to know about Digg is that when it was first launched it was a very innovative idea – nobody was doing social news, there was delicious but it was about bookmarks, not creating a social news front page. So Digg took that to its logical end and it was really hot for the first three years and it was the darling of Silicon Valley – maybe Google was gonna buy them for millions. You gotta remember they didn’t capitalize on that. Digg just broke even 5 months ago – it took 5 years and 35 million dollars in venture capital for them to break even.

Amy: So that’s all you need. 5 years and 35 million dollars and a really good idea.

Amy: How many of you are interested in the future of Digg?

Mo: How many of you are interested in the future of Digg?

Amy: Also, I do feel our heads are beautifully shaped (reading from backchannel)

Andy: some of us have had the privilege of getting a sneak peek into the future of Digg and I actually can’t talk about that.

Amy: if you talk about that, they will take your children away.

Mo: It was like that white bunny in a snowstorm.

Andy: But what’s interesting is that in the context of what Facebook is doing.

Mo: Well yeah. Digg’s main innovation was the ‘Digg’ button and the algorithm. A couple years ago they announced “We’re gonna make a Digg button for the web.” They were going to put the Digg button across the web, and we have yet to see it.

Andy: And that’s basically what Facebook announced with their ‘like’ button.

Amy: If you’re unfamiliar with Facebook, you have to leave now.

Mo: Yeah, problem is their new set of social plug-ins makes Facebook the fabric of the social web. Like buttons, etc – the next step of the Facebook Connect. So the hopes and dreams that Digg had of becoming that social platform for the entire web have been crushed by Facebook.

Amy: Is there really an Austrian general in the back left of the room. There is a request for you to march back and forth in the room.

Amy: Another question about groupthink. How do the structures of Digg and Reddit lead to different ways of thinking and differences in the community?

Andy: The main difference between Digg and Reddit is the size.

Mo: Digg is 5-6 million. And Reddit is what, 5-600?

Andy: And what Reddit doesn’t realize is that as their community gets bigger they’re going to look more like Digg.

Mo: I think the easiest way to explain what’s working and what’s not working on Digg is to compare it to our current political system. It’s a bit commercialized, it’s big.

JD: It’s a slow process. Reddit is much more nimble. You can get thousands of visits in minutes. Digg takes longer. Reddit is self-moderated, Digg is not. That might be changing. Self-moderation will change in Digg. Reddit uses moderation who are users who have the ability to get rid of spam. Digg does not, they use their staff and rely on bury.

Amy: Why do you spend so much of your free time on Digg. It’s really addictive. I post what I find amusing on Facebook. I have friends who tell me “You find the funniest stuff.” It’s good to have people tell me “You’re awesome.” I’ve made really good friends, and I see way more stuff than I could.

Andy: Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, a little validation?

JD: Why do people watch TV or WoW? They enjoy it. Digg is a recreational thing. They want to get that rush, that a story they selected has so many people reading it. It’s a power trip.

Amy: You have 4300 Diggs, do you still get that tingle when you get that email from Digg?

Andy: Absolutely. Absolutely. Every – it’s definitely a bipolar reaction for me. When I get the SMS alert there’s that thrill, then I go to the site and check out the comments, and if I’ve gone for a day without a story on the front page I get depressed. “Why doesn’t anybody love me and my stories?!”

Amy: My husband is like “Go submit something because you’re really bitchy” I haven’t had a front page for TWO DAYS!!

JD: Nobody else in the world gets an SMS when they front page.

Amy: How do you like the new format for ads that look like submissions?

Mo: Let’s talk about the ads a little bit. Digg has an inherent problem: Their community started off tech-savvy and web-savvy and they are built on a CPM advertising model. Problem is a majority of their users have adblock and they don’t see those ads, so Digg doesn’t make money off their heaviest users. So recently they created a new ad unit where the ad looks like a story and goes through like it was a sponsored story.

Amy: And you can vote it up or bury it.

Mo: You can’t comment on it because the brand wouldn’t like that if you started bashing them in a comment thread on Digg.

Amy: When they first did it, when they tested it they made sure that it worked with AdBlock Plus. So you would not see the ad, if you had AdBlock.

Andy: I have a couple Reddit accounts and the real mrbabyman is me on Reddit, I also have another one which I started a couple years ago just to test the waters to see if the magic was still there, if I could still find and spread good content irrespective of my status on Digg. And the answer is ‘yes,’ that other account is doing quite well and nobody is able to connect that with me.

Amy: What’s the name of that account?

Andy: I’m not going to tell you.

Amy: Do the people on the panel make a living off Digg? It’s complicated. I personally am making a living because I made a name on Digg. I help some sites with their social media strategy, as a journalist for news sites. I am not paid for submitting things to Digg.

Andy: Yeah, I make my money as a film editor. That’s how I – I don’t get any monetization from Digg at all.

Mo: I wish I did, God knows I’ve spent a lot of time on that site. In a sense, I work for the Chicago Tribune and they make money off of Digg via page views, but again, it’s an insubstantial amount. Short answer’s no but I wish I did.

Amy: It’s an indirect thing. Did you get the job because of the profile you built on Digg? Part of your entire in to social media.

JD: You can help sites get on to the front page. They don’t want you to accept money for Diggs, etc. People have offered to send us t-shirts, or pay us $1000. I’ve always said no, let’s face it. I make money through social media, but not directly through Digg.

Andy: There’s a difference – there’s things that are absolutely not allowed because of the Terms of Use, like you can’t accept money to submit anything to Digg. However, you can work with publishers in helping to create content that they themselves can submit to Digg, in other words, as a consultant help them get on Digg or other social news sites by optimizing their content to what you feel would work best.

Mo: And that’s not something that’s a standard ToS violation across all sites – for example, Netscape: AOL’s attempt to bury Digg – they hired 30 top Digg users to get that site up and running. Digg users were upset and so were the founders of Digg, because they thought “Huh, we don’t compensate our users… what if it’s successful?” Fortunately for them it wasn’t successful, but some sites feel like it’s appropriate for people to pay to submit.

JD: Digg encourages and is going to encourage site owners. If you’re sitting there from a decent sized publication, you can get yourself on the front page of Digg. If the people who come here have a vested interest in getting on the front page, Digg is a great venue.

Mo: And their ToU is more or less “We’re going to try to monetize your participation, and the publishers will make money off the traffic, but you’re not allowed to make money for being the go-between.”

Amy: If you started a new Digg account today, could you get the same submissions front-paged easily?

Andy: The Digg algorithm has changed quite a bit. I can only theoretically broach that question because you can only have one username on Digg, and that’s why I did the thing with Reddit. But – the way the Digg promotion algorithm works the more successful you are the harder it is to get stuff to the front page and the more sensational the submissions have to be to get to the front page.

Mo: Wait. it’s not just that. The more successful you are the bigger following you have so the moment you submit anything to the community you’ll get a certain number of votes almost automatically.

Amy: after they read the article, of course. And those votes tend to be from the same people over and over again. So to try to level the playing field they make it harder for you, so that you aren’t seeing the same thing again and again.

JD: The short answer is yes. It will take a certain period of time to get known. It would take Andy about 2 weeks to get back to the front page. His newer account could get to the front page more often for the first month than his real mrbabyman account.

Amy: Do you disagree about anything? JD disagrees with anything anyone says. Mo smokes menthol, and I hate that.

Andy: Mo likes the RIAA.

Mo: That’s entirely inaccurate. I agree, go EFF and all that stuff, I just don’t like piracy, that’s it, and one would think that this guy being a film editor doesn’t want people stealing his films.

Andy: But I’d say the metrics that say piracy is bad for the film industry are fallacious.

Mo: That’s an argument for a separate panel.

Amy: With the introduction of Tumblr or Stumbleupon, does the elitist culture of Digg have a face new challenges?

Andy: Do you feel like that’s an accurate characterization?

JD: Digg is an elitist community. The front page is controlled by 1% of the community.

Andy: But that percentage of the community is active.

JD: 1% of the active community.

Andy: But I think if you’re active at all on the site that you begin to build the kind of cache that you can actually get stuff popular.

JD: You can go on Reddit right now, if you have a solid piece of content you can get it to the front page without a problem. If you have Obama kissing Marilyn Monroe, you will not hit the front page of Digg. The chance is infinitesimal.

Andy: The question is about super personalized curation platforms.

Mo: One, nobody’s really figured out personalizing news to that level; it’s not really super-personalized. Two, these sites have needed recommender engines for a very long time. It’s just a matter of somebody figuring out how to look at your activity on a site and give you the most relevant stories for you and nobody’s really figured it out. I don’t think the social news sites compete with Tumblr on any level.

Amy: How much do you know about the algorithm, and what does you know change how you submit on Digg? Every time you figure it out it changes.

Andy: They don’t change it they tweak it but you know what we have figured out how it works, we don’t know the specifics, but we know what aspects are responsible for what is successful or not on Digg. But unfortunately that doesn’t change how we are able to submit anything.

Amy: There was one period of time when the algorithm would allow multiple front pagers for a single user.

Andy: They’re just tweaking certain values. We can’t control whether a story gets on the front page or not, all we can do is best-fit what we submit.

Mo: I think at the end of the day you can even manipulate the Google algorithm. There are certain things you know.

Amy: mrbabyman is a liar, he does not have a wife. He has a girlfriend.

Andy: How big is the core group of power users?

Mo: Define core.

Andy: JD, you’d know better than anybody else.

JD: There are approx 70 or so Digg users who are consistently on Digg. There are 130 or so who are front pagers for a while. Some are part-timers. These are the people who provide the passion of the Digg. They haven’t played the game so they don’t get to the front page.

Amy: Vast majority are reading. A smaller group are submitting. An even smaller is actively submitting.

Amy: Thoughts on the gender imbalance on Digg. I think that it’s changed a lot. There are a lot more women on Digg who are regularly hitting the front page. The site started out as a tech news site, which has a gender imbalance. That’s where it’s root is from.

Mo: Facebook and Twitter tend to skew in women’s favor.

Amy: Yeah, more female users on those sites. There are more and more women who are on the top 100 Diggers of all time and on the site. Sometimes I put a troll’ing comment on Digg being a whiny women, just because I want them to tell me to go make a sandwich.

Amy: How do you find interesting content?

Andy: We specifically said that this panel wouldn’t be a ‘how to’ but I feel like we should give the last couple minutes for tips. The question is “How do you find interesting content?” You have to be a member of the space, there on a daily basis, because Digg is very much about the zeitgeist.

