This is a writeup of Hrishikesh Aradhye, Ph.D.'s talk at the Media Lab last month, with my own commentary sprinkled throughout.

Power to the people, at last! It's a new hour
Now we all ain't gon' be American Idols
But you can 'least grab a camera, shoot a viral

Kanye West, Power

An hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second (or ten years' worth of video every single day). Think about that for a minute. That's a lot of content. And, as haters everywhere have pointed out already, a lot of it is crap.

The more interesting point, though, is that some of these videos are actually really good. If YouTube can get better at surfacing the good stuff, whether it's a funny comedian, a talented singer, or a hilarious FAIL clip, we all benefit (including Google). Identifying talent has traditionally been a very subjective art, and as a result, the quantification of talent hasn't really been discussed in published literature.

Richard Gingras (@richardgingras), head of News Products at Google, spoke at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard today. I liveblogged it, so let me know where the errors are and I'll fix them.

liveblogged by @mstem, @natematias, @schock, and @beckyhurwitz.

How do we empower citizens as equal partners in urban planning with data and analytical tools? If new tech can enable planners, tool makers and community groups to create meaningful change, how do we get there?

Frank Hebbert (@fkh) works at OpenPlans, building tools to help citizens and government come together for better city planning. He thinks we can make great places and beat climate change with the winning combo of planning, tech and public participation.

Frank graduated from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and is also a programmer and GIS nerd. He now runs the Civic Works group at OpenPlans.

A lot has been written, for over a decade now, about trolls on the internet, and the role that anonymity might have in emboldening people to say terrible things. ROFLcon even featured a panel, Aca-meme-ia, with the University of Oregon's Whitney Phillips, who researchs trolling. The MemeFactory group put on an incredible performance where they directly addressed the rape culture found all too easily on Reddit and the other hubs of web culture celebrated at ROFLcon. I hope it gets posted online soon so I can share it.

You've probably noticed that we were at ROFLcon all weekend. (Sorry for all the posts, but if I didn't tweet about Nyan-Cat-flavored ice cream, the Flying Spaghetti Monster would take the keys to my Twitter account). If you want to dive into the individual sessions and keynotes, Nathan Matias has pulled together a great liveblog round-up. But some common themes and a couple of major questions stand out that I wanted to think about some more, if you'll indulge me.

The closing ROFLcon keynote. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to defend These Internets from those that would take away its freedoms. On the heels of the SOPA/PIPA debacle, we’ve assembled this final boss panel to scheme and plan for the next time some baddies come around the corner.

Panelists:

• Alexis Ohanian (Reddit / Breadpig)
• Tiff Cheng (Fight For The Future)
• Derek Slater (Google)
• Elizabeth Stark (Stanford / Yale)
• Anil Dash (mod – Think Up)

Derek (@derekslater): We need to fix the process of how internet policy is made. Internet policy should be like the internet, not politics as usual.

Christian Sandvig introduces our panelists:

• Matt Harding (Where The Hell Is Matt), who became famous in that dark time before streaming video sites.
• Judson Laipply (The Evolution of Dance, a 2006 YouTube performance with 70 million views in the first 8 months),
• Liam Sullivan (Liam Show / "Shoes", which received 41 million views)

We have, gathered here, internet video royalty. But the field itself is changing significantly. On Wednesday, YouTube announced increased investment in professional production of content, to the tune of $200 million. They're going to have channels, hire existing celebrities to appear, produce serialized content, and get sponsors like AT&T to run ads over it. It's 2012, and YouTube has invented television!

The End of the Internet Video Star

Panelists: Dan Sinker (Mozilla / @MayorEmanuel), Biella Coleman (McGill University), Latoya Peterson (Racialicious), Molly Sauter @oddletters (mod - Comparative Media Studies). This post written with Erhardt Graef.

Molly Sauter introduces the panel: How do regular memes and politics collide? There's the political world, the IRL world, and the internet world of hilarity and provocative humor.

Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Georgetown, founded the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit focused on fandom. They were established to make a home for people who make non-commercial transformative works who face legal challenges and copyright battles.

People often assume that certain expression is illegal when it actually is not. When Rebecca first got into law, legal institutions and lawyers were just beginning to become aware of the internet. There was a fantasy of control and a notion that digital files would lead to an era of perfectly controlled content.

Rebecca investigated the legality of fan fiction and found that it is, indeed, legal. Legal questions surrounding the Further Adventures of Mulder & Scully have been mostly resolved. The writing that comprises fan fiction is fair use. [See the Center for Social Media’s Guide to Fair Use]

It's 2012. Nerds are in and internet memes can actually make you famous IRL. But way back in the Year 2000, things were different. YouTube didn't exist, and a video had to be sent around as an email attachment (remember RealPlayer?). Your mom yelled at you for tying up the phone line and GeoCities plastered banners all over your creations.

The past is well-represented here, by Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion (founded in 1998), Zblofu of Zombocom, and Jonti Picking of Weebl's Stuff. They were all online in the 90's, but things really exploded in 2000.

Eric shot still photos of himself conveying requested emotions, gradually growing more complicated, from sad to conveying sarcastic respect for an authority figure.

The crowd groans as we revisit hamsterdance.com and see how commercialized the once-pure GIF-overloaded page has become. But its spirit lives on at sites like omfgdogs.com.