Things have been predictably nuts as we get into the home stretch here at ROFLCon-HQ, but I’m thrilled to announce today that we’ve confirmed a late-breaking sponsorship from Jesse Thomas and the good folks over at JESS3!

JESS3 is a DC-based crew of folks that specialize in some of the most gorgeous (and informative!) dataviz ever to hit the web IMHO, and we’re excited to have them aboard the ROFLCon train.

To boot, ROFLCon coincides with Jesse’s 30th birthday, so be sure to wish that guy many happy returns and all that if you see him around.

Also potentially relevant to your interests: The State of Wikipedia. See you all soon!

We’re always fond of when grungy local sandwich joints or breakfast places sponsor little league sports teams and stuff in their neighborhood and put their photos up on the wall. The Internet, obviously (and unfortunately), is lacking such a grungy local sandwich joint or breakfast place with which we could seek a sponsorship.

So, in lieu of that, we’re happy to announce today that the Internet’s local hometown newspaper, The Daily Dot, is officially coming on board today as a sponsor of ROFLCon! To our knowledge, they’re the first such web publication covering web communities in a “paper of record” style – and we’re big fans.

Anywhose, they’re sponsoring an open bar at our Thursday evening pre-conference get together next week if you’re in town before the insanity starts! So be sure to make a toast to them and say hello. More details about the where/when shortly, just keep an eye on this here blog.

If you’re like us, you probably lost entire weeks of your life watching it when you were a kid, and so, we’re excited to announce that they’re coming on board as an official sponsor of ROFLCon!

The cool news is that, as part of the new YouTube Originals Program, Eyeboogie is producing an upcoming channel called Pop Spot, covering our wild and wooly world of internet celebrity. It all launches on April 23rd, and it’s looking to feature some enormously cool content from our ROFLCon guests.

They’ve also got some surprises planned for the event, so much more coolness is on the way. Stay tuned. Welcome aboard the ROFLtrain, folks!

We’re really happy to announce today that local Boston publication-cum-media-empire DigBoston will be coming on board as sponsors for ROFLCon III! ROFLStaff have been long-time admirers of their work, and we were thrilled when the boyishly handsome managing editor J.Pat gave our underground HQ a ring.

But that’s not all! Particularly exciting is that, as in previous years, the Dig will be doing a complete issue takeover in honor of the ROFLCon proceedings (apparently they had a printer check with them before going to press because it was “filled with typos” lol). This has led to such troll-y and wonderful bits of content like this extreme advertising poncho ad. We’re pumped for it.

And, other than that, they’ll be around for livetweeting and providing general coverage of the weekend’s festivities. So you know, seek them out and go party with them – they’re a friendly bunch.

As a community event, the ROFLTeam has always depended on the kindness of the various friends/strangers/internet weirdos that we come in contact with.

So, we’re thrilled to officially announce this year that we’re teamed up with MIT Comparative Media Studies to produce this year’s ROFLCon!

If you’re not familiar with them, the MIT CMS program serves to forward the (awesome) academic study of media. This has resulted in a wave of amazing research, projects, content and conferences that touch on a bunch of nerdy topics near and dear to the ROFLSphere. (one of our personal favorites: this 2009 graduate thesis about the social dynamics of Dwarf Fortress).

CMS has generously helped us to snag the space at MIT for the conference, and over the years has contributed a bunch of our intrepid moderators and speakers at the event. We honestly couldn’t have pulled it off this year without them. Welcome aboard, folks!

I’m hugely excited today to announce that ROFLCon III has been officially sponsored by top internet smartypants headquarters the Berkman Center for Internet and Society!

In addition to providing a rich source of many of our most badass moderators and presenters throughout the years, like Ethan Zuckerman (and more to be announced!), the Berkman Center backed us all the way along our early fumblings getting things together in 2008.

So, needless to say, we’re excited to have them aboard for this third installment in our trilogy of ROFLs as we get into our pimply awkward adolescence as a conference.

If you’re not familiar with Berkman, you may be interested in the massive library of research that they’ve generated on all aspects of web and policy. They’re also involved, fantastically enough, in the upcoming launch of Lady Gaga’s nonprofit.

In any case, excited to have them aboard once again!

We’ve been blessed to have a wave of fresh new partners in the production of ROFLs in the past few weeks: Next Media Animation, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and so on.

