ROFLCon Panel - Internet Fame

Weinberger also (see previous post) stayed to moderate a panel on what it means to be internet famous.

Panel description:

YOU CAN GET PAID FOR THIS?: MAKING SOME BUCKS (W20: Sala del Puerto Rico): How do you make money? Are you making lots of money? Has all that money corrupted you? How about now? Are you a fluke are you generalizable? What are some other ways the rest of us can make money? Please?

Moderator: David Weinberger

Panelists: Kyle Macdonald (One Red Paperclip), Joe Mathelete (Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke), Ian Spector (Chuck Norris Facts), Andy Ochiltree (JibJab.com), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage)

My rough rough notes:
(Mostly these notes don’t reflect how good Weinberger is as a moderator with an unpredictable crowd, including the panelists - he did a great job getting them to answer questions without getting in the way of their natural humor and randomness.)
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Weinberger at ROFLCon: Fame in the age of ubiquity

David Weinberger, whom I’m a clear fan of to anyone who reads this bog, was the keynote speaker this afternoon at ROFLCon, which the organizers pronounce like roffle-con, not spell out like R - O - F - L- con, which is how I pronounce it.

(Photo by kevingc on flickr, creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license).

See my rambling notes below:

He basically argued (riffing on many themes from Everything is Miscellaneous) that the internet has changed the nature of fame - that in the pre-internet, mass communications era, fame was incredibly scarce, and drew it’s power from scarcity - very few people could make someone famous, and the number of ways to become famous was very small.

This created a certain kind of fame we call celebrity, along with a bunch of notions of what that means.

But thanks to the internet, we are no longer are interested in the inhuman, they’re-not-like-us-they’re-so-different famous - we’re looking for real, homespun, authentic, not separate, one of us kind of famous.
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