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

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Tim Hwang
Categories: Partners and Friends, Team, Tim

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?)

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We want your input!

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Carrie Andersen
Categories: Carrie, Getting People, Planning, Team

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!

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Tracking Down a Meme

Posted on by Carrie Andersen
Categories: Carrie, Getting People, Planning, Team

Part of what’s made this conference planning business so fun and difficult is trying to track down some of the folks behind our favorite memes. Many of them have been fairly easy to find, still being celebrities and all, but some of them seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.

More below…

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The founder of 4chan, moot, is coming!

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Carrie Andersen
Categories: Carrie, Getting People, Planning, Team, Triumph

4chan!

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.

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