So this happened.

As we’re (predictably) huge nerds over here at ROFLCon HQ – we were absolutely ecstatic to get news over this past week that Maria Popova, founder and proprietor of the profoundly mind-expanding Brain Pickings, has been confirmed for ROFLCon III!

Beyond raising our collective perceived literary IQ more than a couple points, we also recommend sifting through her other writings scattered around the far spanning reaches of the Internets, if you haven’t already.

In any case, hello Maria! We’re glad to have you in the ROFLSphere.

We’ve been blessed to have a wave of fresh new partners in the production of ROFLs in the past few weeks: Next Media Animation, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and so on.

Today is no exception – we’ve been chatting with and getting to know the fabulous Holly Clarke and the good people the the UK-based Unruly Media, and excited to announce today that they are coming on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III! We’re particularly excited about this because the sponsorship requires us to bring a sort of absurd piece of party equipment to the MIT campus. Suffice it to say for now that it will be awesome.

Unruly is also in the involved business of keeping track of all your memes in the form of their “global platform for social video advertising” (!!!) Viral Video Chart, which we’ve been sort of obsessively clicking through for the past hour or so. They’ve also nicely curated the videos of some of our guests, if you need a refresher before coming out to Cambridge. Welcome aboard, folks!

Our headquarters are all abuzz today with news that jetsetting international man of destiny Alexis Ohanian is locked and loaded for attending and speaking at ROFLCon III!

In any case, Alexis is a phenomenon. He’s the co-founder of this fun obscure little site on the internet called Reddit, swine defender over at Breadpig, helped to launch the cutest travel site of all time in the form of Hipmunk, is makin’ it rain over at the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, is working on a new book about making the world suck less, and most recently was a happy warrior in the battle to protect the Internets on SOPA/PIPA.

Alexis was the fearless moderator on our LOLCats panel back in the day, and also MCed our ROFLThing-NYC event a few years back. We’re bringing him back (with a few other folks to be announced in the coming weeks) to be part of a session that collects a number of internet badasses to talk strategery on ways to scramble the United Internets security council and defend the internet the next time an attack comes around the corner.

BAM! More tomorrow, stay tuned.

(photo courtesy Laughing Squid)

Happy Monday, everyone! We’ve got a seriously great line-up of announcements queued up and coming out this week, so you’ll be sure to want to keep an eye out on this here ROFLBlog.

In any case, we’re excited to kick off this week by announcing that the Seattle-based Cheezburger Network — proprietors of a vast and mighty kingdom of Internet products like Fail Blog, the Daily What, Know Your Meme, and (of course) the all original I Can Haz Cheezburger itself — is coming on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III!

We’re particularly excited because they’ve generously offered to throw the Friday night party for all the attendees at the conference. This probably means the entire ROFLStaff will be in the corner, drinking heavily and stuffing our collective faces with so many tiny cheeseburger sliders.

We couldn’t be happier — more details to come.

Welp – rumors are all true – and it really happened.

We’re pretty much absolutely thrilled to officially announce today that America’s nicest, most family-friendly little community on the entire internet, Encyclopedia Dramatica, has come on board as a sponsor for ROFLCon III!

Just epic. We’re still processing how to deal with it all. It’s sort of like the Internet just reached out and gave us a call saying that they wanted to buy us a kitty or beat us up or something.

ED itself, of course, needs little introduction for anyone who happens to be reading this blog. So, we’ll just leave this here to represent how we feel about it all and let that be that.

If you’re like us over at ROFLCon HQ, you may have had the pleasure of catching Taiwan-based Next Media Animation’s bizzarely awesome short machinima reproductions of current events: the Tiger Woods car crash, the Zuck IPO, Steve Jobs, and so on. We generally are all agreed that pretty much all information on the internet should be presented this way.

And so, we’re thrilled today to announce that the overlords over at NMA are dispatching Chris Vespoli, the lead writer and mastermind behind much of this work, to represent at ROFLCon III!

