

ROFLCon conference attendees keep one eye glued on the panelists and another to the projected backchannel screen.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – At ROFLCon, the two-day gathering of internet memes and the people behind them, attendees didn't have to wait in line to pepper geek celebs with burning questions.

They just submitted their questions online

and voted, thanks to a custom-designed web-based tool, backchan.nl.

"Twitter is just one kind of a backchannel," said Drew Harry, the MIT graduate student who first came up with the concept in November 2007. "But I think this worked well as a public forum held in a physical space." Harry was contacted by the organizers of ROFLCon to create a special backchannel for the weekend's event.

The Reddit- and Digg-like forum was available online throughout the entirely of the conference. Moderators and panelists alike occasionally referenced the top eight questions, which were projected on a screen during each session.

A screenshot of the posts voted to the top during a panel about internet marketers.

"We were worried that speakers would get lampooned," said Christina Xu, a ROFLCon organizer and Harvard undergrad. "But decided if it was an event about the internet, we needed to make sure everyone had a voice."

By allowing a constant flow of dialogue with the audience,

ROFLCon-specific tool helped side step the mob rule that took over during the disastrous Zuckerberg keynote at South by Southwest. Audience members were able to virtually shout-out proclamations of geek love, ask poignant questions – and even play mischievous pranks.

During one panel, Incubating the Mind Virus, panel attendees furiously began submitting lines of the lyrics to the Rick Astley song

"Never Gonna Give You Up," voting to get them in the proper order – to

silently rickroll the entire session.

The only real question was – which was more entertaining, the panels or the feed on backchan.nl?

"I found it a bit distracting," said Brad Neely, an animator on Superdeluxe and panelist during ROFLCon. "But I think it was a good thing. It's probably an appropriate things to have for a group of people used to multiple forms of communication at once."

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com____

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