The Weekly Dig Signs On As Official Media Sponsor!

Been trading some e-mails back and forth with David Day, head Arts+Music honcho over at Boston’s best and only entertainment magazine, The Weekly Dig, and we’ve recently gotten word that they’re all systems go for partnering up with us as Official Media Sponsors of ROFLCon!

So to all you folks in the Boston area, keep an eye out for some special coverage April 23rd and in the months coming up to this thing. I’m told they’ll also be there providing some live coverage and otherwise taking part in the event.

Kind of a sweet deal. Great to have you on board, boys.

[Update: and girls! Thanks Christine, major major apologies - Thx, the Mgmt]

Venue (For Saturday) CONFIRMED!

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.

Evan White, Internet Meme Operator Extraordinaire, Joins on With ROFLCon

As the word’s slowly been filtering out across the wide world of the internet about the epicness that is planned to ensue in April, the ROFLCon team’s been blessed by a group of people who’ve just come outta the woodwork to offer their experience and services to make this thing come together.

Evan White, who I met through Kyle Macdonald of One Red Paperclip, handles purely internet meme related PR work beyond being an all-around cool guy, is joining on with the team. He’ll be helping out with some logistical stuff, and I’m thinking he’d be awesome doing moderation on one of our panels.

From what I can tell, dude’s scarily well connected to a bunch of the golden oldie memes, lending extra creedence to my growing suspicion that the entire internet celebrity community is one big happy incestuous sub-culture onto itself. (Carrie was relating a story to me recently about how Denny Blaze heard about us through Leslie Hall of Gem Sweater fame. Abwah?)

We want your input!

So as you can see from our slowly growing guest list, we’re going to have a pretty amazing slice of the internet coming to this conference in April. One of the Team’s tasks now is to figure out where these folks should end up in terms of discussions, speeches, panels, what have you.

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!