Conference

In 2010, Chicago-based designer Max Temkin and seven of his friends launched a Kickstarter project for the "party game for horrible people" they first created at a New Year's party in 2008. The result, Cards Against Humanity, has topped Amazon's bestselling games list for over two years. Since then, he's launched projects for a new deck of Werewolf cards and an interpretive dance based on Spelunky, and will publish the highly-anticipated Samurai Gunn.

Portland-based cartoonist Erika Moen illustrated her personal life for the last decade, with frank and honest vignettes of sex, queer culture, and her own sexual identity. She ran her autobiographical webcomic DAR! for six years, leading to an appearance on Penny Arcade's Strip Search, an online reality show for web cartoonists. In April, Erika launched Oh Joy Sex Toy, a weekly NSFW comic about sex and sexuality, in collaboration with her husband Matthew.

Startups are usually devoid of personality on Twitter, but Pinboard is a bookmarking site with attitude—skewering well-funded competitors and Silicon Valley culture. Behind the account is programmer, writer and painter Maciej Ceglowski, who created Pinboard out of frustration with Delicious' post-Yahoo redesigns. He bootstrapped the site with a crazy idea—take money from your users.

What do gypsy jazz and Python have in common? Adrian Holovaty, the Chicago-based developer and accomplished jazz guitarist responsible for EveryBlock, Chicago Crime, and the Django framework, named after gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt. Adrian's jazz guitar renditions on YouTube have garnered over 17 million views and inspired SoundSlice, a sophisticated web app for transcribing and sharing guitar tablature from YouTube videos.

Using little more than a Sharpie and a sheet of paper, Vi Hart breaks down topics like Fibonacci sequences, binary trees and hexaflexagons, turning doodling in math class into entertaining, thought-provoking videos. As a result, she's built an audience of over 600,000 subscribers in three years, with more than 42 million views for her YouTube videos.

Shanghai-born, Detroit-raised, and Brooklyn-based, Jack Cheng is a designer turned full-time writer. These Days, his self-published first novel released in April, raised $23,000 on Kickstarter. In the weekly updates that followed, he outlined every step of the creative process, giving an inside look into the publishing and editing process to his 961 backers.

For the last 15 years, Evan Williams has made it easy for non-geeks to find their voice online. He cofounded Blogger in 1999, Odeo in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and last year, Medium. Each of his projects built on the last, democratizing personal publishing for everyone. You can follow him on Twitter, along with 1.68 million of his closest friends.

In 1988, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair launched a print zine called bOING bOING, "the world's greatest neurozine." After migrating to the web in 1996, Mark added three talented writers to the mix — technology writer David Pescovitz, science-fiction author/free culture advocate Cory Doctorow, and journalist Xeni Jardin. This year is the 25th anniversary of bOING bOING's first issue, a quarter-century of sharing their "directory of wonderful things." Interviewed by Glenn Fleishman, editor/publisher of The Magazine and host of The New Disruptors.

Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and filmmaker Jack Conte may be best known as one-half of Pomplamoose, the indie-pop duo that racked up over 80 million views for their "VideoSongs" on YouTube — videos that show every step of the recording process without lip-syncing or dubs. As a solo artist, Conte's released five albums that fuse electronic, dance and pop. His most recent EP is out now on Patreon, the new funding platform he co-founded for independent artists like him, who release material online frequently for free.

The founder and CEO of one of Kickstarter's most successful — and controversial — hardware projects, Julie Uhrman had a simple vision: a $99 console that brings the mobile app model to the TV, letting any developer to publish a console game without restrictions. Ouya went on to raise over $8M to become the second-most funded project on Kickstarter, and the indie-friendly console was released in June.

When we asked New York writer and programmer Marco Arment to speak at XOXO, he was still developing Instapaper and The Magazine, and Tumblr was an independent startup. Since then, he sold The Magazine to Glenn Fleishman, Instapaper to Betaworks, and Tumblr sold to Yahoo in a billion-dollar deal. One of the best parts of independence is choosing what you work on, and Marco's clearing his plate for something brand new.

For the last six years, Jay Smooth's injected his own unique style of funny and thought-provoking commentary into the national debate on race, gender, and politics on Ill Doctrine, his pioneering hip-hop video blog hailed by the Rachel Maddow show as "genius" and selected as one of iTunes' Best Podcasts of the Year. You can listen to him every Friday night on WBAI's Underground Railroad, New York's longest-running hip-hop radio show.

In many industries, publishers can sometimes hurt unknown artists more than they help. But a new model for publishing is emerging, and Breadpig is paving the way—helping independent artists find a wider audience without losing control over their work. In addition to her work running Breadpig, Christina Xu is co-founder of ROFLCon, the conference on Internet culture, and founding director of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, the nonprofit wing of the Awesome Foundation.

Here's an idea: Mike Rugnetta reinvented the critical essay for the web. As host of Idea Channel, Mike deep-dives into a single idea every week, drawing connections between pop culture, technology and art—with a healthy side dish of animated GIFs. In its first year, it's racked up over 12 million views and over 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. A programmer and composer in Brooklyn, Mike previously toured as one-third of MemeFactory, a performative lecture about the Internet, soon to be released as a book.

Jonathan Coulton quit his day job as a software developer in 2005 to become a full-time musician, starting with a risky experiment to record a new song every week for a year. The result, Thing A Week, launched his independent career. He's responsible for some of geek culture's greatest anthems — "Code Monkey", "Re: Your Brains", and the closing themes for Portal and Portal 2. His most recent album, Artificial Heart, reached #1 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers Chart.

Ostensibly, Panic makes Apple software, like the award-winning Transmit, Coda, and Status Board. But how many Apple software developers team up with the creator of Katamari Damacy to print and sell their official t-shirts, or manufacture a series of deadly accurate Atari 2600 boxes for non-existent games? Cofounder Cabel Sasser shares the unique story of how Panic stayed independent at all costs, as well as some of the challenges along the way.