The talk I gave at ROFLcon, “Before the LOL”, was captured by several entities. There were some internal videographers streaming me to the net at large via the Ustream service, and there was also Rocketboom, a weekday video weblog that puts up little hacked up films about people, places, things.

Here is the remix of my talk on Rocketboom.

Bear in mind you’re seeing probably two to three minutes of a 50 minute presentation. For some, this may be all of me you want to take, so it’ll work out just fine. Others might enjoy the talk more seeing the full version that I’ve been told is coming out later. I intentionally set up the speech to not need fixing up, so hopefully it’ll look and sound good. WARNING: Amish Hat.

As a nice bonus, you see me kiss Steve Garfield on the forehead, and call him the Gift of Boston. I interviewed Steve six years ago for the BBS Documentary, and since then he’s gone on to become one of the bigger “Video Bloggers”. He never tires, never gives up making his funny and smart content, and so I was really happy to see him there.

I’ll post a more elaborate overview of my talk when it’s downloadable. Needless to say, I go in some crazy directions in that speech, which people liked. Unfortunately, I was scheduled up against a “LOLcats” panel, in which some of the biggest stars of the event were assembled to give their thoughts. People chose one panel or another to attend, and a lot of people who wanted to see me ended up going to the other one. So soon everyone will enjoy it.

By the way, the photo of me above came from Scott Beale of LaughingSquid, who I met at ROFLcon for the first time and is this really amazing photographer on top of everything else. You browse his photos of me and I actually look pretty damned human! Considering the lighting condition, the angles and final appearance of my presentation looks incredible. You could do worse for an afternoon than browsing his photos of the event.

This is only the second time I ever had something like presentation software showing images during my presentations. The first time was at Google, and I figured it’d be worth it. This time was because I walked the stage and thought this massive screen was too beautiful to resist. I was right. I’ll probably stick with my non-software-aided presentations generally in the future. I consider it the equivalent of a tie: gotta have one for certain situations but it’s more comfortable not to.

Here’s hoping the full video arrives soon.

As promised, I dumped a bunch of stuff on Flickr.

And by bunch of stuff, I mean a lot of stuff. Something like 1,200 photos so far, with another thousand likely to make it on there. Like I mentioned previously, I think this is way too much for anyone to get much out of it without a tour guide, but I figured you might like to know.

This page of collections is probably where most people would want to start. A lot of this is elsewhere but the Flickr interface is faster and easier for a lot of things, so you might discover stuff you didn’t check out before.

It’s pretty easy to dump stuff in; not so easy to arrange and tag things so they have all the old information. As time presents itself, I’ll tinker. Until then, enjoy the cascade.

OK, in a word: ROFLcon was fantastic.

Many other words come to mind: Perfection. Delight. Surprise. Thrills. Variety. Triumph. Every positive adjective I can think of, superlative words on the bottom of my bag that have not seen the light of day in many months, come out with fervor and stick to ROFLcon’s side with no ill fit. This was a special, special event and I am so very lucky to have been a part of it.

Like many ideas, it came in a flash and with a lot of scratching of heads and skeptical eyebrow raisings. I don’t pretend not to have been part of that contingency. In fact, I was likely a leading candidate for Grand Poobah of Doubt. Asked to help organize the event, I spied some of the mailing list and quickly retreated from any administration or backstage duties, fearful of the time sink and resulting disaster tarring my jacket. I was left on the mailing list for the administrators, however, and it was there I witnessed something quite inspiring indeed.

Over the months of planning, these kids (and they really are kids, barely in their twenties and a few of them not quite there) saw through barrier after barrier, secured many thousands of dollars in funding, called and cajoled and convinced attendees and speakers to play a part in the conference, and hatched something brilliant.

ROFLcon, to summarize, was lauded as a “conference of Internet memes”. Memes, in this case, mostly meant “celebrities”, and celebrity from actions and events more than positions or wealth. These were the kind of celebrities who could be summarized with a noun and a “guy” or “girl” appended at the end: Tron Guy. Sweater Girl. One Red Paperclip Guy. Chuck Norris Facts Guy. I Can Haz Cheezburger Guy. On and on, and over time this list grew quite large indeed.