And that’s not all! Happy to pair out the announcement with the additional twist that Next Media Animation itself is coming aboard as a sponsor on the event — I have to admit tangentially we’re sort of hoping to team up to produce a piece that features a polygon’d Tron Guy. Welcome aboard, folks!

DOCTOR MOOTY MOOT MOOTKINS WILL AT ROFLCON III.

THANK YOU INTERNET THAT WILL BE ALL

…and by that we really mean that we’ve confirmed Dan Sinker, the voice behind that which is @MayorEmanuel.

If you’re not familiar with the whole saga of Dan and the role of his deftly-fuck-laden anonymous bit of Twitter epic poetry in massively disrupting the election news cycle of a major metropolis, you really need to get yourself to this here article.

You may be also interested in the inexplicably published book of those tweets. We’re mentioning this because we’re hoping that Dan will relate that time that Rahm himself showed up at his book party and signed the book, “You are an Asshole.” For serious.

You can read more about Dan at his website, in particular his awesome work with the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which we’ll be sure to force him to talk about at the conference in addition to the lolz. Excited!

The man, the myth, the legend.

We had the pleasure of meeting the classy and inimitable Mr. Christian Baker – who is the mastermind behind Tastefully Offensive — when we were out in Portland a few months back running ROFLCon Summit.

As we learned later over lunch, in the true spirit of ROFLCon, Christian is basically a scrappy upstart – a one man army operation devoted to single-handedly digesting the web and distilling it into a fresh, single-malt data stream of the amusingist things the internets has to offer.

In any case, we’re thrilled to announce today that Christian will be breaking the mold and jumping on board as the first non-veteran sponsor of ROFLCon III! Welcome aboard!

Oh, also just another note today.

Excited to announce that Matt Oswald, the originator of Me Gusta, will be at ROFLCon III.

ME GUSTA.

As we’re finding this round around, old friends are sometimes the best friends, and the good people of the e-mail newsletter list management juggernaut Mailchimp are no exception. They were sponsors for ROFLCon II a few years back, and we’re thrilled to announce that we’re teaming up again for getting ROFLCon III together.

Additionally, we’re proud to let word out that MailChimp has come in rare company at our highest DEFENDER OF THE INTERNET REALM level. In addition to all sorts of shady favors in tropical isles and black helicopter rides, this means that we’re partnering up with their absolutely amazing team to develop out the design of the swag package this year. This has usually been a pretty involved thing in the past.

You’ll see more of this as it comes together, but suffice it to say that what’s being planned is amazing (if you haven’t seen the sorts of things they get up to and support outside the e-mail list biz, please see and this).

So to Mark, Ben, and the entire Mailchimp team, you rock. Welcome aboard!

HELLO WORLD

It really has been too long. Hi, hello, salutations.

The team has been hard at work behind the scenes for the past month or two getting together the two-day insanity that is ROFLCon III. As previously promised, we’ll be returning to MIT in dear old Cambridge, MA in Spring 2012.

And, we’ve finally finalized the dates, so set your phasers for MAY 4-5, 2012.

Buckle your seatbelts. This blog post makes it official: we’ll be updating guest confirmations and other fun news pretty regularly from here on in about what’s coming together for the conference. Registration will be set to open sometime early in the new year. Excited!

Sorry for delay, true to form — sucked up by all the festivities of the weekend. But, we’re officially back to work and I’m glad to say that today we’re releasing the complete video of “Heroes of Usenet,” with moderator Jason Scott and a host of luminaries. The description:

Now only browseable through Google’s dirty porthole, Usenet’s early history holds parallels, lessons, anecdotes and memories well worth sharing with the current online world. Moderator Jason Scott brings you a panel of historians, history-makers, internet famous and internet infamous figures to talk about Usenet, the worldwide networked messaging system that showed everyone How It Was Done.

Uploading big honkin’ files have been giving us a bit o’ trouble with Blip, but rather than delay the content coming out, we’re starting to split panel videos into sections. So, Heroes of Usenet is in three, glorious sections (and embedded for your viewing pleasure after the jump)

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

It’s also pretty easy to navigate the sections by going to our main show page. Enjoy! More to come in the next few days. Stay tuned.