Mo: Give them the short answer: Go to Reddit.com.

Andy: But you have to feel what’s going on a regular basis, you build RSS feeds of sites you like that are popular, we joke about the Reddit thing but because Reddit is so quick to brew – surface content it’s almost like a canary in a coal mine, and Digg is just a bigger audience for that. There are tools that we use – DI66.net -

Amy: There’s a site di66.net where you can see top words and descriptions. e.g. “Obama and Megan Fox eat bacon”. Talks about top 1000 sites over last few days, months.

Andy: Any of those sites are a great starter kid of RSS feeds to start following if you want to get to the front page.

Amy: It has to be something that you like, it becomes obvious if you submit something that you don’t care about. Or if you are paid to submit it.

Andy: Be passionate about what you want to spread out there.

Amy: It’s a lot easier to work it if you like it and are interested in it.

Amy: @amyvernon everywhere.

Andy: thedrilldown.com, and if you Google mrbabyman you’ll find me. The Drilldown podcast’s live Sunday afternoons on ustream.tv.

Mo: I’m msaleem on Digg, Twitter, etc.

Amy: I have no podcast. I would like to say that.

Brian Govern (Posted first review of Three Wolf Moon Shirt)
Michael McGloin (The Mountain)
Antonia Neshev (Three Wolf Moon Artist)
Patrick Davison (MemeFactory) [Moderator]

How does a simple, quiet shirt with a little bit of stardust, three wolves, and a moon end up kicking the Amazon bestsellers lists ass for more than four weeks running? What’s it like being a part of that process? What do you do after it’s all said and done? Does the shirt actually grant you mystical powers?

Recorded by: @andthengensaid & @wphillips49
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Patrick: Introduction, welcome, big up to the magical moon. Perfunctory introductions. Brian Govern, law student in New Jersey. The original Three Wolf commenter. Michael McGloin, businessman/artist, art director at the Mountain. Antonia Neshev, artist, moved to US in 96, paints lots of wolves, and is Three Wolf Moon artist. Throws to Brian.

Brian: Well, I have to be honest, my review for the Three Wolf Moon shirt is the first and only funny thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. I’m going to be an attorney, not very funny. I’ve only purchased 2 things on Amazon, both law books. Also not funny. I’m from Detroit. I don’t have much experience with being clever or ever making people laugh on purpose. I tapped into some vein of Americana when I wrote the review for it. It was a complete whim and then we ended up here today.

Patrick: Michael, describe responsibilities.

Mike: All things art. Designing shirts, web, talking with artists, doing sketches, trying to get shirts done, marketing, catalogues, the whole thing.

Patrick: How many artists do you work with?

Mike: I have a core of about 15, Antonia is one of 100’s of other artists all over the world.

Patrick: How often do you come up with new designs?

Mike: We do about 100 designs a year.

Patrick: Antonia, how did you come to paint wildlife?

Antonia: It’s a long story. I did a bit of writing but I will summarize the most important events in my life. I had been creative sculptural pieces until I got tired of lugging them around. Moving the computer was easier than moving paintings. My husband left for only his computer when he was hired by a printing company in CO. The company was hiring anyone willing to transport to the isolated community. Since I was already there, I spent 2 years working there in house and learning about how to design nature t-shirts.

Patrick: So now let’s talk about Three Wolf Moon itself. This is what I’d call a flashbulb moment — you always remember where you were. For each of you, when did you know something was different about Three Wolf Moon?

Brian: When I was sitting down and I opened my email, and it was in the middle of finals and I hadn’t had much of a life in a long time. It was an email from Amazon about public relations saying the NYTs wants to talk to me, and can I pass over their into. I Google myself, and my review of TWM is all over the internet. I made the review 6 months ago, and I had forgotten that I had even written it, so it just came out of the blue for me.

Mike: A guy I worked for forwarded the review from Amazon to me, so I went and checked it out, then I realized that there were like 100 reviews. I sent it out to our entire company. Do you see what going on here? This is insane! We have about 300 dozen of each shirt in stock, but TWM was out of stock, and they were all going to 1 customer, the one that was selling on Amazon. They didn’t even tell us they were out of stock. Then we decided PRINT IT NOW.

Patrick: Antonia do you remember?

Antonia: Yes, I do, I always check my t-shirts, and Googling them, and looking for ratings and how popular is the image. I was aware of the review under TWF, I thought it was written by someone who has nothing more meaningful to do. It was sitting there quietly for a while until one day I received a historic email from Michael. You have to read this, it is out of control. I went there and saw 1000s and 1000s of comments.

Mike: While TWM was happening, she was on vacation for like three weeks. No one could find her.

Antonia: I had emails, from Mike, looking for me. Where are you? Are you kidnapped?

Brian: I can confirm it was from someone who has nothing better to do. Ask my wife, I’m on the internet from 5 minutes after I wake up. The fact that I missed the whole TWM thing is ridiculous.

Patrick: So TWM happened, how have your lives been, post-moon?

Brian: Even locally it was kind of cut off. The day that the TWM was on world news tonight, the local news broke in on this story about this girl who had kidnapped herself broke it, so I hadn’t seen it. A lot of people I hadn’t talked to in 15 years friended me on Facebook.

Patrick: Trying to get a cut…

Brian: Most of the time, people don’t put 2 and 2 together. When I tell people they’ll say “Oh, you’re the guy who wrote that?” and then move on with their lives. I’ve been trying to figure out how to spin this into some kind of marketing thing, but I haven’t been able to figure out how.

Patrick: And that raises the question, have you thought about reviewing anything else?

Brian: I’ll be honest, I haven’t. I’ve thought about it. I’ve attempted to. I’m faced with trying to follow up with something that was important enough to be the subject of a panel at this conference. I don’t want to be that guy. I’m already paralyzed by the success of the whole thing. I’ve had bands try to ask me to review them. Some products, like an irrigation system. There’s no comedic gold in irrigation systems.

Patrick: Well, so offers from bands, or companies with money. What would it take?

Brian: The right product, and the right inspiration on it would get me back into the review. The review was something I’d written to someone. I kinda put myself into their shoes and wrote the review from their view point. Most people who ask are friends who are going to be Patent Lawyers. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to compensate me.

Patrick: Michael, what we’ve seen is the way in which corporations respond to internet memes… one of the things that was great was how quickly The Mountain came out in support of TWM. How has TWM changed your approach to marketing?

Mike: It made our brand completely stand out, in itself, it put us on the map. We’re not a small company, but what it allowed us to do is get over the hump of selling just to middle America. We’ve done collaboration with Element skateboards, Ronnie — in New York, mainstreamed us;

Patrick: Do you have any pre-wolf competitors?

Mike: We have some rivals…

Patrick: Are they super pissed now?

Mike: They started selling the shirt. Antonia, has the popularity of TWM effected your work?

Antonia: It opened up our business, it made our brand completely stand out. It has allowed us to get into a lot of markets we weren’t in before. It put us on the map. We’re not small company, we have about 150 employees, but what it allowed us to do was to get over the hump of just selling to middle America and get into some larger chains and doing some collaboration. I’m doing some collaborations out of New York. Just our look in general, it mainstreamed us.

Mike: We have some rivals, but not really. Liquid is a rival of ours. They started selling the shirt, so they banked.

Antonia: In a very positive way, I have a great exposure and Michael initiated a licensing representation by The Mountain, so I have no worries about how the business will go, that’s Michael’s area of action, and I have a pretty good life.

Patrick: Have you been receiving any requests for wolf-themed art?

Antonia: Most of the people are interested in using TWM image since it is the phenomenon, and I’d like to believe that there is a time when people will be interested in seeing beyond that, to the rest of the work that I have, that has quality, but not the popularity. TWM will open the door to the rest of that.

Mike: And it already has…

Patrick: Speaking of requests, obviously English is not her first language. I asked if she felt comfortable talking in English, asked if maybe she wanted, she could do some art on the chalkboard.

A: What do you want to see? Wolves? More wolves?

Patrick: Cats? I think we want cats. Why don’t you guys start backchanneling… You guys throw up your suggestions. So, we talked about your experiences with TWM… let’s get a little theoretical: Why do you think TWM became popular?

Brian: Well, first and foremost, I think the story kinda created a frame work, a mythology, that other people could add to. If it was just a funny review, it’d be a funny review, and that’d be it. “Not putting this shirt on your torso, you put it on your soul”. It almost created a progressive story where people could add to it and sort of tell their own story, it created this mythos that resonated with people and let them add their own. On top of it it converged with this trucker chic with the net hat and PRB beer and it kind of merged with that undercurrent and it gave it more of a body than a single funny review would have.

Patrick: Any other thoughts?

Mike: I believe it because it was a product that people could buy. The majority of the reviews before were about milk? Just random things that people wouldn’t buy on Amazon. Since we were a big company and could fill orders for something quickly, it allowed it to gain a momentum. It wasn’t just a meme that had to build over time, it connected to the real world and connected to the real world.

Patrick: Connects to the real world… speaking of that, is there, are there any standout moments? Most you printed in a single run?

Mike: We do about 400 dozen per press per day and we ran it three months straight.

Patrick: That’s a lot of shirts.

Mike: we printed and dyed so many shirts and our waste water company called and said please stop dying because we are not that big.

Patrick: So TWM is an environmental hazard.

Mike: We printed 100’s of 1000s of shirts. Walmart picked it up 60k shirts. It keeps going. Amazon is like our #1 customer right now. You can look at people at work that you pass on the street, and maybe 50% have seen the same funny cat. But if you have the TWM shirt on, you can ID each other by being part of that meme. It’s like you’re part of this secret brotherhood.

Mike: There are people who buy our shirts beforehand and you’re like “yeaaah” and they’re like “I’ll kick your ass!”

Patrick: This raises a good question, do either of you own the shirt?

Mike: Yes.

Brian: Absolutely.

Mike: We actually print a glow in the dark one now, because in his “cons” he listed “shit does not glow.”

Mike: Yeah. It glows.

Patrick: How many are out there?

Mike: You can buy it on our website. But not many people know about that. www.themountain.me

Patrick: Obviously there is a TWM variation, in the ROFLcon shirt? But are you saying there are other secret variations?

Patrick: The Internet might have just found out.

Patrick: How often do you guys wear it?