The whole thing wrought large, actually; upon the weekend of this happening, hundreds had been joined up, either as attendees or speakers. These speakers included myself: I was asked to give a historical presentation, and my indifference to this assignment grew to heady anticipation as I saw what a gathering storm was occurring.

Slated for Harvard’s halls, the event grew so large it was moved to MIT, along several buildings. MIT organizations helped with space and logistics. The organizers reached out to other groups for promotional items, ads, printing, and artwork. It became very real.

Of the two days, Friday was a work day for me – I was one of the first presentations. My talk, “Before the LOL”, attempted to give an overview of the rise of cutesy little ideas being passed along for the hell of it, along with a sense of how human beings have always kind of acted the way they do online. I touched on some pretty out there subjects like slow-scan ham radio and office copier art. It pulled off very well and was well liked by the audience as far as I can tell. More details will come on my talk as it goes online and I assemble some related material about it.

The rest, however, was me just being awash in the fun. It is rare to be at an event where I am not just fascinated by the names on badges, but consistently amazed by them. Administrators of sites I use daily were next to artists I’d known for years. Old friends came out of the woodwork, while I made entirely new ones. I autographed items, and resisted the urge to ask for autographs myself.

Did I agree with everything said and every characterization of the ideas presented? Of course not. That’s not the point, to find like-minded folks to parrot to you everything you already knew. Echo chambers are not worth getting out of bed for. This was a place where certain things were assumed (we all use the Internet, we’ve all seen these famous things to various degrees), and what came next was a celebration of being alive while being online.

There are many writeups of the event, and many photos. People did their jobs of capturing this whole event and I feel quite redundant going into detail. But I will take note of several things.

First of all, there was a real vital sense of fun and joy throughout the event. It wasn’t “for” anything; not selling a product, introducing a new technology, forcing a hipness down our throats until we were dazed enough to sign up for whatever it was we needed to sign up for. It just was, like assembling a huge party of cool and smart people and just letting them go. I’ve been told the SXSW conference is like this, but SXSW sells stuff: bands, movies, books, products, technology. This just was, a celebration of people who spend time online walking around and basking in the joy of communication. I don’t see enough of that.

Second, an event like this is ripe, one might even say begging, for exploitation and cynicism. Writers whose job is to sneer at everything around them are also in abundance regarding this event. Like any other conference of folks assembled around a theme, it’s easy enough for someone to dash off a handful of cramped thoughts about being there, scarfing down the free pizza and checking their Blackberry for new calls, than it is to accept that there was something special there. There was. I felt it and throughout the weekend I was part of it.

Kudos to that gang, those people who worked so hard so near where I live so that I could have my horizons split wide and my circle of acquaintances bound in directions I’d have not dreamed possible.

OK, here’s your homework.

Suffer, if you have the inclination, through this episode of “Boing Boing TV”, a regular feature of the Boing Boing weblog, which discusses the upcoming film Speed Racer, a special-effects laden summer blockbuster from the makers of the Matrix Trilogy. (The episode is entitled “Speed Racer is “poptimistic”: interview with John Gaeta, part 1″.)

Remember when people who considered themselves vanguards of Internet technology bleated and blorted about how on the Internet, things would be different? Loosed from the constraints of the current mass media paradigm, they could really take the discourse in new directions? Sure, a lot would be stupid and petty and weird, but a lot wouldn’t. Unquestionably, if you were tired of being spoon fed pre-packaged goat pellets, you were in for a treat.

So here we have an episode of “Boing Boing Television”, the newest feature of one of the unquestionably most popular “weblogs” currently extant, which would not be out of place in a low-funded television station on the ass-end of a major network syndication feed. After a couple seconds of from-the-studio footage of a major motion picture, we get the BoingBoing TV logo, which includes lifted (and uncredited) audio from the song “Video Computer System” by Golden Shower, and then, at the 10 second mark, a big fat ad for BMW, telling you this was “brought to you by” a specific model of BMW car. 30 more seconds of from-the-studio footage follow it.

