Happy Friday!

First off, to all of you who have registered to date, thank you. Response has been huge and it looks like we’re going to completely sell out the event. You did so without knowing exactly what the schedule of events would look like and we’re excited that people are pumped enough about ROFLCon to just go ahead and support us.

For all those stragglers who were waiting on some clarity about what actually ROFLCon is, thanks for your patience. We still love you.

Today, we’re happy to make public the initial listing of panels that will be going down for ROFLCon II. This assembles a big bunch of our guests into tidy sessions that we’ll be scheduling in the coming week or so. Note that this list is still incomplete and subject to the usual pre-event shuffling around. We’re in the process of finalizing a last few details before we announce the few remaining (and amazing) panels and talks that will be going on as well, so it’s worth keeping your eye on this page.

But, hopefully, this should give some big guidance as to how ROFLCon II is looking. We’re excited, and are looking forward to seeing you all in a month!

Uh, wow, jeez, ROFLCon has to formally apologize for pulling a blog party foul with the sudden dead space in posting. Most of the ROFLCon staff has been laid low as we’ve been moving around the country post-school year. (I’ve been busy doing that whole graduation thing and flying over to sunny San Fran for the summer). In any case, we should all be settling in over the next week or so and blogging should be returning to regularity (if you’ve e-mailed about helping this summer — we hear you and we’ll be getting in touch soon)

Anyways, we’ll be putting the call out to all of the guests who came to the original ROFLCon, but we want to throw a post up to let you all suggest people that might not have appeared at the April event (either because we missed them or because they’ve only gotten famous recently) that you would want to see this summer. Comment here and we’ll get the wheels a’turning on searching them out.

Tay Zonday, if you’re reading this, let’s talk.

(picture courtesy Doc Searls, CC BY SA)

…Oh, and the best part? We should have enough Brawndo on hand for everyone attending.

But, more importantly, check out our new and improved conference schedule, detailing what exactly you’ll be getting yourself into during this fateful weekend in Cambridge not two months from now.

As is mentioned on that page, this will mostly be it from here on in and is essentially the contours of what’ll be going down — time-frame wise. We’re giving the guests a chance to take a look over it, so they’ll be some smaller shifts as we work out the details on scheduling or whatnot.

As promised, Saturday ended up being one of the biggest meetings ever for the ROFLCon Team. After going back and forth for quite some time, we’ve finally decided to our entire operation over to MIT for April 25-6th. We wanted to make it possible for as many people to come and partake in the ROFL, and for that reason, the capped attendance of the event is now looking like about ~500+. (as opposed to the more cramped 250 we were looking at at Harvard). This, if our calculations are right, should make things extremely baller.

Thanks to the help of the folks at MIT Free Culture, we’ve also gotten a fix on the actual spaces that this thing will be going down in. I’m tying up a final draft of the logistics of the schedule (which will have to pend through our guests before being finally confirmed) tonight, and will post it tomorrow.

SO, for people who know the MIT campus: with some finagling, the general space of the conference will be Friday starting in the second floor of the Sala de Puerto Rico eventually shifting over to 34-101 (and surrounding spaces), with Saturday (the 26th) based primarily in 26-100 and surrounding spaces.

Comments, recommendations welcome!

Beyond the straight-up discussion with the celebs and scholars about memehood and the infrastructures that have played a role in the development of online culture, it’s been brought up by a few that it’d be really awesome to have a few more “convention”-type events going on at the same time. Ideas range from an animation screening room, a conference-wide signing period, and unmoderated talks with some of the guests.

But we want to get a sense of what you guys want to see. So, we’re putting out an open call for suggestions for conference events and volunteers to help facilitate these various activities. Let us know what you think by comment or by our ever-reliable gmail account at roflcon AT gmail.com!

So lots of people have been asking us: where’s your conference at?

This is a great question.

I’m glad to announce that after hours of searching and scouring by the Team (thanks, Carrie!) around campus, we’ve secured Harvard University’s Gutman Conference Center in the name of ROFLCon. This’ll cover all our events for Saturday, and we’re still finagling details out for Friday of the event. There’s some good leads and opportunities that we’ve been sleuthing around town for currently and we’ll let you know as that comes together.

Incidentally, it turns out that we’re at the same time as Harvard College’s pre-freshman visiting weekend. Go figure — some poor pre-frosh are going to get a really skewed vision of life in Cambridge. Survey says this is totally sweet.

We hear your cry. And suffice it to say, it’s a pretty good question.

We here on the ROFLCon Team have been working through the vacation to put this thing together, and we’ve hammered out a preliminary conference schedule that we’ll be molding over the next few weeks into a completed, shiny plan of action for our two day event. For descriptions of the memes themselves, see the links on our confirmed guests page.