Brian: Well, I’m married, so I can’t wear it too often. I have my mint shirt that I keep for prosperity and show it to my grandkids, where my 15 minutes came from. Mike sent me a crate to give away at Christmas, so we have family photos of everyone wearing them.

Patrick: Would either of you consider using a t-shirt cannon in any contest?

Mike: Definitely.

Brian: Absolutely.

Patrick: You mentioned

[Antonia draws Pedobear.]

Patrick: You were talking about the 2 usergroups, one ironic and one not. I think we might be taking a turn down negative lane…

[Continues to draw.]

Patrick: Now there is definitely a subtext… to the popularity of the TWM reviews that play on the white trash stereotype. In the wake of that, how have you guys reacted… Brian, how do you feel now about the original tone of your review?

Brian: I think that the internet community as a whole is probably less politically correct than the average bear, considering that the #7 image out there is a ASCII goatse, and the last panel was a ASCII wiener, I think people are a little less politically correct. I had someone specific in mind…

Patrick: You know a person?

Brian: I think that class of society is the last bastion you can legally make fun of. I didn’t mean any harm by it, I had a specific person in mine. In the vein of internet memes, I think there is less problem there than if I was openly making fun of someone on TV.

Patrick: So the context of it being… in a comment field, as opposed to on television.

Mike: Would you have changed it if you knew it was going to be so huge.

Brian: No, not really. The person it was inspired by, who I will never confess because I’ll get a mail bomb, they really liked wolf shirts. I was thinking about how that individual would have grown as a person and what they would have said to the shirt. Because of the good humor, I would have done it the same exact way.

Patrick: Have you had any experiences managing 2 different user bases? Genuine buyers and ironic buyers?

Mike: Not so much, it’s really funny, because I don’t know how many of you actually know our shirts at all, but it’s America, a lot of animals, when TWM took off, our customer base, 95% of it could not sell the shirt, because our customer weren’t you guys. The rest of them were selling huge #s of it. We are a whole sale company, so it was kind of a difference for us. There were maybe 50 customers who were selling the heck of it, and the rest of the customers get it.

Patrick: Have you seen any boost of sales from the previous community, or just the new community?

Mike: Well, everyone knows that the recession kinda sucked for just about everybody. We were down about 25%. We lost about 25% of our customers, they just got wiped out. TWM happened after we brought our workforce down about 30%. The t-shirt guy shined on us, and TWM made it all better. We have hired almost all our people back and now we’re pretty much on fire right now. We’re printing 7 days a week like all our shirts.

Patrick: That’s great. That hits on something I’ve noticed, there ’s some aggression, some reviews go a bit further with that stereotype. But there seems to be a general positive air about the whole thing.

Mike: In general, yeah. Probably like 100 or so maybe 120 reviews on Amazon. It started for me to get a little racy, another wolf shirt, it was a long sleeved shirt. “It cured my AIDS,” it got really racist, this other meme. I responded to them, and let them know that our company wasn’t cool with that. I thought it was this one on one with this guy, and all of a sudden they were like The Mountain hates us! But we were like no we like the money thank you. I didn’t really think about it as a bad thing.

[Antonia draws a dinosaur mounting a robot]

Brian: A couple got racy, but I think it will still not as bad as anything written on YouTube.

[a standing ovation for dinobot]

Patrick: Tomorrow, that will be on Cafe Press.

Patrick: If something bubbles back up from this, we’ll slip that back to her. Speaking of, what do you think about Tuscan Whole Milk? Also, do you look more closely at reviewing threads now, and do you spend more time on the internet?

Mike: I think that they are missing a huge opportunity. I haven’t talked to Tuscan, but don’t you think they’re missing a huge opportunity.

Patrick: What do you think they could do? To, ya know, sell some milk. It’s like $70/gallon.

Brian: They actually carry it at grocery store, so of course I had to buy it. I almost troll around the internet now, but it’s impossible for me to do more so than I did in the past, but something like Tuscan Whole Milk, you gravitate towards it because there are 100s of funny reviews. A lot of times people try to do their own funny reviews, but they’re not really very funny. Amazon has tried to embrace this, and tried to make a video. Snow tires aren’t going to lend themselves to funny reviews as well as other products. It has to be the right product.

Patrick: Antonia, now that you’ve finished gracing us with your drawings. Do you spend a lot of time online?

Antonia: Every day, Facebook, I spend 3 – 4 hours on there.

Patrick: Really?

Antonia: To keep connected with friends. Everyday, I go through different websites, I have a huge list of bookmarks of different art websites, and that’s my main interest. Another one is looking for tribal jewelry and ethnic jewelry, which also interest me. National Geographic. I can easily spend days and days and days on the internet.

Patrick: Do you look to other art online as inspiration?

Mike: No, she hasn’t sent me any?

Patrick: Are you just living off the success of TWM?

Antonia: No, I’m working secretly.

Patrick: So there’s something awesome that’s about to drop?

Antonia: A tsunami.

Patrick: I asked the gentlemen here if they owned or wore the shirt, do you? Do you wear it?

Antonia: Sure, yes. Isn’t it a macho shirt? Should I wear it?

Patrick: Absolutely.

Mike: Does your husband wear it?

A: Yes. Actually, my brother in law wears it, and he got divorced.

Patrick: So it seems like the power of the moon didn’t shine so brightly…

Mike: No, because everyone was attracted to him

Patrick: How did you find the shirt on Amazon, Brian? Were you looking for wolf shirts?

Brian: Believe it or not, no. I remember the day, it was 11:30 at night, I was laying in bed with my laptop, I was looking for “Professional responsibility, patent law, etc.”, and the Amazon suggestion popped up that I would probably like the TWM shirt. So if those are your interests, then you should probably buy the shirt. I have no idea why that combination brought out the shirt.

Mike: Well you were looking for great things.

Patrick: On the last panel, one of the speakers admitted to possibly being a bit intoxicated when they made their videos… were you on some substance or other?

Brian: Other than pure boredom from having spent the last 3 years reading 12 hours/day. Usually I get wittier when I get drunk, but I think that’s just my opinion not anybody else. It was off the cuff, without any assistance.

Patrick: Antonia, were there any substances involved?

Antonia: There are always substances involved.

Patrick: Anything you’d care to describe?

Antonia: Like alcohol.

Patrick: Antonia, how does it feel to be an American icon, responsible for Americana, as an immigrant?

A: Oh, thank you for this question. That is the most ridiculous thing. As an immigrant, I saw on the website of my home country, which is a notable capital in Europe, there is so much going on there right now, and I saw at the bottom of the page a list of Celebrities of Bulgaria, National Heroes. There are the most recognized writers, singers, musician, composers, huge names, and on the bottom of this list is “Antonia, creator of TWM.”

Mike: That’s awesome.

Patrick: There’s another question… would 5 wolves be better than 3? No, obviously. But, if TWM could have any other number, how many would it have?

Mike: One. The loners. Instead of the wolf pack. But three is the best, it’s the trinity.

Brian: Sixty nine.

Patrick: That’s the second funniest thing you’ve ever said. Antonia?

Brian: I was going to go with 42, but 69 is better.

Antonia: I’m sorry, I have no suggestions. You cannot break TWM.

Patrick: Michael, I have a question that might not be super appropriate [How many women are you with per week?]

Mike: One.

Patrick: Ok, what percent of sales for the Mountain come from Amazon vs. other sources for Three Wolf?

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. We have like 10,000 customers wholesale customers so it’s really all over the place. It was probably maybe around 5%, maybe 5-10% Amazon. It’s probably around 3% now, maybe. It’s still in the Top 10.

Patrick: I mean you’re the art director. Now, what celebrity would like most of all to wear a TWM shirt? Living and dead. Who would you most like to get the shirt on?

Mike: Maybe Tesla? That’s a tough one, because the internet says EVERYONE’S worn it. Obama.

Patrick: That because of Photoshop?

Mike: No, I’m the Photoshop master.

Patrick: Between you and Antonia, who’s better at Photoshop?

Mike: I’ve been using Photoshop for 20 years, but she did TWM so she wins. Brian, who’d you want to wear TWM?

Brian: I thought Teddy Roosevelt is a pretty tough guy, I wanna see it. I would love to see Quagmire see him wearing it.

Patrick: Antonia?

Antonia: Frank Zappa for sure.

Patrick: We’ve got about 5 minutes left, any other questions or closing remarks?

Brian: I’d like to thank everyone for coming. I am so amazed to be here, that just some brain fart, ended up making so many people laugh and so many people rally behind it that people would want to hear about it, that some random dude from South Jersey could land here. I guess that just shows the power of the internet.

Antonia: Thank you all for participation and supporting us in such a touching way.

Mike: Yeah, I mean you guys did it, you guys spread it, you are the powers that be and let everyone know everything that’s going on. Me and my company thanks you from the bottom of our hearts.

Patrick: I talked to Antonia about drawing before the panel, but how would you feel, at the conclusion of this, if Antonia could draw us a moon on the board, to pose in front of the board, for a photo-op… for a Three Three Wolf Moon Panelist Moon Panel photo?

Robert Cockerham (Cockeyed.com)
Joel Veitch (Rathergood)
Neil Cicierega (Lemon Demon)
Ethan Zuckerman (The Berkman Center for Internet for Internet and Society) [Moderator]
danah boyd (Microsoft NERD) [Moderator]

This panel collects awesome people who have been doing things on the internet for some time now. From the ground floor, what have been the long-term changes in internet culture and celebrity that have happened over the last decade? Any thoughts on where internet culture will shift into the future?

Recorded by: @andthengensaid & @devanjedi
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Ethan: Welcome back everyone. This is the old guys panel. We are the old guys (and gals) in the sense that the people here are not just Internet flash in the pans. With entire schools of memes. I am not even going to attempt to introduce them.

Rob: I’m Rob Cockerham, and I run cockeyed.com. It’s probably best known for the “how much inside” adventures, light sharpener, ridiculous costumes.

Ethan: How long have you been doing this?

Rob: Since 1998: GEOCITIES. I’m pretty sure I was deleted from tripod.com at some point.

Ethan: Can we get the audio and video up?

(Plays a video from Cockeyed.com: Meet Rob. Self-taught scientist. Unlicensed Detective. Rob Exposed Scams, like Cash4Gold. Herbalife. LIGHT SHARPENER! How many feet of silly string can be found in a can? Welcome to Rob’s world!)

danah: Hello. So I am delighted with your adventuring. Maybe your childhood was much too entertaining? What was the first time you created something that got you in to trouble?

