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It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that behind all the screens, behind all the slide shows of funny animal photos and GIFs, the Internet is made of people.

These are people who are making things and figuring out new ways to turn their work on the Web into a business — and not necessarily by creating social advertising. Instead, they are coming up with ideas to develop, finance and market projects like films, albums, products and companies that might typically get rejected by movie studios, record labels and venture capitalists.

That was one of the main themes of a four-day conference in Portland, Ore., the XOXO Festival, that brought about 400 people together over the weekend to discuss the many ways that the Internet is helping to “creatively disrupt” traditional businesses and industries.

The weekend was infused with the vibe of creative makery. In addition to a weekend full of talks, the first floor of the arts center that hosted the conference was turned into an artsy fringe festival/marketplace. Attendees could browse custom smartphone cases, play with 3D printers, try indie games, peruse zines and visit a booth of popular Kickstarter projects. Food trucks serving local fare filled the street outside of the event, including a cart selling handmade ice cream. (A truck was there giving free screen printing lessons.)

All of it was meant to emphasize a new economy that is being reshaped. It defies tradition and prizes creativity, seeks direct contact with customers and an audience, and formalizes that process and scales it, so that instead of asking your relatives to finance your next film, people can make use of the network effect and generate support, social and financial, from a large network of people online.

Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, which was used to sell tickets for the conference, described in an interview a new economy, one “that is being created by the minute.” But what does that new economy look like and how will it work?

Here are impressionistic insights and tidbits from some of the speakers who took the stage at XOXO.

Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt of Studio Neat have created successful Kickstarter projects including the Glif photo accessory for the iPhone and the Cosmonaut stylus for the iPad. They promoted the benefits of staying local, by having hardware products made in the United States. “This is Joel,” Mr. Gerhardt said, showing a photo of an engineer at the factory where Studio Neat products are made. “We have his cellphone number.” Mr. Provost said that in their experience, “people love to know where things come from, how they’re made and who is making them.”

Jamie Wilkinson is one of the founders of VHX.tv, a video site that lets artists sell their work directly to fans, including the latest comedy special from Aziz Ansari. He used his talk to dispel myths that keep creative types and entrepreneurs from releasing professional content through the Web. “Establish a brand on the Web and use that to promote work,” he said.

Mr. Wilkinson gave the example of “Indie Game: The Movie,” a documentary about game makers, which was promoted and distributed both on iTunes and on VHX.tv. The film attracted the same amount of sales on both sites.

“Self-distribution works, and you can make enough to get by on,” he said.

Christopher Poole, the founder of the notorious message board 4chan, and its more legitimate sibling, the venture-backed image-remixing site Canvas, talked about the perks of running a site that isn’t necessarily financially viable. He said that 4chan, which gets tens of millions of page views, has been losing money for the last year. Despite that, he said, “I’d take that over a million dollars any day,” because he is doing something that he loves.

Ron Carmel of the independent game studio 2D Boy, creator of the hit game World of Goo, said that he and his team initially thought they needed a publisher for the game, then started asking whether they should try to sell it themselves. They sold downloads on the Web and through the Nintendo Wii, then added versions for more platforms, including Apple’s mobile devices. When asked how the game had done, Mr. Carmel said, “It’s very successful. I’m not fully retired, but I don’t need to work for the next 10 or 20 years.” That brought a round of applause.

Many speakers talked about the challenges of being a smaller business and having rivals duplicate their efforts.

Bre Pettis, chief executive of MakerBot, which makes 3-D printers, talked about a project his company did with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that involved taking photos of artworks from many angles, then using them to create a digital 3-D blueprint and a printed replica. He said that he had been tempted to do this on the sly: “I was ready to steal it all, and they said, no, no, come on in!”

Mr. Pettis expressed frustration with companies that clone his product — though he acknowledged that MakerBot is in a difficult position because it tries to share as much information as it can about the workings of its printers. “Carbon-copy clones make spending money on product innovation challenging,” he said. One company in China called Mbot, is “basically taking Makerbots and selling them for cheaper,” he said, adding: “That is one of the things I have to think about — how to keep innovating while still sharing.”

Patents are also a worry, because the company’s products are competing with more elaborate devices from larger companies, so it has had to navigate around “a couple thousand patents,” he said. “I kind of assumed when we started that the patent system would have failed by the time we got big enough to care about that,” Mr. Pettis said to laughter from the crowd.

Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, a comedy series on NBC, set the tone of the event with a raucous keynote speech on Saturday night that urged attendees to seek out creativity above all else. In his experience, the entertainment industry was spoiled by the influx of money and metrics, rather than valuing the creation of quality content. He warned those in attendance of worrying too much about generating a profit. “Don’t value the connection more than the things it’s connected to,” he said.

There were few complaints about the otherwise thoughtfully organized festival, which included parties and events at local companies. The Wi-Fi didn’t go down once! As the conference wrapped up, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, the organizers, gave a teary thanks to the audience, and suggested that the conference, a one-off experiment, would return in some form next year.

One lingering critique that pushed its way into conversation a few times over the course of the weekend, especially after a few pints of locally crafted beers, was one of access. Now that a new economy, a new playbook for making interesting content and projects, is beginning to form, how can we ensure that everyone, not just people with the know-how and social ties to help support it, benefit from it?