Kiddos! We are less than 24 hours from ROFLCon. Are you excited? We’re excited.

Anyways, if you’re around in town this evening – come and join us before our calm before the storm meet up. Started by Scott Beale back when we started in 2008, it’s been traditionally a great time to hang out with your fellow attendees and meet the various guests before all the proceedings get started.

This will be happening at the Asgard in Cambridge (350 Massachusetts Avenue) starting at 8 PM and going until they kick our asses out onto the curb.

Also, thanks to the good efforts of Austin Powell and the team of the Internet’s hometown newspaper the Daily Dot, there’ll be an open bar! You are obligated to give them infinite high-fives if you see them around. See you all on the Web 0.7.

(photo courtesy cityrover, CC BY NC)

HAS LOTS OF PANELS TO ANNOUNCE. WAITS UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO ANNOUNCE THEM.

We’re painfully slow on getting to this, but excited to make the final announcements before we’re properly up to our gills in the ROFLs IRL.

But thrilled that, last but not least, we are doing a very special session with Scumbag Steve and friends at Know Your Meme entitled “BECOMES AN ADVICE ANIMAL; TALKS ABOUT IT.”

The panel to feature the talents of KYM researchers Don Caldwell, Brad Kim, Amanda Brennan, and — well — and, Scumbag Steve. They’ll be talking about the exploitables phenomena (fun fact! we tried to get Advice Dog for this panel — his people turned us down ), what it’s like suddenly being forced into the limelight, and what life after looks like (see: the upcoming Scumbag Steve rap album). It’s gonna be awesome.

Excited! See all y’all this weekend!

Yep – unbelievably, we’re going to keep featuring/announcing new panels and speakers all the way to the closing bell this time. Pleased today to announce that we’ve got a stunningly great line up for our Metamemes featuring the Justice-League-esque talents of:

* Christopher “Topherchris” Price, Tumblr

* Lindsey Weber, Buzzfeed

* Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey, Shit Girls Say

Session to be moderated by the multi-talented Nick Douglas of Slacktory. They’ll be talking about the many tasty flavors of meta on the internet, and the features of platforms that make memes meta like they do. There’ll probably be some pictures of funny cats and wildly offensive image macros going on as well, I assume. We’re vaguely hoping that they talk about talking about panels about memes as well.

It’ll all be going down 4:30 – 5:30 this Saturday. BE THERE.

Ben Huh has had a storied history at ROFLCon. Starting from 2008 on our LOLCat panel, he’s repped at a number of our events – not least of which in taking part in the epic final Mainstreaming the Web panel in 2010 (the discussion on that session still ranks up there as one of the best we’ve ever seen in the kind-of-about-funny-cats-kind-of-about-big-huge-issues category).

Beyond the Cheezburger Network, Ben has been involved in much since ROFL2. He’s launched up a new effort to take on systemic problems in journalism, and took some pretty hefty stands in the fight on SOPA (including one particularly spectacular showdown with GoDaddy).

We’re glad to say that we’ve confirmed him for ROFLCon III! He’ll be speaking about this, and much more on the future of the internet and the defense of the web, this coming Saturday at ROFLCon. Be there.

(photo courtesy Ragesoss, CC BY SA)

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.

Continuing our panel shout-outs in the run up to ROFLCon, we’re very happy today that thanks to the combined tireless efforts of the brilliant Flourish Klink and Kimberly Chang, we’ve brought together the titans of fangirl culture for a mega panel featuring:

• Alicexz
• Beth H, BethBethBeth
• Kori Michele, Prince of Cats and other amazingness
• FemmeQuixotic

They’ll be talking fan culture, the hermeneutics of Livejournal, and gender and fandom in the wild and wooly spaces of the internets. Panel is kicking us off on Saturday morning next week. Excited to have them aboard!

(image, awesomely, courtesy Kori’s 100 Idols project)

HIDE YOUR KIDS HIDE YOUR WIFE

I sort of can’t believe that we’re typing this but ANTOINE DODSON IS AT ROFLCON III

All thanks to our buds at Eyeboogie. I think that’s pretty much all that needs to be said about that. Thrilled to have him — more tomorrow!

