At this point, we’re just all beating a dead horse over and over again: there are more than 2000 pictures just in our public Flickr pool, dozens of accounts from mainstream media and bloggers alike, and more Tweets than is ever appropriate. Youtube videos were being put up before stuff even happened. And really, Ryan North already wrote his thoughts on ROFLCon, so what else could I really possibly contribute?

Well. So I thought until I was a) nagged consistently by Diana, b) shamed by Rachel and Carrie’s postmortems, and c) invited to write on the issue for iDC. So here it goes. The following is a slightly revised and augmented version of the email I sent to iDC.

ROFLCon was an idea that Tim Hwang and I came up with while we were at the xkcd meetup last September. We were fascinated by the real world manifestation of this community that had been constructed around a piece of internet culture–the social structures it took on, the way people interacted with each other once they were face to face, and the Stone Soup mentality of the participants involved. It got us joking around about what the rest of the internet would look like in real life (Goatse and Tron Guy and Star Wars kid all in the same room?), which we quickly decided was the most horrifying idea we had ever come up with in a storied tradition of bad ideas. Then we decided to do it–it was just too epic not to.

The image of many internet celebrities in one room was really all that we had in the way of a coherent vision at the beginning, but we decided pretty early on that the “con” in ROFLCon would stand for both conference and convention. We recognized that at some level, we were doing this out of fandom, and that part of the appeal of the event would be being within arm’s length of these internet stars. However, we were also interested in thinking about this stuff at a higher level, and being steeped in academia as we were, it was natural for us to consider a conference-like format with panels and moderators.

Continue reading ‘One Month Late: A ROFLCon Postmortem’

(Note: Sorry about the blog constipation lately! ROFLCon + Finals + Recovering from finals + Packing != productive writing time. I’m working on a ROFLCon postmortem which will be finished someday…until then, I’ve been posting lots of short, unpolished thoughts and links to cool stuff on my Tumblr.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to smooth out my thoughts about “the gentrification of the web.” A short and simplified summary is: web 1.0 was jankity and was somewhat ruled by jankity people; web 2.0 is smooth and polished, and people using it don’t have to know about the jankitiness underneath. Expect something more detailed…sometime this summer.

I found something that, in my opinion, really resonates with this today. I’ve been trying to use Twitter in the last 24 hours, and as part of my habituation process I’ve been using the “Find & Follow” thing on various email accounts.

* When I did it on my “college” email address, the one that I use to contact everyone I’ve met since coming to Harvard: 62 people used Twitter.

* When I did it on my high school social address, the one I’ve had since I was 13 with all the contact info of my high school friends and my internet friends: 0 people. Zip. Nada. Not a one.

So even though I’ve been active in internet communities since I was like 13, it’s clear that the communities I’ve been in have shifted. The weird thing is, all those people on my old email account? They’re still active online, probably more so than my college friends. In fact, they’re active in the places where a lot of internet culture gets produced. But they’re not on Twitter. And the people who are on Twitter are mostly unaware of their existence.

Weird, huh?

T-Minus LESS THAN 24 HOURS TO ROFLCon!!

I guess I haven’t talked about my involvement with ROFLCon too much on this blog, but I’m going to try to summarize it right now. It has consumed/is still consuming my whole life since October. Because of it, I’ve seen the wrong end of the sunrise every day for the last two weeks, and it is STILL the best thing I have ever done. (Warning: the rest of this entry is more than a little self-congratulating and possibly incoherent.)

Continue reading ‘ROFLCountdown’

Debt-o-meter? REALLY?

Don’t expect these too often…but for today, I feel like sharing lots of things.

Nerddom

LCD Games - Prehistoric Edition :: Youtube
Really frickin cool compendium of very old-school games.

Politics

Barack OBollywood :: Ethan Zuckerman
This is way awesome. Just…just watch it.

Mike Gravel - Rock :: Ethan Zuckerman (Good day at Berkman, apparently)
Mike Gravel, ex-presidential candidate, stares down the camera and then drops a rock into a lake. There are no words for this level of crazy.

Dancehall

Mariah Carey ft. Damian Marley - Cruise Control :: from Yawd From Abroad
Con: Damian Marley, you are so talented and you’ve made so many good songs, so why do you keep collabing with crazy U.S. has-beens divas? Pro: Mariah Carey says “ting”–epic lulz. Hot mess.

Badman Commandments (and Vol. 2) :: Heatwave
Gabriel Heatwave has listened to hundreds of dancehall tracks to collect all the instructions on being a good badman. My favorite: “Badman don’t drink Snapple.”

Mavado featured in GTA IV ad :: HearingTest
Apparently, Rockstar loves Mavado’s music and he’s recording some tracks just for the game. Anywayyyyyy

Political Dancehall

DJ Green Lantern - We Need Barack ft. Mavado & Barack Obama :: Wayne&Wax (the linkthink champion)
Mavado redubs his On the Rock for Barack…!?!