From there, a tarted-up Xeni Jardin asks a bored John Gaeta such probing inquiries as “Did working with this movie change the way you look at vehicles?” (which he responds with “I don’t know”) and we’re peppered with Gaeta’s prepared speech on choosing the specific design of the film’s special effects. Throughout his mentioning the technology, we’re given more canned studio footage of the “making of”.

At the three minute mark, because surely we’ve gotten bored with this discussion, we are treated to a 30 second ad for the model of BMW car the episode was brought to you by.

Three more minutes of Gaeta giving canned responses to Xeni’s quiet nodding and a spastic camera shot are interspersed with canned studio footage from the movie, along with shots of the movie’s logo. We then receive quiet credits which include links to the movie and the information that this goulash is creative commons licensed.

Is that it?

Is that what it’s all about?

The best we can get is a 6 minute ad for a summer blockbuster broken up with a BMW ad, brought to you by a BMW model, while a person with a journalistic background asks meaningless questions of a established Hollywood technician which he ignores and answers with canned speeches? Is it 1988? Are we satisfied with having a low-end Entertainment Tonight cloneclip without the benefit of full 720×480 resolution or adequate sound and video technicians?

No, Xeni, Cory, I don’t want to hear your fucking excuses. You horn on enough about sites like TED.COM that feature exciting people discussing amazing ideas and theories, people off the beaten path and who are beating the path we might all eventually take. The audience contributes ratings on which talks are the most interesting, funny, jaw-dropping, and so on. In these clips, which are also brought to us by BMW, we are given an engaging sound logo, followed by a 2 second “brought to you by” and the BMW logo, followed by anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of someone being fucking amazing. Nobody peppers these people with inane overtures to launch into canned monologues selling a product; they deliver rehearsed yet engaging presentations of whatever they know best. So we know this sort of thing is being done… You’re just not doing it. A lot of people are not “doing it”.

Somehow, with the same opportunities (you certainly run into enough brilliant people along the way, you own a camera, you have BMW sponsorship), TED.COM shows class, insight and depth where you eject out sugar pills of Hollywood movie ads. Are you going to step it up? Are you going to talk the game?

Then play it right.

Editing clips of video means a lot of time rendering them out. While this goes on, I have time to make a few other things happen. One of them is clearing out some of my junk drawers and putting it up to a more accessible position. Among the stuff I grabbed a long time ago was something called Hacker Photos, which was someone’s attempt to gather “the face of the underground”. What he mostly did was capture everybody who has both a newspaper article and a DEFCON badge in their scrapbooks. Well, whatever works. Some of these people are friends and the attempt to capture “the underground” is an appreciable act. So here that site is again.

The date of it is 2001 but I’m sure I caught it a little later than that. The “photos” seem to be culled from screengrabs of video, newspaper articles, and various scanned photographs taken over a range of about 10 years. As time goes on, this functions more as a lovable album than a real “rogues’ gallery”. The addition of some of the canonical UNIX and Internet pioneers is a nice touch as well.

I’m sure some people in these photos are unhappy about this. Well, sorry. Someone thought you were a hacker, once. Now you’re awesome. I assume anyone who judges you based on these photos is not really your friend or not worth working for anyway. Hang loose.

More fun stuff soon.

I’m putting something like a thousand images and scans up on Flickr. I guess that’s interesting.

The concept, of course, is interesting to a certain segment of people. Oh wow, a thousand images, and Jason tends to collect neat historical stuff, so it’ll be a thousand images of neat historical stuff. Oh wow, they will say.

But to another segment, they will never simply browse a thousand images. They have no time. I’m the kind of guy who uploads a lot of images but so do others. People are uploading images so fast to Flickr that there’s just no way to easily get a sense of it all. None. Same with weblog postings. Compared to all this, movies are a steady stream of droplets you can easily catch in a cup.