Check it out, after the jump. We’re taking comments/questions/criticisms from everyone at this point, so feel free to let us know what you think, particularly about the panel prompt questions.

This schedule is subject to change. (And addition: there’s a number of big namer guests that don’t know about their schedule yet — for privacy’s sake, I’ve left them off, some of these holes are obvious, feel free to guess who they are)

Friday, April 25th (“State of the Internet”)
Noonish — Registration Opens
2-6 — Conference Activities (opening keynote to be scheduled)

1) CASE STUDY: LOLCATS: How and why do memes evolve the way they do? To what extent has internet culture established its own language in the past decade?

Panelists: LOLCat Bible, LOLSecretz, LOLTrek, LOLCode, Judith Donath

Moderator: Alexis Ohanian (Reddit/LOLDeconstructed)
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2) THE INTERNET AS CITIZEN’S MEDIA: Massive, unintentional fame seems far more possible online. What makes a successful meme in terms of popularity? What makes a meme successful/unsuccessful at leveraging that fame into mass wealth and power?

Panelists: Jay Maynard (Tron), Kyle MacDonald (One Red Paperclip), Matt Harding (Where the Hell Is Matt?)

Moderator: Martin Sargent, Web Drifter

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3) THE INTERNET AS A COUNTER SPHERE: Online culture gets itself inevitably entangled in the popular culture (and occasionally, the legal structure) of the outside world. How can internet culture be derailed by/how can it triumph against forces in the non-online world?

Joe Mathlete, Ian Spector, Bert Is Evil, Jeff Diehl (10 Zen Monkeys)

Moderator: Christopher Kelty

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7-8 — Dinner
9-10 — MUSIC SHOW OF THE MEMES: They play, you listen, people rock out.

Leslie Hall (Gem Sweater), Martin Leung (Video Game Pianist), David Lloyd (OCRemix), Group X

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Saturday, April 26th (“Future of the Internet”)

11-6 — Conference Activities (includes opening, breaks, and lunch to be scheduled)

1) MEME INFRASTRUCTURE: What makes an online space conducive to the production of memes? What is the future of online culture? What technologies might play a role?

Panelists: Drew Curtis (Fark.com), Moot (4chan), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit.com), StupidFilter

Moderator: Anil Dash

———————————

2) THE BUSINESSES: What kind of businesses can be constructively built with internet culture? Does it require a different approach? What is the future of meme-based business?

Benjamin Palmer, Anil Dash, Evan White, Rocketboom

Moderator: JD Connor

———————————-

3) THE ARTISTS: In many ways, webcomics and animators are the internet’s foremost meme creators. What do you think is the future of internet culture for creators? How does art online interact with art offline?

Panelists: Brad Neely, Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), The Brothers Chaps (Homestar Runner), RoosterTeeth (Red vs. Blue), Randall Munroe (Xkcd), Cyanide and Happiness

Moderator: ??

————————————–

6-8 — Closing Stuff/Dinner
8-? — Party of the Internet 2008 — Every internet meme, ever. In one room. Partying out. Promise: they will be cranking that soulja boy.

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

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

We got mentioned on the Wired Blog (sweet). Welcome if you’re a’coming from thereabouts on the blogospheres.

Also, you might’ve noticed our badass new webpage format thanks to the continuing efforts of Dean and Matt (also sweet).

Official registration ain’t up yet (it’ll be up within the next week) — but if you want to reserve a spot, be sure to drop an e-mail to ROFLCON@gmail.com to take advantage of the reduced registration fee (offer expires Sunday at midnight)!

More below…

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, Anil Dash, VP of the blogging company Six Apart and internet culture pundit (you may remember this formative work in LOLCat Studies) will be coming to ROFLCon! He’ll be paneling/moderating some of the event and sharing his experiences from the wild wooly world of the Net. This is awesome and the Team’s excited to have him on board.

I think this is pretty sweet in terms of building on an idea that we had a little while back — if our invites end up working out, it’d be awesome to put together a panel of people who design web infrastructure and are involved in creating platforms for memes to become increasingly iterative. Kind of a meta-panel — we’ll see.

Also — last night was an invite/logistics/be total geeks party of the ROFLCon team at Berkman. The scoop on that and the latest news about ROFLCon, after the jump.

The whole meeting went kind of like this –

Cool Media Shared

Noted: cool bits of media that should bear further investigation.

1) The King of Kong
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPLjXjObEms&rel=1]

2) We Are Robots.

God, I don’t even remember this meme, though apparently it was all the rage. I clearly must’ve been spending too much time making Icy Hot Stuntazz Geocities pages. Yeah, I went there.

3) New Developments in LOLCat Science: LOLBots has been dormant for awhile, but have you seen their newest post? Hysterical.