Rob: Uuhh, trouble. Trouble. I don’t know, the tree house, I guess?

danah: Tell us about the tree house.

Rob: I took some wood that looked like it would be good for a tree house and slapped it together about 15 feet up, then found out what the wood was for. Sorry, that wasn’t very entertaining.

Ethan: How much of my gold do I have to send to Cash4Gold for a Goldschlagger?

Rob: The Goldschlagger had so little gold in it, that it wasn’t good enough to weigh the amount of gold in there. But MIT has a scale that is good enough.

Ethan: We’re going to ask questions about the nature of internet celebrity. Now on to Neil.

Neil: Hi, what do you want?

Neil: In 2001, at the tender age of 14, I created Hyakugojyuuichi!!, THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN OF ULTIMATE DESTINY in 2005, and in 2007, The Mysterious Ticking Noise (Potter Puppet Pals). So those are my three things, and I think we’re going to watch the first one.

http://www.eviltrailmix.com/animutation/hyakugo.swf

Neil: I’m sorry I made you watch all of that. You have to understand that’s what passed for a meme back then.

Ethan: Let me take back my earlier question about a global question about crisis of weirdness. What’s the difference between animutation and animation?

Neil: There is really no difference. Animutation is just a word I came up with to describe the only thing I can manage to do in flash. Then people started enjoying them and making their own videos like it. There was one that was inspiration (eg., Hatten R Din). Salon.com did an interview with me. There was a small little fanbase of people who were doing it, and I called them Fanimutations, cause that’s like three words combined. It’s weird to watch now, but at the time it was really weird and people though it came from Japan.

Ethan: I love this idea that Japan is the well of weirdness.

danah: in the 1910s and 1920s there was a Russian filmmaker who ran out of film to film on so he would slice up film he had and juxtapose in weird ways. He had constraints but you have the opposite problem, how do you pull stuff together?

Neil: I literally had a folder of funny images that I’d saved. And then while making this video at like 2AM. Oh here’s some stuff, it’s from this Japanese Pokemon CD from a mall kiosk. This was before I knew what Japan was, but I just thought it was funny. There is this whole genre of meme driven compilation videos, where people take other videos or source material and try to make mutation remixes of them. Every once in a while someone says, “You inspired YouTube Poop, which is pretty cool.” And I’m like “Yeah.”

Ethan: Has YouTube cut you a check?

Neil: Not yet.

Ethan: While I still have that remarkable song in my mind, I will move on to our next guest Joel Veitch.

Joel: Hi! I’m Joel Veitch. (rathergood.com)

(WE LIKE THE MOON! Also inspired a Quizno’s commercial.)

Are those hamsters? It is possible. That’s all I can say. Is this an actual song in some other language? I think they created this song.

Ethan: What does it mean for your career that this is the work you are best remembered for?

Joel: It’s lovely, it’s wonderful, I’ve done quite a lot of songs like this, and that one is particularly painful.

Ethan: You’re the lead vocalist there?

Joel: I’m the lead vocalist. And everyone always wants me to do this.

danah: You do live performances?

Joel: I do! This particular one, I’d just been in the pub with my brother, and we came back and pulled out a guitar and it was improvised from stuff that was in the room. I had the animations lying around from previous things, and it was literally about 2 minutes of work.

Ethan: You’ve been known for bringing animated animals to the web. Is there some magic to this?

Joel: I mean, when I did something on the telly with those, I learned that not everyone likes that. Cute animals are an easy win, especially kittens, everyone loves kittens. The reason I started doing stuff with little furry animals is… You can love them, but only in the way you’ve love a terrible diseased child.

Ethan: So let’s get to the question: How has fame changed your life? And, Rob, you are flooded at all time in Sacramento… How has microfame changed things for you?

Rob: Not that much. The real impact is that you make something and you put it online, and people give you positive feedback, and they want the same thing over and over again. So you keep producing content and hoping to achievement and maybe more. Maybe I can get on Slate.com, or Good Morning America, or maybe people will make companion video. And I’ve had success with that! I know a lot of people have trouble finishing problems, and I don’t have that problem anymore. When I start projects, I finish them.

Ethan: Are you known in your neighborhood, in your city? At conferences, people don’t know who to flock to. For most people here, we don’t know who you are. Have you crossed over beyond that? You are the main character.

Rob: I’ve got my face plastered over everything I do, so I’m likely to get recognized. Sometimes I’m in a crowd where lots of people know me, and sometimes I’m in a place with tons of people, like a basketball game, and no one will know who I am. I go into hiding, which is a big problem for celebrities, being able to go into hiding, but I don’t always have that problem.

Ethan: Many people leave ROFLcon and never want to meet people again. Neil, how about you?

Neil: It’s the internet. Mostly in the past few years, I was in some of my videos on YouTube, and it’s totally contextual whether or not people recognize you. Sometimes I get noticed, and they’ll be like “Are you Neil?” I got a comment on my livejournal from someone asking if I was at South Station on Friday, and sure enough I was.

Rob: They’re always apologetic, like “I’m sorry to interrupt your day.” I’m like “It’s not a real problem.”

Neil: It’s not pervasive in anyway. I get recognized when I enter geekdom. For a stretch, my family home kept getting calls from little girls, about once a week, from sleepovers, being like “Oh my god, are you Neil?!” and my Dad would be like “No, I’ll go get him”, and they’ll start screaming in my ear. Now I’ve moved out, so I don’t know how they’re dealing with it, but I hope they’re being complete assholes.

Ethan: Did you ever respond by doing a live version of your song?

Neil: I’ve had to do that before, I’ve met a fan in person, and they’ve asked me to call a friend and do a puppet voice. What is a problem is when they scream in my ear and then hang up. I don’t really know what to do with that.

Ethan: It’s always been hard to know what to do with screaming fans. Joel, how do you deal with people coming up to you?

Joel: Well, if there was an A list and a B list of celebrities. I think that most people thought for a long time that I was a … They found it hard to believe that there was a person behind it. “Are you the Quizno’s guy? Do the voice do the voice!”

danah: Has any of the attention been negative?

Joel: To a certain extent. YouTube is the worst for comments. For a long long time I didn’t really have any negativity. The subject matter isn’t very controversial. YouTube had made things very different, in the old days people had to email me or join the forums to troll me, but now they can just comment on YouTube. It doesn’t matter what you do or how good you are, someone is going to say YOUR GAY ROAR.

danah: Do you all read the YouTube comments?

Rob: There are some that you read and some that you take to heart. It’s the worst place for comments ever.

Joel: It doesn’t really matter that much. The problem is my mum, who looks very carefully at everything I do. She’ll have a couple glasses of wine at 11 o’clock and start commenting “I think this is wonderfully harmonized!”

ethan: Does she have Joel’s Mum as her YouTube handle.

Joel: It’s not clear that she’s my mum.

Neil: I get joy out of responding to terrible YouTube comments. They’re not trolls, they’re stupid children, and someone needs to tell them they’re stupid at some point. Occasionally someone will give me an insensitive critique, but sometimes if you ask and actually engage them, they’ll be like “Oh my gosh, I didn’t think you’re reply, it’s okay, I guess.” A lot of people don’t post expecting them to respond. It’s a wire from their brain to the keyboard. You can get into arguments with them, but it’s a waste of your time. Oh, this is really poorly typed, Mister.

danah: Are there any critiques that are fun to engage with?

Neil: No.

Joel: When people are negative. I’m struggling to think of examples, but sometimes people can be negative in quite an entertaining way.

Neil: I did a video that was this Super Mario video cover, and it would just zoom in and pan on it, and lots of people responded with “That video sucks ass.”

Ethan: Rob, does this change for you because they know they are talking to you? As opposed to the disembodied heads of Harry Potter.

Rob: The further removed it is from me, the nicer it is. If they’re emailing me, they know I’m going to read it and maybe reply.

Ethan: What happens when the stuff goes mainstream? And when people start opening their wallet? Joel has sold out in some interesting ways. Rob, how does this work out financially for you?

Rob: I’m a SUPER MILLIONAIRE. A lot of people don’t know what that means, but I’ve got an example over there: (8+14=22). I used to not have any ads, then I added ads, and I started making money, so then I put ads on everything, because it makes lots of money. If I did a site about cutting up credit card applications, then I’d get credit card ads on my sight. So no matter how ridiculous the text I said was, no matter what I said about credit cards, the ads were still for credit cards. Which is a good kind of ad to have, that’s where the money is. It doesn’t drive what I do, but it’s certainly in the back of my mind.

Ethan: Will we ever see — how many jelly beans can you fit in a Lexus?

Rob: vitaminwater asked me…. No, I don’t think it’ll ever be that overt. I don’t mean to say overt, I mean to say that’ll never happen.

Ethan: you can see him thinking right now. Neil, this has lead to interesting things in television:

Neil: When Mysterious Ticking Noise won the YouTube award, they invited me and a bunch of other YouTube award winners, like Tay Zonday was on Good Morning America, and those guys were dicks. They reshot the interview halves. I also went on Fox News with Shepard Smith, who you might know from an anchor blooper video, and he accidentally says blow job instead of block party. Then after the break, he’s got his best apology face. And I’m on Fox News who I recognize from that video and I’m like … They show a video of the “Leave Brittney Alone” guy, and whoever edited it left in one “shit” or something. And everyone goes silent. Then later in the video he gives the exact same apology.

Ethan: You think it’s like a macro?

Neil: I think the guy is a robot, and we kicked him into his apology program.

Neil: It was just really interesting to be on TV. When I got home from New York, a few local affiliates did some stuff on the puppets thing. I have them all on DVR, and it’s exciting to see yourself on TV. It’s just an extra way to get extra eyes on yourself. I guess it’s different for you, because you were in commercials (to Rob).

Ethan: (to Rob) So you would never sell out?

Rob: When I first got asked for commercials, I thought I would get something about fans. I was amazed by how many fans thought it was brilliant, almost no one was nasty about it. Being able to make money from this means you don’t have to make something else.

Ethan: Was it a surprise that Quiznos was interested in being as weird as what you were putting up for a web audience?

Rob: Bearing in mind that I’m English and Quiznos isn’t a big chain there, it was sort of out of nowhere form me. They just did one with someone sucking form a horse teeth. They did it quite cleverly, they got a bunch of people. I did the ad and people went a bit mental.

danah: Did you have to modify anything? Did they change the words?