This has been said in different ways in different places, but I’ve become a strong believer that the future for people looking to make a good buck is to become a tour guide.

We’re no longer in the position of there not being enough “stuff”. There is so much “stuff” online now that a person who wants to find “stuff” could now spend the rest of their natural lives browsing through it. There was lots of “stuff” before but now you can have it fed to you consistently and constantly forever. This is both wonderful and depressing.

The process of getting “stuff” is becoming easier, quicker, slicker, more a natural part of existing. I don’t mind this, but it does mean that we’re getting flooded with content, of which a small amount might be inherently interesting to a specific line of thinking. If I’m looking for, say, the history of glass insulators, there are places within flickr, ebay, websites, weblogs and FTP sites I would probably find interesting. Others might be interested in it too. All of us could appreciate someone being a tour guide to find all this. Some of us might want to be that tour guide.

A tour guide, when good, helps save time by taking you to interesting things, but additionally understands if you want to break off to study things closer. A tour guide knows that not everyone in the tour group is a crazy goddamn fanatic who needs every last detail, but just wants to get a sense of thing. And a tour guide chats with other tour guides on ways to make the tour even better.

We have “linkblogs”, collections of links people dump and others drop on them. That’s nice. We also have places where people kind of assemble weblog-entry-like paragraphs and put them up and people comment on them. Also nice. But in both cases, they’re linear tours, one after another, with a lot of the same ground being covered again and again. Hey, look, someone drew using a etch-a-sketch. I’ve had to sit through a few dozen “wow, nice etch-a-sketch” weblog entries or linkin’-log entries and see everyone discuss them again. Often, shaking the etch-a-sketch is discussed. Sometimes people mention other cases of insane work being done using children’s drawing toys.

I suspect there is a gap out there for sustained group tour guides of stuff. I’m probably visualizing something like what wikipedia currently fulfills, without the additional moronities of policy and fucknuts. A place where you’re clicked in and others are adding links to it and photos and you browse until you’re sick of it and move on. A nice little tour.Variations of this exist but we’re not quite there yet.

Regardless of a software solution, I think we’ll always need people, people who are willing to construct little walking tours for others, who enjoy showing off what they’ve found and putting it all together. I think this is what we need more of, the missing piece to this collecting of stuff we’re all inevitably doing in our lives.

You even get to wear a jaunty little hat.

I made a discovery the hard way over the years, in the way one doesn’t like to make discoveries. That is, I made the finding that database maintenance is hard.

Oh, sure, laugh at me and my vital announcement of a thing well known, but there’s a more sharp edge to the coin besides just knowing that databases can be difficult. It’s that, without knowing it, you can find yourself in charge of a database and the maintenance of it.

When I started bbslist.textfiles.com, I didn’t understand that this little lark would be a daily (and I do mean that, daily) maintenance task for the next eight years. People send me changes, updates, descriptions, and artifacts for that BBS List Database pretty much every single goddamn day. I am happy to have the duty and the pleasures of maintaining this list, even if people sometimes get a bit pushy about it.

But there we go, a daily strapped-on duty and chore on top of my other stuff. So when I think about projects I want to do, I have to ask myself: will this become a database? Will this become a database requiring maintenance? Because honestly, I probably have to walk away at that point.

At some juncture I had this idea of a “who owns what” database. You’d type in the UPC product code of a item you bought, and it’d immediately tell you what fucked-up, evil corporation you just plunked your cash over to. People are sometimes not aware that they’re dropping bills into the hat of what they would think was a completely non-related competitor but in fact is a big daddy to your favorite little munchable. Hay has been made along these lines.

But the thing is, these sales and purchases happen every month. I’d be in the critically sad business of tracking corporate earnings statements, taking letters from people on boring consolidation announcements, and probably ending up going somewhat crazy. Also, I’d never be quite accurate. So no, let’s not do “who owns what”.