Apologies about the delay on posting, dear readers! Predictably, things have been nuts over at ROFLCon HQ (we just got boxes and boxes of fanny packs delivered to our house — more about that shortly), and just now getting a chance to catch up with teh blerg.

In any case, since the schedule is up as of last week – we’ll be taking the next few weeks to feature panels and guests that haven’t been formally announced up yet. Today, happy to announce that we’ll be doing a panel entirely focused on the memes and communities around the internet’s Superlatively Difficult Games. Moderator by Jamin Warren of Kill Screen, this panel also to feature some of the top minds working on the topic today, including:

* Bennett Foddy, QWOP / GIRP / Foddy.net

* Jesper Juul, NYU Game Center

* Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly, I Wanna Be The Guy / Kayinworks

While our collective minds continue to wrap themselves around the coordination necessary to beat two-player QWOP, we’re sure that this panel is going to be one of the best of the conference. Welcome aboard, folks!

Welp, now that the schedule up, we’re transitioning over to shouting out our remaining ROFLPanels that have not yet been unveiled yet – and today, we’re happy to announce that we’re finally getting around to our long-standing obsessive dream of doing a panel on the aesthetics, cultural significance, and deeper meanings of the aniGIF. Featuring the amazingly badass team of:

• Aaron Meyers, 3Frames
• Alana Post, Each Day Is A GIF
• Olia Lialina, Professional GIF Model / Author, “Digital Folklore”
• Jonny Vingiano, OKFocus / Le Meme
• Ethan Marcotte, web designer, moderator, and (most importantly) bukk.it

We’re thrilled. They’ll be there showing off some particular gems in their respective hoards of images, talking about why they collect the images they do, and why people still are obsessed with them years after their appearance into the collective consciousness of the web. Welcome aboard, folks!

We’re excited today to officially confirm that Craig Allen, one of the two mastermind writers behind the glorious series of Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials will be speaking at ROFLCon!

They’ll be talking about life after the meme, advertising and internet fame, and the difficulties of trying to shoot a commercial where an outdoor hot tub turns into a motorcycle (it turns out, not surprisingly, to be more involved than you’d think).

…and yes, children – we’re hard at work on seeing if we can get Mustafa himself to show up. He’d kind of obviously have to be our Master of Ceremonies if we got him. Or have an arm wrestling match with The Most Interesting Man In The World. We’re working it out. More soon!

Jason Scott is a huge troll. But, thankfully, he’s one of the brilliant, awesome kinds.

He’s produced one of the finest geek documentaries that it has been our pleasure to pore over (and is en route to produce much more amazing work in the next few years), runs a cat who is more internet famous than you, and is on a mission with Archive Team to defend the internet against the casual disregard (and outright assholery) that results in much amazingness going down the memory hole. Check him out on the Twitters for his bard-like command of the caps lock button.

Anyways, we’re confirming today that Scott will be reprising his role as the ROFLCon resident history mascot, and giving a talk that we’re actually still a little bit in the dark about. But, we know this much: it involves a death, double lives, and has been a story apparently more than ten years in the making. Frankly, he’s one of the finest presenters it has been our pleasure to have at ROFLCon, and we’re excited.

Also – since folks have been asking – we’ve been a little bit delayed, but the completed ROFLCon III run of show should be appearing on this here site on Friday. Stay tuned!

(photo courtesy Textfiles)

Three men. Three projectors. Severe information sickness.

We’ll admit, it was pretty much love at first sight when we ran into the NYC-based MemeFactory crew a few years back. Their performances are staggeringly immense and awesome and difficult to describe – like gazing directly into the dark cat-themed heart of the internet.

So, when the opportunity came around to have them for the upcoming conference, we snatched that up in a second.

I’m happy to confirm that the three man team of Mike Rugnetta, Patrick Davison, and Stephen Bruckert – in addition to having served honorably as our Seal Team Six moderator A-Team for the most recent ROFLCon Summit – is confirmed to come out to Cambridge in May! They’ll be debuting entirely new material (some pulling from their upcoming Kickstarter book), and we’re excited to have them.

Woo!

Happy Friday! Glad to say that we’ve been hard at work here deep in the ROFLMines, and we’re just about ready to do the full announcement of our schedule for ROFLCon III next week, which is gonna be awesome. The line up is looking basically like the most ridiculous thing ever.

