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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.

• Before the LOL
• I Can Had Case Study

This is the most recent ROFLCon post, please scroll down and start with the first post.

There are some fun stories from at Great Scott as well, that I just don’t have time to outline. The long and the short of it is that its a great idea to go to a dance party with a whole slew of people from the internet. The DJ’s there were awesome and played all the great internet dance tunes including numa numa. I actually danced for the first time since leaving college and the relative safety of the parties thrown by my geeky friends.

I left around 12:30, by this point feeling practical and worrying about how I was going to get home. I took the 66 bus from Alston to Harvard and walked from there. I was on the bus with two conference attendees and one girl, who works at an apple store and just came by for the open to the public after party. The attendees were very happy with the con overall, but thought that Anonymous was not a good addition, citing their efforts to disrupt the Internet Cult Leaders panel. We discussed all the memes that were not at the con and how much longer it would have to be if they really got everyone. All in all it was a great time. If they do it again next year I need to get on the team, not just a volunteer.

During the Making It Big panel I took on some guard/badge checking responsibilities since they were understaffed for that. Afterwards I went outside the auditorium and began staffing the registration/info/shwag sales desk. I spent most of the day hawking t-shirts, lunch boxes, and reddit bobble heads. I also had some exciting free stuff to give out, firefox sitckers and action pads.

On Saturday I got to sleep in as my first volunteer shift was to start at 12:30. I actually slept through the keynote at 10am, which was probably a mistake. I got to the con at around 11am, just as the keynote was ending. The next panel was “Making it Big.” It included Michael and Matthew Chapman of Homestar Runner, Burnie Burns of Red vs. Blue. I have seen both of these and instantly recognize that they have certainly made it big. There were also two groups I’d never heard of Brad Neely (othercriteria’s photo) of Super Deluxe, and three of four guys from Cyanide & Happiness. This was surprisingly the best (of the two) panels I was able to attend. It was all about how and how long it took each of them to reach the monetary break even point. And then how much longer for them to quit their jobs, if they have been able to do that. There were a wide variety of interesting answers, that I can’t detail.

There were some interesting details about the memes themselves that were revealed:

• Homestar Runner does not suffer from down syndrome.
• They actually still make new Homestar Runner episodes.
• A Homestar Runner game for the Wii is in the making.
• Red vs. Blue’s sound was based on the quality of the overseas telephone signal one of the voice actors had to use in the early days.
• Burnie Burns is a staunch defender of Homestar Runner.
• Brad Nealy doesn’t know anything about the internet or the other memes.

The firefox asked all the panelists about their use of open standards, which received a lackluster response. One of the Homestar Runner guys espoused the joys of firefox use, but did not address the fact that their medium, Flash, is not an open standard. The other panelists, some of whom, produce videos using closed standards as well did not comment. This disappointed the firefox.

I’ve decided to redo this post as sort of a play by play of the weekend, with pictures and links when I have them.

On Friday morning I work up late a 7:15am, apparently having set my alarm for 6pm not am. I was to have arrived at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which served as home base for the ROFLCon team, to help drive shwag to MIT. Luckily they didn’t really need me, having secured a large van that was able to take everything in two trips.

I’m yet to find a single picture with me in it. So I could just be lying about all of this. But, I’ve got some pictures purportedly taken by myself on my flicker account, so maybe that will convince you. I am sort of ok with that. I think I’m more comfortable reporting the news than being the news. Not that a single picture would make me news, but I think you know what I mean. I’m just trying to document my weekend, for myself. Please don’t take these posts as trying to be cool by association cause I can name drop. My primary goal at the con was to befriend some of the staff, because they, mostly, live in Boston, and that is where I need to find some new cool friends. Anyways, After loading up the van for it’s second trip I went to work; where we manged to fix the bug we were working on by 2:30pm. Usually that is a 6:00pm on Friday kind of thing.