Day two at ROFLcon!

As with yesterday, newest posts are at the top.

Check out these two feeds:
My flickr account (photos)
My twitter (tiny tweets)

[@4:11pm] I’m home from ROFLcon — have to head out with the family for Orthodox Easter celebrations now. Had to miss out on some of the final panels (tweets on the ROFLcon feed are telling me perhaps I didn’t miss much) but I’m already looking forward to next year. I’ll post more about my overall thoughts on the conference in a later post. Have a lot to digest from the past two days before I can get some cogent thoughts together.

[@2:26pm] Whoa, Timbaland ripping off OCremix isn’t getting any coverage? If true, how is no one picking up on this story?

MSM and radio and talk shows read Fark for material. Apparently show networks can’t attribute Fark for material because of union and network contracting rules — legal ramifications. Hat-tips just don’t happen in MSM, says Curtis. He’s explaining how many TV news networks quote each other when stories breaks. This isn’t news to me, but a lot of audience members seem shocked. Old media ethos is exact opposite of how sites like Fark and Reddit work, kind of incomprehensible about how the two will mesh more and more.

“The Internet” = Fark.com

[@2:11pm] We have now successfully RickRolled the panel.

Alexis of Reddit: “So many buzzy PR things happen organically and it frustrates the hell out of them. ”

Another question — are trolls necessary?
DJPretzel: “They are necessary to deal with the marketers that come to the site. If you’re real it will come through, if you’re fake you’ll get trolled–there’s no way to pull one over the audience.”
Matt of Metafilter: “Marketing comes off as fake.”
Fark summary of comments: “People submitting content, great. Marketers, fuck ‘em.” Oooo.

Corollary: Old media being fooled by stupid stories/marketing, Drew Curtis not sure why old media is always getting drawn in by these fake stories all the time. I’m not either! (Mooninites anyone?)

[@1:56] Fark’s Drew Curtis on what Fark is: “Everybody else is stupid but I’m smart.”

Anil Dash deserves a lot of props and shoutouts, he’s doing a fantastic job of moderating this panel.

Comments on how Reddit and the Reddit community is changing, has changed. From geeky LISP-related news to political memes (Ron Paul) etc. Fark and Reddit commenting on their community–even the gripers–they’re really happy with the communities. OCRemix wants to see more diversity of games remixed, I can’t argue with them there (I go for the FF and Chrono Trigger remixes mainly but other games I like are barely touched by remixers). “Don’t always go for the lowest common denominator in terms of what you want to see featured.”

Current top comments on the backchan interactive are the first few lyrics from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
That’s right, ROFLcon’s RickRolling Fark, Metafilter, Reddit and OCRemix. It has all come full circle.

[@1:47pm] Starting the “Incubating the Mindvirus” panel on memes– OCRemix, Fark, metafilter, reddit. This might be my last activity of the day — it’s Eastern Orthodox Easter tomorrow and I need to be with my family this evening.

Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD, is here. He says thanks to the referrals from Reddit he’s on there all the time. Figures, ’cause XKCD is on Reddit all the time. Cozy.

More twitter-reddit hybrid comment posting on a projection. Top posts right now: “Trolls: are they an essential part of the community?” and “Do you think the Internet is less interesting now that you’re all in here?”

Reddit gave a shoutout to Yahztee (Zero Punctuation game reviewer), says Yahztee should be here next year. I couldn’t agree more! Yahztee’s fast-paced potty-mouthed game reviews are painfully funny, and his homegrown reviews have basically dwarfed all the professional game reviewers out there from word-of-mouth alone.

[@1:15pm] We got locked out of an event room but there are a few ROFLconners inside. I’m twittering one of them, asking them to open the door (since they can’t hear us knocking) when they see the tweet. This is really bizarre, even for a geek like me!

[@1:01pm] TripAdvisor provided 225 boxes of free pizza (I asked an employee, that’s how I got this number). I think we ate about half of the food, I wonder what they’ll do with the ~100 boxes of untouched pizza? [I'm overhearing talk of Salvation Army and Pine Street Inn.]

Earlier, Anonymous (4chan) showed up toting pizza. Cries of “Anonymous delivers!” rang out.

Had a group photo outside of all the attendees. It’s a beautiful sunny day for it, can’t wait to see the pics.

Another one of those “Only at ROFLcon” moments — Tron guy, the Firefox and Cheez (CEO of Icanhascheezburger.com) all chatting together:

BTW, looks like there’s a Tron guy documentary in the works. He’s trailed by a sound and video guy at all times. Fascinating.

Earlier, the FireFox and Ollie the Owl (TripAdvisor’s mascot) duked it out:

… but they reconciled, all in the name of OMGfreepizza:

Going to get a seat now for the Stuff White People Like blog panel. I talked to the blog creater earlier, he’s a really nice guy and I’m interested to hear more of what he has to say on his blog’s very, very sudden and huge popularity.

[@11:59am] Fans are kind of asking for dirty Homestarrunner — Homestarrunner porn? Have Homestar say things he oughtn’t? Bros Chaps reply: “Corner me in the john.” Um, no thanks.

Lunchtime. Free pizza (oh, it really is like college again). The Firefox and the Owl will have a smackdown. Hmmm.

[@11:51] Brothers Chaps affirms they did indeed visit Disney and met with a producer there, he wanted to collaborate with HSR. Apparently nothing came of it (conclusively) but they found it very flattering that Disney folks liked their work.

Panel voted unanimously: The internet is awesome.
Great.
Glad we cleared that up.

The Firefox asked the panel about adding features for accessibility and open standards on their websites?
…Panel replies they don’t really get what open source is.
Moderator: “This is like a panel of people who only visit the internet.”

[@11:46] Someone asked the inevitable “How does Strongbad type with boxing gloves on?”
Strong Bad: “I’m gonna murder whoever put that question up.”

[@11:41pm] Neely: “I’m waiting for the day when someone tells me this thing is all over…but I have secrets” — OK, it must be obvious I am a huge Brad Neely fan. If he’s got other things up his sleeves, I can’t wait to see it!

Brothers Chaps: Someone actually thought the whole HSR joke was that Homestar has Down Syndrome?!?! What the heck?

[@11:34pm] Brad Neely–”Flash to me is a guy in a red suit that runs around”–talking about processes and tools used in production. HSR still uses Flash 5. Wow!

[@11:15am] Here I am again at the MIT campus in a sea of geeks and laptops. I didn’t get back from the ROFLconcert at the Middle East Upstairs (in Central) last night until 2:30am, so as you can imagine I’m pretty tired. In my exhaustion this morning, I forgot my camera at home! So it’s all cell phone photos today. Sorry!

Still the main focus fo the day are the excellent panels going on today.

Right now I’m (a half-hour late) to the Making It Big panel. Big names here–Brothers Chaps of Homestar Runner, Brad Neely of SuperDeluxe.com (Babycakes, Professor Brothers), Burnie Burns of Red vs Blue and some of the staff of Cyanide and Happiness.

The discussion has moved from what “selling out” is, to freedom of expression on the internet versus self- or imposed-censorship on other media, to the processes they go through to create their popular content.

Applause for Homestarrunner.com never running ads on their site for the eight years they’ve been going.

Q: “Can you talk about not having ads on your site?”–moderator
A: “There’s nothing to talk about, ads are the worst thing about the internet”–Bros Chaps

Brothers Chaps apparently work out of a “inspriringly depressing shopping center.”

There’s a room-wide twitter-like channel going on. Comments are up-down voted ala Reddit and the entire screen is projected behind the panelists so they can see what the most popular comments and questions are. This is a fantastic idea.