But, in the meanwhile, wanted to close out this week by announcing that we’ve just confirmed a squarely brilliant set of folks for a ROFLCon panel we’re entitling “ADVENTURES IN ACA-MEME-IA,” which will tackle the ongoing and evolving world of people studying funny cats and other internet-ness seriously in the hallowed halls of the University. This line-up to include:

• Whitney Phillips, UOregon and researcher of the fine art of the Troll
• Kate Miltner, London School of Economics and got a masters in LOLCats
• Jordan Lefler, Louisiana State University and a Linguistics masters in LOLSpeak
• Patrick Davison, of Media, Culture, and Communications @ NYU and knows a scary crapton about aniGIFs

They’ll be relating old war stories about trying to write papers about Goatse, talking about the general topic of memery becoming a “respected” (or at least accepted) part of Higher Learning, and coming siege (partnership?) of serious academia by the lolz. Welcome aboard folks!

We’ve been literally trying to get this guy since 2008, so this blog post is kind of a momentous occasion for the ROFLStaff.

Today, we’re very happy to announce that the disturbingly brilliant and talented Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law professor, Berkman Center for Internet and Society co-founder, EFF board member and ex-CompuServe sysop (O.G.!) — will officially be our opening keynote for ROFLCon III.

We’ve been long time fans of Jonathan’s work, from his tremendously awesome talks (see, e.g. Minds for Sale) to his book on the underpinnings of the Internet as an engine for innovation.

So, needless to say, we’re pumped to have him kick us off on May 4th. Welcome aboard!

(photo courtesy Doc Searls)

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.

Perhaps no video in 2012 has yet been as controversial or as suddenly, instantaneously internet famous as the well-spring of activity around the high-definition minute-and-nineteen-seconds of “Shit Girls Say” (though granted: we’re still trying our darndest to get Kony – the man isn’t returning any of our Google+ messages).

The sheer number of remarkably specific response and follow up videos is hard to comprehend. Our mind still boggles at the whole thing (though we’re fond of ROFLGuest Rich FourFour’s take)

In any case, we’re officially confirming that Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey, the co-creators of the video, will be in attendance at ROFLCon III! Welcome aboard!

We’re glad to announce today that we’ve confirm that long-time internet mega-brain David Weinberger has been confirmed and modding for ROFLCon III!

David was the guy who opened the very first ROFLCon in 2008, and we know him through various brilliant doings at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” is still one of the best books that we’ve ever read about the Internet. Honestly, if you haven’t read it yet – go read it – the thing is a serious classic. He’s also out with “Too Big To Know,” which rocks in similar though distinctive ways.

Anyways, we’re particularly thrilled to have him at ROFLCon this year: he’ll be moderating a truly epic session of panelists on the dark beating heart of data underlying some of the big meme infrastructures on the internet – YouTube, Reddit, Imgur. It’s gonna be great.

We’re just pumped. Dude is a badass, if you don’t believe us – just go and check him on The Twitter.

these shoes rule…these shoes suck…these shoes rule…these shoes suck!

We’re happy to announce today that Liam Kyle Sullivan will be repping up at ROFLCon this year. You may remember Liam from the early days of YouTube with his enormous hit in the form of the single (and video) “Shoes.”

We can honestly cop to having seen it individually at least a few hundred times.

In any case, we’re thrilled to have him at the conference. He’ll be there talking about all the projects he’s been up to, and the changing landscape of funny video (and the business thereof) online. Welcome aboard!

ALSO: We’re just about buttoning up the finalized official schedule over here at ROFLCon HQ – more about this coming up soon…

Happy to announce today that Rich Stevens, proprietor of Diesel Sweeties, stone cold Twitter genius, and some of the most glorious swag available on the internet, will be present and speaking at ROFLCon III!

We’re really glad to have him back. Rich was generously awesome enough to pixelate the Three Wolf Moon for us back in 2010 for the conference shirt, which we still wear proudly (nerdily).

Rich just got wrapped up with a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign for the advance of his 3,000th comic. He’ll be teaming up for a duo-session with the previously announced Sam Brown of Explodingdog, to talk about the history, present, and future of webcomics.

PUMPED.