Today is no exception – we’ve been chatting with and getting to know the fabulous Holly Clarke and the good people the the UK-based Unruly Media, and excited to announce today that they are coming on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III! We’re particularly excited about this because the sponsorship requires us to bring a sort of absurd piece of party equipment to the MIT campus. Suffice it to say for now that it will be awesome.

Unruly is also in the involved business of keeping track of all your memes in the form of their “global platform for social video advertising” (!!!) Viral Video Chart, which we’ve been sort of obsessively clicking through for the past hour or so. They’ve also nicely curated the videos of some of our guests, if you need a refresher before coming out to Cambridge. Welcome aboard, folks!

Happy Monday, everyone! We’ve got a seriously great line-up of announcements queued up and coming out this week, so you’ll be sure to want to keep an eye out on this here ROFLBlog.

In any case, we’re excited to kick off this week by announcing that the Seattle-based Cheezburger Network — proprietors of a vast and mighty kingdom of Internet products like Fail Blog, the Daily What, Know Your Meme, and (of course) the all original I Can Haz Cheezburger itself — is coming on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III!

We’re particularly excited because they’ve generously offered to throw the Friday night party for all the attendees at the conference. This probably means the entire ROFLStaff will be in the corner, drinking heavily and stuffing our collective faces with so many tiny cheeseburger sliders.

We couldn’t be happier — more details to come.

Welp – rumors are all true – and it really happened.

We’re pretty much absolutely thrilled to officially announce today that America’s nicest, most family-friendly little community on the entire internet, Encyclopedia Dramatica, has come on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III!

Just epic. We’re still processing how to deal with it all. It’s sort of like the Internet just reached out and gave us a call saying that they wanted to buy us a kitty or beat us up or something.

ED itself, of course, needs little introduction for anyone who happens to be reading this blog. So, we’ll just leave this here to represent how we feel about it all and let that be that.

If you’re like us over at ROFLCon HQ, you may have had the pleasure of catching Taiwan-based Next Media Animation’s bizzarely awesome short machinima reproductions of current events: the Tiger Woods car crash, the Zuck IPO, Steve Jobs, and so on. We generally are all agreed that pretty much all information on the internet should be presented this way.

And so, we’re thrilled today to announce that the overlords over at NMA are dispatching Chris Vespoli, the lead writer and mastermind behind much of this work, to represent at ROFLCon III!

And that’s not all! Happy to pair out the announcement with the additional twist that Next Media Animation itself is coming aboard as a sponsor on the event — I have to admit tangentially we’re sort of hoping to team up to produce a piece that features a polygon’d Tron Guy. Welcome aboard, folks!

The man, the myth, the legend.

We had the pleasure of meeting the classy and inimitable Mr. Christian Baker – who is the mastermind behind Tastefully Offensive — when we were out in Portland a few months back running ROFLCon Summit.

As we learned later over lunch, in the true spirit of ROFLCon, Christian is basically a scrappy upstart – a one man army operation devoted to single-handedly digesting the web and distilling it into a fresh, single-malt data stream of the amusingist things the internets has to offer.

In any case, we’re thrilled to announce today that Christian will be breaking the mold and jumping on board as the first non-veteran sponsor of ROFLCon III! Welcome aboard!

As we’re finding this round around, old friends are sometimes the best friends, and the good people of the e-mail newsletter list management juggernaut Mailchimp are no exception. They were sponsors for ROFLCon II a few years back, and we’re thrilled to announce that we’re teaming up again for getting ROFLCon III together.

Additionally, we’re proud to let word out that MailChimp has come in rare company at our highest DEFENDER OF THE INTERNET REALM level. In addition to all sorts of shady favors in tropical isles and black helicopter rides, this means that we’re partnering up with their absolutely amazing team to develop out the design of the swag package this year. This has usually been a pretty involved thing in the past.

You’ll see more of this as it comes together, but suffice it to say that what’s being planned is amazing (if you haven’t seen the sorts of things they get up to and support outside the e-mail list biz, please see and this).

So to Mark, Ben, and the entire Mailchimp team, you rock. Welcome aboard!

We’re always kind of surprised over here at the shady, underground lair (read: basement) that is ROFLCon Global HQ that this conference actually somehow works out to be a real thing each year. It absolutely would not have made it for so long without the sheer awesomeness of some friends that have been with us since the very beginning.

The good people over at Laughing Squid are no exception. They’ve been with us through thick and thin ever since we got started on those fateful few days in April 2008. And so, we’re thrilled to announce that they are teaming up with us and sallying forth with us once more as official sponsors for ROFLCon III!