Joel: Rob, well you have to change the words to it being about a sub. They’re 30 seconds ad, so you’ve got time for them to sing some stuff then do some things about sandwiches. There are a lot of people who watch the TV who are aware of this. On the internet, you elect to clink on a link, and if you’re freaked out by it, well you did it to yourself.

Neil: At that point it’s not consensual any more.

Joel: But if people are watching the Superbowl, it’s not consensual anymore.

danah: You mentioned you change what you do based on ad. How do audiences affect what you choose to do or not do? Are there ideas that you can because there isn’t audience potential?

Rob: Sorry to say that I don’t put that much thought into the audience. I mean I really want them to like what I do, but like, if I get a suggestion. Part of it is that I like having my idea, and I can be “that’s my idea!” I like to have an idea, and then bring it. If it’s someone else’s idea, then I’m like “here’s someone else’s idea”. Which isn’t as awesome for me.

danah: Neil, how does it affect you? How much are you thinking about the people who will watch?
Neil: about 25% is about what people like. I keep making things that amuse me. Even if it doesn’t go viral, at least it amuses me. I’ve never lost followers from a video. I am aware that people are waiting for the next… I don’t want to make them wait 2 years, but maybe I’ll make them wait one year.

danah: How about you Joel? How much do you think about this?

Joel: This is a good point. You have to make something that you enjoy, if you’re thinking too carefully about what other people want to see, then it doesn’t have your soul, which means it will be pretty bland. If you do something you love, then you’ll love it, and it will have some kind of soul and some sense of originality. It might not get massive hits, but it’ll be worth doing.

Ethan: 15 minutes to go, question for Neil: Wanted to address the cranky old web coot syndrome.

Neil: Cranky Old Web Coot syndrome. If you grew up in the days before YouTube and 4chan and whatever, to see those get popular and see these jokes get done over and over again, and if you don’t really find it this funny, you get mad at these kids and you’re like “What are you doing to my internet!”

Rob: I love everything on the internet! I’m cold.

Neil: Like mudkips. I stopped playing Pokemon before mudkips existed.

danah: Can memes survive if there is no boredom or loneliness?

Joel: Memes will survive as long as people have to work for a living. They’re there to waste time. I met with someone one time who does market research and she says “What you DO is enable people to waste their time.” The majority of people who watch this stuff are people who are in front of computers to do something constructive.

Rob: I do just static content, just text and pictures. M-F had large hits, and Sat and Sun were low. It’s because people were watching my site.

Neil: So many people that view my stuff are in middle school and high school. By people I mean children. They do to school during the day, and when they get home they browse YouTube and they click on to the next video. Sometimes people will be inspired by my things to make their own videos and their own music. Even if it isn’t very good because it’s just some 13 year old shooting it with their camera phone. It’s kind of fun to see people who are doing things that are the beginning of what might be a career. I don’t mind wasting people’s time, because at least 1% of it is going to something good.

ethan: About flash. Flash is political, Apple doesn’t like flash. How are we going to archive this stuff? What would happen if flash were not available, to creators and iPad/iPhone?

Joel: The first thing is that I in no way condone the war against flash. I don’t think it actually matters to us, because all of these things can be published in another medium. From the archiving position, everything is in danger of being lost.

Neil: I haven’t actually opened flash in quite a while. I’m happy of any new reason to make fun of Apple users, so I’m okay with it. I think flash kind of already had it’s heyday — like AlbinoBlackSheep and Newgrounds — and stuff is still being done there. But YouTube has kind of changed the game. It’s gotten so that internet speeds have been fast enough to load streaming video.

Joel: Flash is an animation tool, and I frequently make things that are too big to public as a .swf, but they needs to be exported as a video, because they’re too big, but it’s not a problem.

danah: Joel, you said that all animals are cute but dogs are not as loved as cats. Where does this war between cats and dogs go? Where are we going with this?

Joel: It’s the light vs. the dark isn’t it. I really like dogs, there are some nice dogs out there. But I’m fundamentally a cat person. With a dog, a dog loves you, and if you died, the dog will pine. But with a cat, it pretends to love you, and if you were to die, it would just eat your corpse.

danah: Because they will eat you, they are fundamentally funny?

Ethan: Is there some aspect of things that is guaranteed to be funny? Is there guaranteed comedy gold on the internet?

Rob: Is there guaranteed comedy gold on the internet. That’s an impossible question. No. No there isn’t.

Ethan: The comparison between the work you guys are known for with Americas funniest home videos? Does that comparison apply to you?

Neil: I’m not sure if it applies to us, because we’re not really the found footage kind of thing. There have been a lot of TV shows who have taken the AFHV formula and tried to apply it to YouTube, but none of them have been as successful as AFHV, Rest in Peace.

danah: What is the path to getting traction? How did your videos take off? Is there one path?

Joel: There isn’t really a good answer to that, is there? Fundamentally, the internet works by people talking to each other. It used to be just email, but now it’s through a bunch of social networking things. If you make something that people think is cool enough to want to show to their friends, then people will see it. That’s all there is to it. With a commercial project, there is a lot of money for people to get their video to be posted on the front page, but then it can fall flat on its face.

Neil: In the older days of the internet, it was easier to see when a video went viral, oh yeah, it was on FARK.COM. Now it’s harder to pinpoint, it’s much more of a mystery.

Rob: I know when a ton of people get linked from a huge site, and then the site goes down, and then when it comes back up, some of those people go back.

Joel: There is a big correlation between being linked by a big blog and that will get you a lot of hits.

Ethan: Is it still about Fark or Digg or Reddit? Or is going through social media waves like Twitter & Facebook?

Joel: I mean it feeds off each other. If something is big on Twitter, a bunch of those poeple also use Reddit. There is a lot of cross over between Reddit and Digg.

Rob: People on TV don’t stop watching TV to go to their computer to watch you. If even a medium sized site links to you, and you get a lot of hits.

Neil: YouTube makes it easy for people to flow from one video to another, by keywords, and things getting linked to each other. The vast majority of the hits I get are from a different page on YouTube. For some sites, it depends on other blogs and other sites and link to you.

danah: The internet wants to know if you have day jobs?

Rob: Yes I do, sorry to go first. I’m an editor. It’s part medical and part legal writing.

Neil: I don’t have a day job. YouTube is giving me enough money from the ads and things that I can live. YouTube is a great system, they’re actually trying to get people money from their think. They started a rental service for independent film makers. My online videos got me a day job working for Plymouth Rock Video, I worked there as an editor and making web content for them, and then I got laid off. Because they kept hiring people based on things like that. It’s gonna happen someday, but they’re just kinda small right now.

Joel: I just have always done this.

Ethan: It’s been wonderful to have you here, who are living the dreams. Creating this stuff.

Joel: I do have a thought. Where we started with the long view. The internet is a brilliant democratizing thing. If you think about how it worked a long time ago, they’d get a hit then they’d shut down.

Neil: I remembered something this morning that I had totally forgotten about that once I was reading about this guy who had killed this girl and was planning on eating a girl, and I was looking at his geo cities page, and he linked to me, as some of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen. He just got life.

Rob: The internet is evolving, and there are always new tools, and it’s good to learn them, but there is also something to using the old tools that exist, and using them to make something. Second point: Take pictures of things as you are making them. Everyone always posts pictures of things that have already been made. But it’s more important to share the things as you are making them.

Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center for Internet and Society)
danah boyd (Microsoft Research)

When ChatRoulette allowed a new generation of internet users to anonymously heckle, flash, offend – and occasionally build meaningful connections with – each other, old-skool net watchers wondered, “Does this mean that the ‘net is weird again?” In this talk, they will resist the urge to wax nostalgic about the past, but they will use ancient net culture to help ask some serious questions about what’s happened to weird. Researcher extraordinaire danah boyd will look at what’s happened as internet culture has been legitimated and validated, exploring how we maintain a hacker’s mindset about the internet – and the world as a whole – now that our tools and methods are no longer obscure. International man of mystery Ethan Zuckerman will ask who in the world gets to shape internet culture in a globalized age as he wonders whether we’ll end up LOLing together at Kenyan netmemes or LOLing at the incomprehensible and other.

Recorded by: @flourish & @wphillips49
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Ethan Zuckerman

This is a weird way to start the conference, because you are not coming to see the academics. Academics are less fun than people who do cool things online.
I used to be a musicologist, and you study Bach, and you realize no matter what you do you are never going to write a rockin’ fugue. And at some point you go “Why the hell am I doing this?”
Academics will never create the mystery and wonder of the things that people who aren’t academics make.

Interested in community uses of tech, tech within impoverished communities. Why are some people really, really rich? Why are others really, really poor? Most of the answers are based in history. Bad answers are answers that postulate some human beings are smart and others are dumb. This used to be “eugenics” and now we call it the bell curve. What’s interesting is looking at how cool shit comes from every corner of the globe.

Who has tech, who uses tech, who doesn’t, based on who goes where, and who has economic advantages?

Malawian man, William: wanted to listen to radio, so he just made one.
I’m interested in what happens when we get to the point where people like William, who are utterly brilliant, suddenly have the chance to be brilliant in front of the world.
Challenges the bell curve idea about technology

Transitions to: “Daddy, where do memes come from?”

Where do memes come from?
Normally when we look at where memes come from we look at maps. (Gulf of YouTube, then an image of who puts out memes)
Data from “Know Your Meme”: looking at who/what generates memes, and where

Memetic creativity depends on how long internet has been available/widely available
Brazil/Russia/India/China: BRIC countries going to rule the world: memes emerge from these BRIC areas
As we start thinking about memes, we discover that BRIC countries are putting out a lot of memes: Golimar/India, Brother Sharp/China, Tenso/Brazil, Glazasok/Russia

If we look at world/meme map, we see there are few memes in Africa. As an Africanist, I am deeply troubled by that white spot in the middle of the map and I’m here to tell you that Africans are fighting back.

The first meme that I know of out of Kenya called “Makmende Amerudii”
Makmende is halfway between Shaft and Kanye West. He always gets the girl, etc.
He’s the face of modern Kenya mixed with blaxploitation films and he swept through the Kenyan blogosphere.