People Invited

For most the meeting, we sat around and sent e-mails.

We’ve issued a new set of really high calibre invites, including such folks as Maddox and Nicholas from Perry Bible Fellowship. They’re all pretty amazing and we’re hoping ROFLCon’s success thus far holds up.

Logistics

At any rate, what’s pretty exciting to report is that Harvard’s got some kind of pre-existing conference registration implementation that makes it easy to set up these sorts of events. This is pretty freakin’ sweet. I’ll be working out the details over Thanksgiving and we’ll be open for business as soon as next Friday.

Dean’s also been hard at work on our new shiny website that isn’t our current jankity crank wordpress setup. So that’ll be rolling soon enough.

If you’re already hit up our gmail account, I’ll be e-mailing all the details as soon as I know them myself. Exciting news with partners and friends of ROFLCon due in around that time too — so stay tuned.

So, it was brought up as kind of a vague joke this Sunday at Grendels, but I’ve been thinking about this idea more and more, and I think we might just have to roll on it.

The ROFLCon team’s been thinking about putting together a conference as sort of a day-and-a-half event, starting with an evening of events rolling into a day of in-depth discussion and panels, and then wrapping up with a huge party.

This gives us alot of cool flex to put on a few nifty internet culture geek events at the very beginning of the event. One suggestion was to have a competition of media composed in really old jankity crank online website media like the animated GIF. You could put together a soundtrack and everything and do a film festival.

I mean, we all remember the “Under Construction” animated gif as a universal symbol for a stillborn Geocities site, right?

Hmm…I’m pretty swamped right now, but doing an event like this seems pretty sweet. If you’d be interested in coordinating this, let me know. If we can get the space, I’m also toying with idea of soliciting material for a gallery showing of desktop backgrounds.

In the meanwhile, I’m starting the process of finding people/companies who’d want to sponsor ROFLCon. It’s envisioned as a conference bookended by more casual events (brainstorm from Nick Montfort this Sunday: an animated GIF movie festival) that should be bringing in some mondo cool people from the technology and culture community. Between who we’ve gotten and who we’re planning to get — we’re thinking that there’s a pretty good opportunity here.

If you’re out there and have a connect to anyone who might be interested in supporting this project, definitely definitely shoot us an e-mail at roflcon AT gmail.com.

We’d pretty much love you forever and ever and would shower you with food and schwag.

BUT: Finally getting a chance to sit down with the rest of the team tonight and figure out some details about how ROFLCon’s going to go for the next month or so in terms of putting together a conference site/trying to get sponsorship/etc.

I know some people have e-mailed our gmail account looking to get involved: I’ll keep you all posted once we sort out stuff tonight. But we’d love to have you guys aboard for sure.
Also — pretty exciting news about guests will be breaking here tomorrow morning at around 1100 EST.

Actually, amazingly exciting news that you won’t want to miss.

The team’s hard at work on putting together a good system for letting people register for the conference and should have that rolling in a few weeks along with a slicker design than this jankity crank blog. Stay tuned…

Until then, if you’d like to reserve a spot (supplies are limited) — shoot an e-mail with your name over to roflcon AT gmail.com

Problem: LOTS of people have claimed to be Willy. This e-mail, apparently, is only one of a huge series of people.

The Solution (thanks to assistance from SJ): I think we’ve got to get them all into a panel.

More on this as we start to hear back from the Willys.

Also: thanks to all who e-mailed me about helping out! I’ll be sending out a coordinating e-mail later tonight and we’ll get rolling on this thing right away.

While we close up the returns on LOLCat Week and continue to wait on some of our first round of invites, we’re moving on and carpetbombing a new group of folks. I’m doing a run this week of people who’ve been involved in musical phenomena online, whether that’s Chocolate Rain guy (above) or web kings Lemon Demon.

In an additional though not necessarily mutually exclusive note: In what will be undoubtedly a more than week long effort, we’re opening up a new front to track down the Worst of the Web — that means opening up our entire series of guests that are widely known on the internet for being huge jerks, huge embarrassments, or big assholes (in more ways that one!) Leeroy Jenkins, here we come.

Incidentally, there’s an interesting tale to be told about Numa Numa kid that I’ll be blogging about sometime this week. Keep on truckin, folks.

This is awesome in many ways, but I’m thinkin’ that one kid with a laptop and a dream ain’t going to cut it anymore. It’s going to require a crack group of expert internet culture nerds and organizers to get this thing ready for the spring.

If you’re interested in getting involved and being part of the ROFLCon team, shoot me an e-mail ASAP at thwang AT fas.harvard.edu.

We’re looking for people who are up with helping to trawl through the ginormous guest list, help set up a conference registration system, help out with finding ca$h money and all that other cool stuff.

Kick it!