It’s gonna be awesome. Thanks for being on board, folks.

Awesomely enough, right now, as legions of folks spill out across Cambridge MA (and we’re thrilled to finally meet you all in person) — I’m glad to announce a late-breaking (but terrific) sponsorship with our long time friends @ The Barbarian Group.

TBG jumped on board early on the ROFLCon train, and have been strongly along with us every step of the way coast-to-coast, from our original conference, to ROFLThing-SF, Titans of Small Town, and finally to ROFLThing-NYC. So, it goes without saying that we’re thrilled and absolutely excited to have them on board for our massive two-day homecoming to Boston in ROFLCon II.

It’s been two years in the making, and we couldn’t have chosen better folks to have along for the ride. We think that they’re excellent, and hope you get a chance to meet some of them at the conference!

Thanks to the wonders of modern science, no longer will countless internet kittens be without ice cream. More importantly, neither will you.

No kid. For one weekend only, local Boston ice cream institution Toscanini’s will be proudly offering THE INTERNET as a flavor, in honor of the impending reality vortex that is ROFLCon II. From what I hear, it will be a vanilla ice cream base with Nerds mixed in (DELICIOUS).

And, best of all, Tosci’s is literally just across the street from our boozy base for the weekend at the Asgard, over on 899 Main Street. So, if you’re around, dear attendees, absolutely worth checking it out.

Oh yeah, we seriously went there.

ROFLCon’s had the honor of teaming up with tons of illustrious sponsors over the years: Mozilla, Breadpig, Omni Consumer Products — you name it.

So, really, when we got the chance to team up with San Francisco based angry-snark-and-rage-button-making outfit Snarky McFuckbuttons, how could we refuse?

What you see above is the amazing work of Christopher Palmer and the Snarky team, translating Almighty’s slick designs to button form. They’ll be available en masse only at the conference. Use them wisely.

Aaaaand, we’re in the home stretch! ROFLTeam’s been pulling some late nights and putting out the usual fires, but the good news is that we’re looking to be on track and balling. Expect this blog to start getting way more active as we get into the final few days before the event — we’ve got some additional surprises (it’ll also be updating with coverage of the event and other fun tidbits on Friday/Saturday).

We’re glad to announce today the terrific news coming down the chute that the friendly folks over at Magners — those manufacturers of fine alcoholic Irish products — are coming on board as conference sponsors for ROFLCon II! Pretty happy to welcome them to the internet.

In practical terms, this translates to awesomeness. They’ll be representing with their fine Irish cider on Friday night at the Asgard (350 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA), where we’re setting up base and you’ll be able to hang out both during and after all the ridiculous things going on that evening. So, good stuff: definitely come and check it out!

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

You’ll be able to access it here.

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

With their nearly flawless corporate track record in designing robotic law enforcement devices and the 6000 SUX, we’re glad today to announce that the well-respected international conglomerate Omni Consumer Products is coming on board as a key partner for ROFLCon II!

You may remember Omni from ROFLCon 2008 as the company responsible for (fantastically) bringing Brawndo to life and keeping our conference two years ago hyped up on caffeine and electrolytes. One of their subsidiaries, Sex Panther Cologne, also was a sponsor during the festivities of ROFLThing-NYC. They’ve also since been the masterminds behind Tru Blood.

The shadowy and reclusive CEO behind Omni, Pete Hottelet, will also be attending and speaking at the conference. So, needless to say, we’re thrilled to have him on board.

Additionally, let it be known that ROFLCon II will be the official world premiere relaunch of Omni’s latest purchased subsidiary, Stay Puft Marshmallows. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Some of you who are fans and regular readers of such profoundly worthy online publications as The Onion and the Onion AV Club may have had the fortune of catching a rare glimpse of ROFLCon creepily advertising itself recently with the above bit of Shockwave joy. You’re welcome.

That little bit of genius was the product of the talented and awesome gentlemen and ladies over at Almighty. Which, might give you a good idea of why we’re happy to announce today that we’ve partnered up with them for ROFLCon II!

As sponsors, they’ve been deploying some great design talent to working with us on developing the registration pack and programs, as well as the stickers, buttons, and other bits of usual conference schwag that you’ll see later this month. We’ve been thrilled by how it’s been all coming together, and can’t wait for you all to see it, too. Stay tuned…