The first thing we had to figure out: what the hell does Makmende mean?”
It was used to refer to the guy who thinks he’s a ninja in Nigeria. This means “Makmende is coming back.” Everyone thought it came out of Swahili/English slang but it turns out it came from “Make My Day!” Makmende has been remixed onto the currency, the band who made it (Just A Band) is behind all these remixes so quickly we started seeing videos taking off on Makmende – Makmende meeting the Blair Witch Project.
Also: Hitler Downfall Makmende mixes (And yet Makmende has managed to not get taken down from Youtube)
Makmende stuff mainly happens on Makmende.com (Chuck Norris with an African twist)

Reminds me of hedgehogs
Lexicographers, anthropologists of words: What are the words people are actually using?
Clearly internet memes work in the same way as words: if nobody uses it, it doesn’t have life; if they do, it does. And it doesn’t matter what anybody else says – except it kind of matters what Wikipedia says.

So one of the first things Kenyans did was make sure that they got the Makmende Wikipedia entry summary deleted. Part of it was the people editing Wikipedia going “What the hell are you talking about?” What they had to do was say “This is our first internet meme, this is our thing.” But it got deadpooled immediately and now we’re hoping someone will revive it… but the point is there is a danger that we are keeping things like Makmende out of the whole meme thing?

Cultural context means that Makmende isn’t really easily remixable by non-Kenyans.
What memes can everyone enjoy? Ones that are already cross-culturally famous.
F’rex, the Backdoor Boys. We all feel comfortable remixing goofy Backstreet Boys songs because they are so internationally famous. (The global embrace of goofy identities.)

One question: “Is there one internet or are there many?”
One of the things we’re worried about is China, which has blocked off big chunks of the internet that we all care about. It’s hard to get to YouTube, but you can get to YouKu… Different protocols = different Internets

China has bridged the cute cat gap! They have cute cat dominance! And they have cats flushing toilets! Not just western-style toilets, but also pit toilets! They’re far ahead of us in cute cat technology!

Usually we don’t lol at Chinese lolcats and they don’t lol at ours… which is problematic! Someday we may actually end up with internets that aren’t talking to each other and maybe someday internets that CAN’T talk to one another! We need to meme at each other!

It’s hugely important that we build memes that Chinese people laugh at, this is what allows us to have single connected internet. The easiest way to cross cultural barriers is to laugh at. Mahir, case in point.

Mahir: “I’m going to let you in on the joke WITH ME. We’re going to go from LOLing at to LOLing with.” In that sense he’s my idol. Matt Harding is also my idol.

“We’re going to laugh at this together.” We’re going to go from loling at to loling with. Matt became very famous with the video. Matt’s response to controversy over “Sweet Lullaby” being actually by a guy in the Solomon Islands, not “Pygmy music” was to go to interview the people who actually made that song, to find out the story about it.

“For that, Matt is my hero of the internet.” We need to go from being Weird to Wide. Need to get past loling at and towards loling with. We should approach internet as anthropologists, not bouncers. We need to look for memes in China… shared reference, belief, if we don’t have the same memes, we’ll have different internets. Also, the word “erinaceous” is only a word if we use it.

Final slide bullet points:

- Weird can lead to Wide.
- Are we LOLing at or LOLing with?
- Anthropologists are cooler than bouncers.
- If we don’t laugh at Chinese memes, the censors win.
- “Erinaceous” is an awesome word.

danah boyd

A lot of what we’re talking about, we say is “culture,” but it’s really “subculture.” It’s cool because the internet is populated by geeks, freaks and queers, and we all enjoy them, and have for a long time – cats have been funny forever – alt.tasteless invading rec.pets.cats to teach them how to cook cats – it was funny then and it’s funny now!

Everything we’ve seen was first embraced by geeks, freaks and queers – not actually youth! Subcultures taking and running with things. But what do we do now that things have gone mainstream? You go into anywhere and people know the same jokes, which make it a delightful moment, but… what is inside and what is outside, as Ethan has pointed out? How do social scientists make sense of this?

Connections to rave culture: Sarah Thornton (studies rave culture) argues about the essentialness of subcultural capital. Bourdieu got very interested in the idea of “cultural capital” which is how we got the idea of high/low culture – attending the Opera is high culture; not everyone can get access to it; it requires money, privilege and connections. But then along come subcultures, which remind us that this is not the only way to build culture. Access is easy, but being in the know is extremely hard. Showing up to a rave? Not expensive. Figuring out where it is? That’s hard.

If we think about what’s going on in this space, we realize the connection to subcultural capital, but now everything has been sped up. At one point it would take weeks for a song to go East Coast – West Coast, but now it’s minutes.

FOLLOW THE MONEY: which keeps infecting internet culture in lots of ways. We’re in another boom right now – the MBAs invading our spaces. “Why are people wearing suits? What’s going on here? Where is my San Francisco?” The funny thing after the crash was that we had a moment to reconsider what it meant to be weird and reclaim the internet. But while the MBAs took over Web 1.0, now we’ve got more people invading our cultural space – the Marketer.

You know what marketers are really good at or obsessed with? Cool hunting. All of a sudden being weird got to be cool. All the artifacts of subculture have become mainstream culture. This isn’t new, of course – business loves subculture. HOT TOPIC!

When we think about “for the lulz,” we have to think about what it means. The monetization is one thing, but the politicization is another one. We think about Dadaists, Surrealists, Yippies – people were participating in these movements for the lulz but they had a political statement that they were making.

We’re at a really interesting crossroads. When I was a teen my friends were hackers and we spent a lot of time breaking into anything we could get our hands on. None of us thought twice about what we were doing. How stupid could people be? Did people really make their password ‘password’? But then my high school boyfriend got arrested for hacking into the Navy’s computers. And in the process of trying to defend him we discovered that there was a much wider hacking culture and we had to ask ourselves what it meant to be part of their culture.

For most teens that I interview, things are so mainstream. They consume memes but they don’t think much of it. There are no hackers anymore, basically. The way that that dominated every single internet community when I grew up? Not so much. But there’s a similar mindset in social hacking. It’s no longer about hacking computers, it’s about hacking the attention economy. People do these things but they don’t realize that there’s a collective.

And we’ve got cultural capital now. We’re becoming mainstream, becoming the dominant discourse.

What we have to ask is, what do we lose in this process? What are the economic possibilities of this? How much of the decisions we make are about becoming part of the mainstream and getting validated? We’re going after all the people who are “selling out” – but nobody’s quite sure what that means anymore. What does it mean to sell out? I work for Microsoft Research! To what degree is that selling out and to what degree is that just “working from the inside”?

Remember and own the hacker mindset. Think about where this is going and what kind of cultural hacker you want to be. How do we make sure that hacking makes connections, not splinters?

Question Tool – Q&A

Ethan: danah, you’re saying a couple things: we’re hacking different systems than we used to. We’re still trying to hack attention. But at the same time you’re pointing to the “crisis in weirdness” – what happens when the weird goes mainstream really quickly? Are we suffering from a national weirdness deficit?

danah: I don’t think we’re in a national weirdness crisis, we’re running into a new and interesting tension. Memes immediately become a commercial. The attention economy is where the mainstream is going. To what degree are we becoming the attention economy and to what degree are we challenging it?

[slapstick with a screen that comes up and down all the time]

Ethan: What Kenyan friends wanted more than anything else was for people to pay attention to them. Now that everybody has a voice, the scarce thing is who do people choose to pay attention to? That is possibly the answer to the question of “what’s so valuable about internet coherency?”

danah: Subcultures give us a place to be in the world, make sense of things. Finding other people like me, for validation. They overcome geography, but the question is, do we want one global subculture? Does coherency get us towards anything politically valuable? The problem is that people are trying to take fragments and make them cohere, and then depoliticizing them. Because all of these actions individually are making statements.

Ethan: One question is “Are you and I old?” I have the first consumer digital camera right here. And maybe we are! The /b/tards are sort of doing their own thing and not “hacking.” There’s not ONE way to be hacker, no such thing as hacker culture.

danah: Well, yes we’re old but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have something to learn from the past! I spoke at the “35th anniversary of the internet” and was like wow, um, we don’t think about the people who created the internet anymore! But there’s a lot to learn from people like that (Howard Rheingold etc). There are these patterns in it – and it’s worth it to learn this lore.

Ethan: Does it make any sense to follow meme culture outside your RL culture? The internet gives us opportunity to…spread more, to more people. We’re getting to point where we’re worried about our own subcultures, but less attention is paid to wide world of subcultures.

Ethan: I’m answering a bunch of questions about crosscultural memetics. We need to figure out how to archive global memes, yes – I run a website called Global Voices and we realized very early on that we need to find the guy in Namibia to be our African editor (or something) and have other folks in Europe, South America, Asia etc. And this is going to eventually happen in places like Know Your Meme. Now – is it just for the lulz? Memes are incredibly political! River Crab and Grass Mud Horse: when people got censored they’d start a new blog and then they’d say it; then ‘censor’ got blocked. They started saying ‘I’ve been harmonized,’ and then that got censored. Then they started saying ‘river crab’ because it sounds almost exactly like ‘harmonized.’ ‘Grass mud horse’ fights the river crab, because it sounds like an intense swear word. Fact is that viral ideas are pretty much the only thing that DOES save the world. Democracy’s a meme!

danah: re: economics and marketing, is very connected to what Ethan’s talking about. Because in Europe the assumption is “Oh, this is OK if the government does it, but it’s not OK if a corporation does it.” I think of marketing as a way of usurping power from people. I get frustrated with advertising culture because guess who clicks on ads? Those who are least privileged. The way your materials are being used are to market to people who don’t have the money/ability to do otherwise. Ad culture is not about making money in an evenly distributed way.

If you had followed our blog during the first ROFLcon, you may have noticed our ultimate plan to liveblog anything and everything going on at the event.

Well, we’re at it again, and we’re looking for one or two good citizens of the Internet to join our team.

If you are charming, engaging, own a laptop, and can type like the wind (btw, the wind types at more than 75 words per minute), send a note of interest to alex@roflcon.org. As perks, you’ll get free admission to the conference, as well as some team schwag and access to special events.

Deadline: noon EST on Wednesday 21 April 2010.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Be sure to email roflcon AT gmail DOT com if you’d like to comment on future plans.  We’ll post any updates to this blog!

