AND SPEAKING of the ridiculousness going on Friday night, our talented and brilliant ROFLStaffer Jesse Gold has put together this fantastically great promo of what to expect from the MemeFactory folks for their performance on the first night of ROFLCon. We’ve seen it before, and let us just say that it is absolutely worth checking out.

If you’re so inclined to learn more, you can also see a longer cut of this interview here. Mike and Patrick talk about the internet, creativity, higher aims, and the internet’s most meme-y of memes: the memebrid.

In any case, this is a good time to reveal at least a small part of our grand master plans: Jesse and International Man of Mystery Randy Plemel will be putting together similar long-format interviews with all of our guests throughout the conference that will be released CC post-conference, compiling an (as yet) unrivaled archive of primary source interviews with internet people. Should be sweet!

Photo courtesy Doc Searls

We’ve been joking for a month about celebrating the one-month anniversary of ROFLCon.  In internet years (similar to dog years, except even more extreme), ROFLCon’s already an aging spinster!  But we still kind of like her.  In honor of this most special occasion, we wanted to pull together all the guest and team reflections on the conference that we could find.  We’ve been calling them “postmortems,” but that’s kind of mean, right?  I mean, she may be a spinster, but “dead” is such a strong word.

Without further ado, here are all the guest & team reflections I could find and fit into one post.  If you feel yours is missing, go ahead and add it in the comments!

* * *

TEAM

Behold! Tim Hwang’s reflections,

Diana Kimball’s (that’s me!),

Christina Xu’s,

Rachel Popkin’s,

Carrie Andersen’s,

and Natalie Bau’s.

* * *

Meme Reflections & Reactions

Adam Lindsay (of LOLCode)

Alexis Ohanian (of Reddit and Breadpig) here and here

Alice Marwick (Saturday keynote speaker)

Andrew Baron (of RocketBoom)

LOLSecretz

Benjamin Palmer (of the Barbarian Group)

Professor Christopher Kelty (moderated Internet Cult Leaders panel)

David Weinberger

Dino Ignacio (of Bert is Evil)

Jason Scott

Jay Maynard (Tron Guy) here and here

Jeffrey Rowland (of Overcompensating) possibly here and here

Joe Mathlete (of Marmaduke Explained)

Joe Peacock (of Mentally Incontinent) here and here

iJustine

Kevin Driscoll (Soulja Boy Studies)

Kyle MacDonald (of One Red Paperclip)

Matt Harding (of Where the Hell is Matt?)

xkcd, maybe (check out the rollover text!)

Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics)

Scott Beale (of Laughing Squid) here, here, and here

Stephen Granade (of LOLTrek): bingo here, video here

Xiaochang Li (CMS)

* * *

…Stay tuned for more goodies tomorrow, on Day 2 of ROFLCon’s one-month birthday!

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]

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.

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?)

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!

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.

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.

Lots of cool people responded to our call for help — it should be pretty sweet.

I’ll be posting up the profiles of the teammates here as we get ‘em.

Right now it’s just me and the awesome K.Drisky, who I’ll let do his own introduction.

Also: already got some cool responses from the invites I sent out today! Be posting about them as we confirm ‘em.

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.