You know that YouTube has become an institution when there are conventions and events built around the people who make the videos. The very idea of a convention conjures up a mass of people milling around in cheap suits, milling around the show floor and shaking hands and doing the name tag scan — eyes dropping to badge level, a quick decision that the wearer isn’t important enough to bother with, moving on. At least, that’s what people do to me at conventions. I go to a lot of them.

Anyway, it’s apparent that if making videos and posting them on YouTube hasn’t quite reached the level of the National Pork Processing Association and its Annual Meeting And Luau, it’s at least big enough to spawn some get-togethers and meet-ups (those are the same thing, aren’t they?). And while it’s not the first of its kind, there’s one coming up next month that will gather a bunch of folks who are making names for themselves with Internet video.

It’s called Playlist Live, and it’s scheduled for March 26th and 27th at the Marriott World Center Resort in Orlando. This one will feature comedians Julian Smith and Wheezy Waiter, the guys behind the livelavalive comedy channel (Mitchell Davis and Kyle Sibert), and musical acts He Is We, All Caps, Nickasaur, and others. iJustine is supposed to appear for a meet-up, as is the Mystery Guitar Man and a host of others. The idea is to have YouTube-bred personalities — some making their first live appearances — together in one place. And the bottom line is that DIY celebrity, the kind that you get with a lot of hits on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, is starting to resemble the traditional kind of celebrity, the kind that used to be reserved for people on TV and in the movies and on “real” record labels.

It’s not yet the same, of course. And the bigger money is still mostly in traditional media. But the lines are blurring, and, like for any convention, the real value isn’t always in the panels and booths and official events, it’s in the networking, so if you’d like to go someplace where you’ll be able to trade tips and ideas with like-minded people, this might fill that bill. Plus, it’ll probably be warmer there than wherever you are now.

This isn’t a Nerdist endorsement, by the way — it’s just a heads-up for those who might find an event like this worth checking out. If you’re interested, there’s information at playlist-live.com.

Images: Fox Searchlight, Playlist Live