ROFLthing

Tomorrow the extra large San Francisco club Mighty will take a break from the dancing and drugs in favor of something much more addicting: the Internet. The web trends group ROFLcon (ironically named after the mid-90s chat room acronym) is anticipating a crowd of 300 for its first ROFLthing, a night of short presentations and cocktails to celebrate … well … Internet culture, of course. If Upcoming.com creator Andy Baio on the cult of unwilling celebrity doesn't get you in the door, maybe "Microhumor and The State of the LOL" from I Can Has Cheezburger's Ben Huh will.

ROFLcon founder Tim Hwang, who spends his days working in business development for Creative Commons and blogging at the catch-all U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches, says the event should "serve as a nice state of the union for where things are at and what people are talking about." Hwang (not to be confused with the Google attention-grabbing Korean singer) started ROFLcon in 2007 with a group of friends to address the question of whether it was possible to get the entire Internet in one room simultaneously. Barring that, the annual get-togethers now draw several hundred computer scientists and social media buffs, many of whom are as interested as Hwang in how to aggregate social networks and content, or, as he says, "clean up the mess that Web 2.0 has created.” If all goes well, the Big Apple could get their own ROFLthing this winter, followed by Toronto.