What would happen if every internet meme got squished into one room? Would all your base belong to our gem sweater? I think they are about to find out in April with ROFLcon! Just look at the guestlist: The Brothers Chaps from Homestarrunner, Dr. McNinja, and I Can Has Cheezburger, among others. And get this: it's at Harvard. Awesome.

One thing I can't figure out, though, is what exactly the purpose of all this is. I mean, okay, there's a tiny box titled "about" which reads:

This is the ongoing record of an effort to assemble every famous internet meme or celebrity to come to Harvard in the spring of 2008 to attend a conference.

There are some panels, and some lucky, lucky academics who will be at this thing, such as Chris Kelty, Judith Donath, and JD Connor. But really, what are they doing? I suspect it's just an excuse for LULZ. Very sneaky.

Stella Kevlar of lolsecretz has been invited to speak on the, er, lolpanel, and remarks:

Yup, that’s right: the creators of various Internet phenomena are going to be converging upon Harvard in April to discuss Internet culture, the generation of memes, and generally gaze at each other’s navels. We’ve been invited to sit on a “Lolcat Panel” along with the folks at I Can Has Cheezburger?, Lolcat Bible, and some other Lolspin-offs.

Let me restate this again, with emphasis, just in case any of you don’t completely understand what amazingness is happening: Ryan and I are going to Harvard University to engage in a series of intellectual discussions about misspelled and grammatically incorrect text superimposed on photographic images of cats.

I love my life.

Momo sees this as part of a bigger trend, where people create mashups of memes to make something new, or as a common communication point, which she calls a "new collective imagery." She links the video "Internet Stars are Viral" as an example (the song itself is a parody of a Billy Joel song about pop culture touchpoints. Beautiful.). I only recognized about 70% of those, which makes me realize I need to sleep less.

Anil Dash is going, and is excited about ROFLcon as he thinks something is happening:

But taken together, the propagation of memes through the Internet is a new channel for creating culture. I think that's a phenomenally important development, and one well worth taking seriously. If that can happen and we're having fun laughing at silly cat pictures at the same time, even better.

But he's not sure what, either.

The verdict is still out: We've never made a rock star -- if MySpace counted, those bands wouldn't consider getting signed to a major label with a traditional media company as a milestone of success. Snakes on a Plane tanked. Howard Dean is not the President. A funny YouTube video can get a couple minutes of play on a clip show on basic cable. But I think there's a future where we really can do a lot more than just contribute 10 minutes worth of ha-ha to your workday.

He probably is just going for conferences for the same reason I do: free stuff.

It makes me wonder what will happen, though, when all these memes are in one place together. Will the internet finally become serious business, as it has threatened to do thousands of times? Either way, lulz will be eminent. I have to go...I will call it "research."

[SJ writes at I, Asshole as well.]