If you don’t know about Swedish “musician” Gunther, well, suffice it to say, he touches the ROLFCon team’s collective tra la la.

Depressed that you missed ROFLCon registration? Can’t make it across the Atlantic to catch a glimpse of Tron Guy? Torn between two multi-streaming panels? Have no fear! ROFLCon has teamed up with Harvard sketch comedy group Respectably French to produce full footage of the conference. All footage will be released with Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY-SA), which means we’re encouraging you to share and remix the conference video.

Jeph Jacques, the super talented artist behind web-comic Questionable Content, the ongoing story of a couple of Northampton indie kids, will be joining the party in Cambridge in April. Jeph also sells questionable content inspired merchandise. I am pretty psyched about talking to him about translating a successful webcomic into a larger business opportunity.

Amidst all the partying like a rockstar at ROFLCon’s subterranean/cyber HQ(s), it’s sometimes too easy to forget that we are putting together a conference, not just a convention. The goal of ROFLCon isn’t just to exhibit internet memes, nor is it just to give meme originators the chance to speak and interpret the larger lessons (if there are any) of their fame. From the beginning, for me, ROFLCon has been a talk-back between “memers” and academics. Studying “memes” and the internet is important for two distinct reasons. One, the internet has unquestionably changed the way our generation relates and communicates with one another. It has reshaped human interactions and also, as we saw with w00ts entry into Merriam Webster, shaped language. Second, the internet has served to enlarge anthropological phenomenons that have always been present in human interactions. As such, it is a treasure trove for a new breed of cyber anthropologists who can document the way facebook and myspace and (yes!) World of Warcraft reshape communities. In short, at ROFLCon, Jane Goodall gets to talk and so do the apes (jk!!!).

Judith Donath, director of the MIT sociable media group, represents an amazing emerging field of cyber scholars, and I am excited to announce that she will be speaking at ROFLCon, tentatively in the LOLCats panel. MIT sociable media group is super cool in it’s own right, and personally I’d love to see them present some of their projects at ROFLCon. They’ve done a lot of work with the application of signaling theory (roughly how we try to convey information about ourselves) and how it relates to online interaction. Plus, if you search “lolcats” on google scholar, Judith is the only hit. Sexy.

This Just In From Natalie Bau: Thanks to a sketchy summer camp/middle school connection, I just got confirmation that Ian Spector, the genius behind the Chuck Norris Facts Generator, will be coming to ROFLCon. Ian’s internet celebrity has translated into offline success: he’s just published a book called The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World’s Greatest Human (promotion here) and the Chuck Norris Facts Generator has been hijacked for political ends by the Mike Huckabee presidential campaign. I’m thinking Ian might be super awesome for a panel on translating online celebrity into offline success OR a panel on using memes for political ends (remember Tron Guy?).

After this, I’ll be turning my attention to gnabbing some super cool academics to round out the conference end of this shindig. So if you’ve got a hot panel idea – or an equally hot academic (but aren’t they all?) – in mind, drop us a line.