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This panel was more of a one man show staring Jason Scott, who is an internet historian and librarian of sorts. He specializes mostly in Bulletin Board Service (BBS) stuff, but also ham radio and more. I heard that his talk was one of, if not the best talk on the first day of ROFLCon. Given his expertise his talk was a welcome trip back to before:

Jason started off by recomending a book author, Tom Standage. Specifically The Victorian Internet and The Turk and hitting us over the head with the idea that “People fell in love over the telegraph.” Eventually he moved on to talking about the invention of the photocopier and the memes is spread. Of course, “People are still parking too close and need to get on the fucking bus.”

Moving to the internet era, the above is the first BBS from 1978. It Rebooted for every caller. I suppose that is one way to handle dynamic memory (if it even used any). It was custom built, but by 1984 systems were commonly run by kids, whom Jason has tracked down, “to their utter horror.” Jason later when on to discuss some of the origins of common internet slang, arriving at this conclusion:

If you take on a language to make fun of it and the language was designed to be efficient you will eventually use the efficiencies of that language. Its kind of interesting to watch that happen. People start to talk like idiots. but what they discover is wow this whole LOLcat’s languages is actually pretty goddamn efficient.

Moving on to the web he offerers this perspective on why he must rescue and archive pre-world-wide-web content, but all the content since then is still around, for the most part:

You were happy when it got down to a dollar per megabyte. I had [some] 514Mb hard drives in 1993 that I had gotten from an airline. They had previously been tens of thousands [of dollars] and I had gotten them for a few hundred. You had this case where storage was a premium. It wasn’t horrible, but it was still pretty expensive. To the life we now live of the terabyte drive; where a terabyte drive is something you pick up with your soda down the street and maybe a keyboard cause its right there and its a dollar.

We really have hit this kind of wall where data is so cheap we’re running out of things.

I put my cat on twitter. He just says things all day, I don’t have to do it. At midnight OMG Bird. He has 143 followers.

Jason Scott was a really big fan of ROFLCon, in fact, he is still sending the staff somewhat suspect emails. I’m not actually party to the details so I won’t elaborate. This was the thesis of his talk, of sorts.

What I’m showing you here is that when we have this ROFLCon, this meeting of minds and this concentration of ideas and stuff it has a very long very storied history. It is normal, it is neat, it is wonderful, it is rich, it is delightful, it is sometimes stupid, it is sometimes fucking stupid, it is sometimes incalculably stupid but all of it is perfectly fitting into our history as people, and I am proud to be a part of it.

In fact while I’m here why not just punch David Weinberger [the keynote speaker] in the face. In his little chat at the beginning. <aside>Oh, this goes over the net, excellent</aside>. He was talking about how suspicious he is when things that look too good. That is a spit in the face of craft. Craft is not an indication of professionalism, craft is an indication of giving a shit.

It’s cool to see some back and forth like that going on, even just watching the videos. Some random quotes and stories from the talk before I go:

When you look into the story of grep… grep is a string based implementation of mathematical theory that was 20 years before grep came out. And he was like, how do I come up with a good way to keep track of strings? I’ll use this hopelessly complicated meta language that they created in the 40s to keep track of complicated number sets, and use it for text. Won’t that be … Just that thinking. Who can do that anymore. Its like, It runs, we’ll fix it later.

When a person feels that they can’t get in trouble for trying something new they will do crazy crazy stuff.

I’ve never actually watched that, and I’m greater for it.

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.

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