• Q: How did you achieve cult leadership status? Dino comics: I am happy to be here and be alive. XKCD: There is a mindset that people share, but aren’t aware they share. XKCD helps them discover each other. 4Chan: Images and Text. I just provide the framework.
• Q: Are comics based on actual events in your life? XKCD: It’s a mixed experience. Dino: Realistic fiction.
• Q: Which dinos are your ex girlfriends? A: Jereseus Mimus might have some lines… from real life… maybe. XKCD: If write something about a fictional relationship… while you’re in a real relationship… people ask fictions. Dino: It can be dangerous. XKCD: People take stuff seriously on the internet.
• Q: When have you been most afraid of what you’ve created? A: Right now.
• Anonymous enters the auditorium – ROFLCon staff holds them back.
• XKCD: My electric skateboard now goes 20mph. I was inspired to buy a helmet.
• XKCD to Moot: Can you do a barrel roll? (Moot does barrel roll)
• Q: How do you feel about interpretations of your comics? XKCD: You shouldn’t have to explain it. I just learn if they get the wrong message. I try not to second guess myself. I try not to take it too seriously. Dino: My opinion is just one in the chorus.
• Q: (from Reddit) To XKCD: Is the female love interest a real girl? If not, can I date you? A: I was tempted to say yes and give Ryan’s phone number. It’s actually not a particular person. Weird thing: Sometimes I meet people in real life who are more like my characters than I ever imagined.
• Q: Zombie defense plan? 4Chan: I live in the south. Everyone has a gun. XKCD: I have the raptor plan. Raptors are faster, jump higher… Inspiration: Jurassic Park. I am aware of the entrances to the room.
• Q: Randal, you are brilliant. Is there anything you want this entire room to do? A: A barrel roll. (room does barrel roll).
• Q: How’s your thesis? Dino: Computational Linguistics, done. XKCD: I’ve given Computational Linguists a hard time in the past… fuck you.
• Q: To Dino: Now that you are an advertising exec instead of an artist. Why do I see a bunch of white faces on stage? Dino: [dodge]
• Q: Why is today a beautiful day? Dino: I should have been prepared for this. A: Barrel roll?
• Q: Tron Guy: How do you feel about being the leader of such an “effective” group of people. 4chan: Yeah 4channers spare no one. They vandalize the 4chan wikipedia article… there’s only so much you can do. The hive mind has free will.
• Q: Coordinates? XKCD: I put up the coords up the first time. They were wrong. I fixed them. The wrong coords were a field in upstate NY. The fixed ones were in a part. Once I realized this would work, I wanted to make some really difficult coordinates — like inside the White House or on a mountain top.
• Q: Bizarre requests? XKCD: Signing a friendship. (two in crowd raise hands – crowd goes “awwwwww”)
• Q: Emacs or VI: A: VI
• Q: Users breaking rules? 4chan: Authorities come and get you. Dino: Some guy did real life Mario blocks. I made the website. Spread virally. 5 young women got arrested, the put the blocks on the ground in front of a gov’t building. Real terrorists don’t put question mark boxes around their bombs.
• Q: (from Anonymous) – When will you hand over 4chan to the head of Anonymous? A: 580 million or fuck off.
• Q: XKCD, you get your comics from a binder you found in a dumpster. You stole it. A: Yep, I’ll run out in Dec 2012.
• Q: Remap the web? A: Thinking about it. Facebook is bigger than Myspace now. Q: 4chan? A: I made 4chan a little island. Huge backlash.
• Q: Becoming too big, mythic? Dino: My parents didn’t like it until I started making money selling t-shirts.
• Q: Will you apologize for 4chan? A: No.
• Q: To 4chan: Is there anything you want to take responsibility for? A: …. No.
• Q: Do your parents know? A: 4chan isn’t exactly dinner table conversation. They figured out after 4 years of me not mentioning it. It’s like the awkwardness that happens when parents need to tell their kids about sex, but the other way. Dino: I knew they were reading it, but we have a silent agreement where they don’t talk to me about it.
• Q: To: XKCD Fruit graph? You were surprised how controversial it was. Is there anything that you made that wasn’t as controversial as you expected? A: I did a comic about the mathematics of cunnilingus… to kind of set the limit. I got thank you letters and letters of proposal for additional research. 4chan: We were called an internet hate machine, we were called terrorists. But people don’t care. Dino: I did a comic about the ninja turtles theme song and got one of the lyrics wrong…
• Q: When did you start 4chan? I started on Oct 1, 2003.
• Q: To Dino: Gender theory? Why are all the content producers men? Dino: I don’t think there’s anything on the internet that particularly makes it a great place for men. XKCD: It’s hard to be preachy and funny at the same time.
• Q: As people who are famous on the internet… is it weird when RL people recognize you? XKCD: The weirdest is when they’ve read the comic, but don’t like it. Dino: It’s tricky because they like you already, but it’s nice when you start on even ground. 4chan: One time a stranger asked me to do a barrel roll.
• Q: To 4chan: What’s your favorite meme? 4chan: Not Rick Roll! I like the song, but it’s getting old. XKCD: You need to strike a balance between how early you use the meme, and how many people in your target community are already bored of the joke. 4chan: I like weegee. It is awesome. Like 5 people know what it is. That’s a good sign.
• Q: To 4chan: Do you use 4chan? 4chan: Too much, but I can’t ban myself. I post as anonymous a lot.
• Q: Was society crying out for your communities? 4chan: Definitely. XKCD: It’s more like you’re just giving the crowd some tools or common points and they naturally form around it.
• Q: What is your personal relationship to the community? 4chan: It’s complicated. I hate it when the community ruins a random person’s life for no reason. I don’t control 4chan.
• Q: Where will you be in 10 years? Dino: Yeah, I could be doing the same thing. Each comic takes about 3 or 4 hours to write, but I like it. XKCD: I dunno. I enjoy my job now, it’s the most fun thing I’ve ever done. But the future is exciting and unpredictable. 4chan: For me, it’s kind of hard to leave on a high note at this point. I’m happy about providing the platform. I’m not sure about 10 years though. It’s hard to monetize. I can’t see myself breaking even at 37.
• Q: Who did page switching for april fools day (between XKCD and Dino)? We happened to just hack each other on the same day.
• Q: Pie or cake? Dino: They’re both good. XKCD: That’s a fire hazard.
• Q: Are you constrained or limited by the form of your comic. Would you try new art styles? Dino: I feel like drawing is really hard.
• Q: Have you ever held back on your swarm powers? Dino I’ve done constructive things, like distributed computation for curing cancer. XKCD: I got tired of seeing “There are no women on the internet.” In the comic, I had users’ computers who said that get destroyed in an EMP. I knew my audience had the tendency to make my comics a reality… I would have been fine with it.
• Q: Why do you stick with primitive art? 4chan: Text and images are all you really need. XKCD: Making it simple pretty much always makes things punchier.
• Q: Why are we obsessed with Japan? 4chan: It’s different. We’re outsiders looking in. We think it’s neat. XKCD: The urge to learn a system and play with it. That same mindset applies to cultures.
• Q: Which sites should people visit more? 4chan: My computer really sucks. I read the news. (claps) XKCD: Reviews of professionals, maybe like a wiki or web 2.0 thing. Dino: ytmd.com
• Q: Free software as model for free content on internet? Dino: I prefer opera to firefox. I do my comic in MS Paint. XKCD: I talked to Stallman etc. They were the beginning. They’re not the only source of geek culture now. 4chan is a huge source now. 4chan: We’re a really bad example of free software. We took free software and made it proprietary and haven’t released it. XKCD: You don’t want to create an obligation of contribution. Your grandma using Firefox helps Firefox even though she’s not contributing bug reports.
• Q: Your ideal woman? Dino: This is a very heteronormative question. Answer – My girlfriend Jen. XKCD + 4Chan: Ball pit!

[random comments] From Tim: This was cool. We might do this next year. If you’re interested, contact us. roflcon@gmail.com RFL staff gives Tim a poster. kthxbye,Kevin Chiu

• Coke doesn’t need to beat Pepsi. Coke needs to beat everything else on the internet that can hold your attention for 5 minutes.
• Q: What do you when something doesn’t work? A: dunno. Aside: Aquateen hunger force got in trouble… it worked and failed at the same time. (Definitely worth the money). Would you do it again? No.
• Viral branding is difficult to time. The internet has no notion of time or space. You could be targeting the US, and it might be a flop stateside, but a huge success in Australia, for example. We sometimes accidentally make brands global. Clients don’t really know what to do with success in non-target areas.
• Q: Awkward marketing requests that just won’t work on the internet? A: 4 times a day, every day. Like “create a community.” Nope, doesn’t work.
• Q: What does authenticity in marketing mean? A: Un-authentic means pretenders or coopting trends. The most interesting stuff is when something has a life of its own apart from being an ad. A: I think of a brand as a personality. A personality at a party. Don’t go in with a megaphone. Have social etiquette. At the end of the day, you’ll be more authentic. A: Have fun. Example: Diet Coke and Mentos. A: Beer cannon + Spray and Wash. Made a bunch of non-business related brands into friends.
• Q: How would you remake something like CNN? A: Current TV is doing it wrong. They should have a bunch of micro-current-tv’s that fit different niches. A: We like to get involved with companies early; so, we can help them find meaning and position their website.
• Q: Do you have a dream job? A company you would like to completely re-image? A: Wall-Mart – we could make massive change by just changing a little piece. Not saying that we would want that job… but it would be a cool challenge. A: I’m in the middle of a dream job right now. We’re doing some work with Honda. In America, Honda and Toyota are interchangeable, in Japan, Honda has a completely different spirit. Honda’s kind of like Apple, and then Toyota is like Microsoft. Honda does all the innovative R&D, and Toyota copies and mass-markets. A: Tangent – I would prevent pharmaceutical drugs from advertising to consumers.

FINISH HIM! Photo: Dan Lurie

And be sure to check out the video!