Similarly, I had some sort of idea to do a compilation of photos taken at all hacker cons. In fact, I own a domain, conphotos.org, for this. But the fact is, I’m stymied along two lines. First, Flickr does this a thousand times better than I do. Second, a lot of people don’t want their fuckin’ photos used without their permission! But ultimately, again, this is a database, more pain in the ass, more needless maintenance.

So on, and so on. I have a lot of waylaid projects that translate to “please give six months of your life to this”, when six months can be spent in other arenas to a greater level of quality. I just don’t see myself having that time, that way. I get suggestions for things I “should” do and the fact is, when it turns out to be a big maintain-me-daddy database, I have to say no. Again. And again.

I do what I can, but realizing this fundamental fact has saved the world a lot of half-baked Jason-maintained databases.

Going through the process of making a documentary a second time causes me to come face to face with a few situations I’d forgotten about. You tend to gloss over stuff, and forget some of the sharp edges. I guess it’s how we cope.

Anyway, I have drives of footage, which include stuff that has been gone through and stuff not gone through. There should be no reason for stuff to have stuck around in “not gone through” except for time; the process should be methodical. However, there were two sets of interviews that have been sitting around way too long.

The reason is they’re dark.

The camera I use is a little tricky in some light situations, and it took me a while to really learn some of the situations it would freak out in. As a result, some percentage are a bit too dark, dark enough that you would notice if I put them side to side with other shots. The nature of digital recording with video is that there’s also a greater noise floor in the video when you look at them closely.

This is all fixable, everything is always fixable, but given the choice of sitting through watching my dark shots and going to the shots I’m really proud of, I keep going to the others. Luckily, I’m running out of choices and that means I’m nearly done with the clip-making. And it means I’m going through the remnants now.

Given a choice between a dark shot and a light shot saying the same thing, I will choose the light shot. This gives advantage to one group of interviewees for no good reason. 99% of the dark shots may not make it in. It makes it very hard to set the time to go through them, know it may reveal just seconds of used footage.

But it has to be done, and I am doing it. It’s just tough. It always is.

Oh, Trixter, you silly person.

You work yourself up into such sadness while life has handed you nothing but jewels and treasure.

You state dreams and projects you feel could not be finished, to feel like your life is going to be a series of incomplete projects choking your days and filling them with regrets. Ha, I say. Ha! As if to butter the corncob of despair with a melted yellow layer of irony, you point to accomplishments of my own as examples of being left behind, missing opportunities, being incomplete.

You probably never intended to name your two sons after the greatest comic book characters in history, but you expectedly did it, and that’s awesome in itself. In fact, it’s a sign. You never intend to do the greatest things ever, but you end up doing them anyway.

I had this mulled idea of doing a documentary on BBSes, this concept that was like many I would probably have fiddled with and then forgotten forever, but then I heard about this little project you were involved in, and I was inspired by anything to absolute do it. And I knew I was doomed to try to pull off a DVD by myself. I knew I needed a guide, a mentor, a tour mensch to make sure I did everything right and not just passably. And who did I turn to?

Here we are, intertwined in destiny, two young kids who both attended the North American International Demoparty in 1996, and we didn’t even meet; we lived different and separate lives and yet we each traveled many miles to be in that specific place to be a part of the proceedings. That says something, yes it does.

You list off your projects like they’re insurmountable mountains. Tell me how you found yourself in Utah winning a competition handily with your 8088 in tow. Tell me how you found yourself in two runs of Blockparty grabbing prizes left and right and meeting heroes. Now ask yourself, who inspired me to want to make Blockparty come together in the first place!

Haven’t you realized yet how much I love you and will help you see things through?

Hey, did you know I can speak German? Neither did I!

“Ich habe vorher ein paar Jahre an einer Dokumentation uber Mailbox-Systeme (BBS) gearbeitet und als ich damit fertig war, merkte ich, dass ich viele Fahigkeiten aufgebaut hatte, die ich noch woanders einsetzen konnte.”

OK, fine, I was translated from english answers I gave. That was nice of them.

I don’t know how much people who read this weblog will find new, but there you go.