After a month or so of waiting videos from ROFLCon are still seeping slowly onto the net. This one answers the question of who the G4 reporter was. This one has more footage that I saw them shoot; although, I must say that I don’t care for Leslie Hall. Anyways, there is much more going on. The ROFLCon staff all recently posted postmortems on the event.
I don’t have an insider’s perspective like they do, and my previous posts perform that function from my perspective. However, the raw webcast feeds of the panels are also coming online slowly but surely. Like many of the volunteers and staff I missed almost all of the panels, so I’ve been watching the videos as a way to kill boring nights. My first impressions are that, wow, are these panels really long. Almost so long that I’m sort of glad I didn’t sit through them in person, (but not quite). Seeing as I missed the opportunity to live blog then panels, I’m going to take the video as an opportunity to blog about whatever aspect of them interests me. I decided that I had little time or skill for video editing, which could accomplish this goal in a rich media way, so enjoy all the text.
Opening Keynote and You Can Get Paid for This?
Opening Keynote:
David Weinberger opened the conference by discussing fame and how the internet changes the nature of fame. This change, of course, provided all the conference guests. If you want a taste of the talk without spending an hour there is a really good video summery by rocketbomb. I disagree with him on one point. He thinks that misspellings, unpolished writing, and general lack of care in blogs is a good thing; that it provides a sense of intimacy. He says that this sense of intimacy comes from a need to pre-forgive the problems with the blog. I agree with that statement, but I don’t think that we should stop aspiring to a polished product. If I care about my readers and I care about my topic I should be motivated to write well. Although it may not seem this way, I am. Although, I do think that such things are forgivable on a blog, and not for a professional, I don’t think that being polished takes anything away from the blogging experience. This is something he implies rater strongly.
You Can Get Paid For This:
The real star of this panel for me was Ian Spector of Chuck Norris Facts. I suppose I just identified with him, as someone spending a weekend night bored and doing stuff on the internet. He had many other random fact generating sites before a poll on those sites lead him to make one for Chuck Norris, then fame, then a book, then a lawsuit.
The one red paper clip guy was not anything like who I imagined. The same was true for the million dollar homepage guy. They are both much younger than I thought. I don’t know why I would think older people would have come up with these great ideas, but until I was faced with them it did not occur to me. This isn’t a problem I have with other memes (that I’ve noticed), just these two.
As far as the actual panel topic is concerned. I was interested to here how Joe Mathlete of Marmaduke Explained made money. He did the usual T-Shirt thing for a while, but also accepted charitable donations until people sent him money and he began to feel weird about that. It seems currently he’s not making money from the site and is just hoping to not get sued. That I can understand. It was somewhat interesting to see how sorely JibJab stands out from the crowd with their corporate deals and infrastructure. It seems that they really are a sort of shadow marketing firm that happened to hit it big and are now trying to recreate their success. Shadow marketing firm is a bit wrong, because they are only trying to do it for themselves, they aren’t a hired gun as that term implies.
As I watch more videos, I’ll post more commentary, and link to it from here.