Tron Guy + Anonymous. By MartinMedia

Evan White + The Average Homeboy

723 photos (and growing) in the Flickr Group

• Q: How long until break even? A: A year and a half A: 2-3 years A:1 year
• Q: Making it big? Watch the numbers? A: Started with small computer in corner of office, got slashboingfarkdugg, almost took down company network. Expanded to 4 servers.
• Q: Influences? A: Don Chrisfel A: Don Chrisfel A: White ninja A: White ninja A: A list of what not to do. A: Print comics A: thespot.com thespark.com Homestar Runner
• Q: How do you work? A: Flash, Internet distribution, no animation skills, write in inspiringly depressing shopping center. One guy does graphics, other does voice. A: No censorship on the Internet. A: Entertain yourself A: Let your work go free and get passed around.
• Q: Distributed workforce? A: Peurto Rico, several states A: I make a video and hand it to some people. I’m totally not a computer person.
• Q: Do you feel obligated to maintain your characters? A: No. A: Not an issue. I have 8 identical guys who are different colors + a jeep + a tank. A. We don’t have characters or stories. A: No. A: No. We just use stick figures. It’s easy to create new characters.
• Q: Limits? A: 720 pixels wide. A: 4:3 A: Halo engine A: stop motion A: We use stick figures.
• Q: Moving from comic to video game world? A: Video games are an extension of the comics. (Homestar Runner is getting a Wii game).
• Q: Why no ads on HSR? A: Ads are the worst part of the internet. I hate ads. Fans buy T-shirts – It supports site and authors. Would rather go under than have ads.
• Q: For Brad: Comic vs video production. A: Yep. Haven’t done comic for 3-4 years. Video took over.
• Q: What’s next? A: 4-part 11 minute special that might hit TV, includes all characters. A: Red vs Blue. Going to feature length. Live action. A: More of the same. A: Video Game. A: Start doing animation.
• Q: Tech limitations? A: We use Flash 5, but our real bottleneck is bandwidth costs. We used a 30-day free trial. A: I used flash 4 until a couple months ago. A: Video codecs (we push 140 TB per month) Bandwidth bill dropped %75 A: I don’t know what flash does… He’s a guy in a red suit that runs fast right? I hand draw stuff a scanner, and use iMovie.
• Q: How important is sound? A: We used to have a closet with clothes. Now we have expensive foam triangles that emulate the closet with clothes. A: We used to just sit in front of the computer. Now we have a sound room.
• Q: How long will you stay funny, stay current? A: Whenever a new game comes out, we get to do more stuff. We thought we would never go this far. A: Things become retro and cool when they’re 4 years old. A: We laugh when watching our own cartoons that we forgot about. (There are too many to remember!) A: Entire archive is always there. A few years from now, people will be finding it for the first time. A: I could be out of a job at any second.
• Q: Do you have haters? A: I have received death threats. A: Had to convince a woman that homestar didn’t have down syndrome. A: People like and dislike a few seconds of a video at a time.
• Q: Getting help? A: Some fans say your stuff sucks, then give you better stuff. (RvB soundtrack, Trogdor flash game, translations, running forums)
• Q: You visited Disney, what was it like? A: Cool. Producer thought character was retarded.
• Q: Internet blah blah blah good? all A: Yes.
• Q: (from Firefox) Open standards? A: I use Firefox, try to use open source when possible. A: I don’t know what open source means, but I get cool points for using that word.
• Q: Will you make HSR voices say things you would never put on the site? A: [Dodged question]

Announcement from Tim – Firefox vs Owl smack down official! Free pizza for lunch! (regarding blackboard: I need a mini-b usb cable… kevin@kevinchiu.org)

• True-ish Myth: Fame is accidental.
• Matt’s dance was originally for getting people to go to lunch at work.
• Something Awful treated Matt nicely.
• Something Awful treated Tron man awfully.
• Open for comments
• Q: First Post!
• Q: How? Matt: Wanted a break from staring at screen programming games in Australia. Irony: Now famous on internet.
• Q: Specs on suit? A: All armor pieces has its own power supply. AA’s. Inverters. 9V in helmet.
• Q: Promotion? Tron: If you try to promote yourself, you fail. Just be yourself. Matt: Sponsorship is really cool.
• Q: How do you cope? Matt: Girlfriend helps make videos, acts as producer. Tron: Does computer consulting. Some people offended that Tron guy is working on their mainframe.
• Q: You danced on that rock…. A: Yep. It was snowing and slippery too.
• Q: Matt: Do you travel and enjoy the places you visit? A: No. Not really. A couple days. Gotta get to all the other places in the world!
• Q: Favorite and least favorite derivative works: Tron: Fark photoshop contests… I don’t like fark. I like like the PC/Mac/Linux where I’m the Linux. Matt: Throwing beach ball across the world. I put it on my page in the videos section. (Favorite) Visiting every city in WoW and doing a dance. (Least Favorite)
• Q: How long can you maintain the fame, and what will you do later? Tron: My pics will be on the net forever. After I’m not famous, I’ll be fine. Matt: Appreciate the highs. As it fades back to normal, appreciate the non-overflowing inbox.
• Q: Videos 1 and 2 you dance. Video 3, other people dance with you. Do people feel like they know you? Matt: People who come out and dance with me know me, and know A LOT about my life. It’s kind of creepy, but you get use to it. It’s nice.
• Q: Is your public persona seperate from your real life? Tron: No. Not really. Matt: The dancing guys loves everybody. I don’t really…
• Q: Will you write a book? Matt: No. A blog works better. Blogs are the best.
• Q: Let’s organize a ROFLGroup dance. A: Yay.
• Tron: I designed the costume to not require underwear. I strived for theatrical accuracy. I was wrong, they used danced belts. Now I always wear them.
• Q: Can we turn off the lights and see tron guy? A: Lights go off. Lots of pictures happen. One guy uses a flash. Tron guy: “FAIL”

Welcome, anonymous! Photo by ideaconstructor

ROFLCondoms! Photo by mdigirol

BRAWNDO! Photo bysushiesque

• Panelists: “Cheez” (I Can Has Cheezburger), Martin Grondin (LOLCat Bible), Ryan and Arija (LOLSecretz), Stephen Granades (LOLTrek), Adam Lindsay (LOLCode)
• Q: Do your parents know what you do? A: Sort of, but they don’t care. A: No. A: They think I’m a doctor. A: My mom is from Latvia.
• Q: Will you still laugh about this when you’re in nursing homes? A: Yes. But it will be old school by then. A: Who remembers Where’s the Beef? Who still talks about it? Touche. A: 30yrs from now we’re going to get CatRolled.
• People are really passionate about silly stuff. People are passionate about the smallest, most random things.
• Cats attract girls to the internet. lolcode contributors are 80% male. I can has cheezburger submitters are about ~%60 female.
• Q: lol becoming mainstream – effect on English language? A: Linguists love the Lolcat Bible.
• Q: What is the takeaway for making awesome? (Pls answer in LOL). Things that become big on the internet are combinations of small iterations on other people’s ideas. A: Lol + trek, Lol + cat, Lol + Bible, Walrus + bucket. Etc. Take two things people like and shove them together. A: The Internet can do anything. A: The idea is bigger than you. You are nothing. You are just the midwife of the idea, helping it into the world. A: Don’t listen to the haters. Use that time to serve the people that love you.
• Q: Dogs are man’s best friend, will cats be man’s best friend? A: No. A: When we think that, they have won.
• Q: Why did lol speak go from sounding like a baby to sounding retarded. A: Lolspeak started as a written language. The voice you hear is in your head. (laughter)
• Q: We tried to translate to Russian / Latvian. Fail. A: Spanish sort of works.
• Q: Why is LOL not spelled out? A: How do you pronounce the name of this conference? Touche.
• Font discussion. LOLCats typography is 8-bit. Alternatives? Comic Sans gets booed.
• Q: Future of written dialects? Where’s it going after lolcats?
• Q: Does lolcode have tail recursion? (laughter from crowd) A: Yeah. I loved Scheme, but I didn’t push tail recursion. [Crowd: Maybe you should!]
• Q: Who do I blame for Rick Rolling? Panelist Q: Which of you have Rock Rolled someone [everyone raises hand].
• Q: Favorite LOLs? A: EmoLOLs A:LOLBots A: MetaLOLs
• Q: What is a LOLCat. A: Wow, you must have a life? A: Google it.
• Q: You wear a DARE shirt, but you play WoW. A: WoW is not a drug. It is habit forming, but not a drug.
• Q: Have you guys been able to make money on this? A: Cheez has a staff of 8 people. A: Nope.
• Q: Does LOLCats help you get dates? A: No.
• Q: Prior to LOLCats, there was already lol speak. Why? A: Blame it on text messages.
• LOLCat book – going through 850,000 images. Trying to find full res versions of each one. It’s a nightmare. We’re crazy.
• Q: Do you own cats? A: Yes. His name is AJAX. A: I’m a cat person, but I’m allergic. A: I’m allergic too. A: I don’t like cats.
• Q: Is there LOLPorn? A: (by girl panelist) The most common meme for that is “Do not want.”
• Last Q: Everone’s comments are really great. You can get cheap Viagra.

LEEEEROY MMJENKIS, by extraface

Leslie Hall promised me she’d rawk out tonight, photo by extraface

I can haz funny t-shirt? iscari0t

Also, some ROFLPhotos on Picasa

• Panelists: One Red Paperclip. Million Dollar Homepage. Marmaduke Explained. Chuck Norris Facts. JibJab. Rocketboom.
• Making money seems to be a fluke.
• If you try to be a fluke enough times, you will become a fluke. Doing stupid things helps.
• The Web is a critical component. If One Red Paperclip were done offline, we’d be up to a Dixie cup by now.
• People like stupid ideas.
• Chuck Norris sued Chuck Norris Facts!
• Million Dollar homepage guy is not starting Billion Dollar homepage.
• Paypal is easy. People will burn $3 bucks for funny nothings.
• Q: You’re all young white guys. Panel – A: I’m 49. A: I’m Samoan A: I’m a woman. A: Other people have better things to do.
• A: By an Asian Girl (self proclaimed double minority on the Internet): “[Insert statistics here] There are no girls on the internet.”
• A: Women aren’t stupid enough.
• A: Girls have better, more normal things to do.
• Key to success: Red Paperclip guy: Have a goal and shoot for it. Like playing Rock Band if you miss a chord. Keep Going!
• Key to success:: Million dollar homepage: “I love money.”

A few of my favorites:

Only @ ROFLCon… by fredowsley

The JibJab guys are hilarious IRL, too… by davefishernc

• Fame started with broadcasting, where networks had control over who was famous and who was not. Fame was pretty much a binary distribution. Now, the people are in control of fame, and due to our various interests, fame now follows the Long Tail distribution.
• We used to expect perfection when broadcasters were in control. Now that things have evolved a bit, we expect imperfection. If something is too perfect it feels artificial.
• Notables: Lightsaber boy. Obama Girl. Obama… Indian music video? Laughing Babies. I Kiss You!