Next up out of the ROFLCon II video hopper — complete video from “It Looks Like You Are Giving A Keynote,” our Saturday morning keynote with Kevan Atteberry, the designer behind Clippy. The talk description is as follows:

A short whirlwind tour of animated assistants, starting with Microsoft Bob. How did Clippy end up being the default Character for Microsoft Office? And how has it continued to live on in internet culture? And why did it take hundreds of hours of testing with Social Psychologists from Stanford to build it? (seriously).

And, as before, if you want to glory of the blip.tv player, here it is.

First off, apologies — despite our promises to the contrary, the video from the conference has been taking a bit later than expected to get out. But, glad to announce that as of tonight we’re finally up off our asses and chugging along on getting all the complete panel videos from ROFLCon II out to the internet. Expect to see them popping out on this blog at a fairly steady clip over the next few weeks.

We decided that the first of these, to lead off strong, would be our final keynote panel on “Mainstreaming The Web,” featuring Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), moot (4chan), Kenyatta Cheese (Know Your Meme), Jamie Wilkinson (Internetfamo.us), and Greg Rutter (You Should Have Seen This). The panel description is:

As web culture increasingly flows into the mainstream, it becomes enmeshed in a crowded world of businesses and commentators. In turn, it becomes more easily digestible and accessible to broad audiences. What are the ethics of being a part of that space? As this process continues, what is gained? What is left behind?

And, if you prefer the glory of the blip.tv player experience, you can also check out the direct link here.

Awesomely enough, right now, as legions of folks spill out across Cambridge MA (and we’re thrilled to finally meet you all in person) — I’m glad to announce a late-breaking (but terrific) sponsorship with our long time friends @ The Barbarian Group.

TBG jumped on board early on the ROFLCon train, and have been strongly along with us every step of the way coast-to-coast, from our original conference, to ROFLThing-SF, Titans of Small Town, and finally to ROFLThing-NYC. So, it goes without saying that we’re thrilled and absolutely excited to have them on board for our massive two-day homecoming to Boston in ROFLCon II.

It’s been two years in the making, and we couldn’t have chosen better folks to have along for the ride. We think that they’re excellent, and hope you get a chance to meet some of them at the conference!

Thanks to the wonders of modern science, no longer will countless internet kittens be without ice cream. More importantly, neither will you.

No kid. For one weekend only, local Boston ice cream institution Toscanini’s will be proudly offering THE INTERNET as a flavor, in honor of the impending reality vortex that is ROFLCon II. From what I hear, it will be a vanilla ice cream base with Nerds mixed in (DELICIOUS).

And, best of all, Tosci’s is literally just across the street from our boozy base for the weekend at the Asgard, over on 899 Main Street. So, if you’re around, dear attendees, absolutely worth checking it out.

Oh yeah, we seriously went there.

ROFLCon’s had the honor of teaming up with tons of illustrious sponsors over the years: Mozilla, Breadpig, Omni Consumer Products — you name it.

So, really, when we got the chance to team up with San Francisco based angry-snark-and-rage-button-making outfit Snarky McFuckbuttons, how could we refuse?

What you see above is the amazing work of Christopher Palmer and the Snarky team, translating Almighty’s slick designs to button form. They’ll be available en masse only at the conference. Use them wisely.

So, really, just when you thought that the ROFLCon guest list couldn’t get any larger — we’re decided to bust all previous expectations open by formally announcing a final series of new and alumni guests that will be turning up for the conference! Some of these you’ll know from their quiet appearance on our schedule, but others have been as yet unannounced to this point. Check it out! We’ve got:

* Neil Cicierega, of Lemon Demon, Potter Puppet Pals, and other greatness.

* Ian Spector, owner and operator of the Chuck Norris Facts.

* AJ Mazur, creator of the (by now classic) Lazy Town-Lil Jon remix.

* Larry Oji and David Lloyd, of the behemoth video game music community OCRemix.

* And, brand new this year, is Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, general Masters of Pop Culture and the amazing minds behind the Found Footage Festival.

Okay, cool, I think that’s it. For now.

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!