LaurieWrites

Converge South Saturday

The main event for me today at Converge South was BlogHer co-founder Elisa Camahort's keynote.

Yesterday there was one female speaker. Today there were several. Anil Dash got stuck in Toronto and had to cancel. At the very fun (and delicious, I might add) barbecue hosted by a local blogger at his very cool house, replacements were found for him who happened to be women.

I believe that BlogHer's presence at this event was a good thing. Elisa did a great job this morning going in-depth into "how blogs change the world," with a focus on the "transformational quality of personal blogging." Here are some notes:

Blogs are changing...How we age. How we survive. The way we make a living. The way we participate.

How we age...Elisa mentioned Millie Garfield and Ronni Bennett  as examples of how older adults are getting online in larger numbers, and how writing about one's aging process is definitely approaching it in a different way than ever before. Here's a link to a shot of Ronni and Millie together, taken by Millie's son, Steve.

"This will be what the Ken Burns of the future uses", she said, indicating that blogs are recording our personal histories and will remain as a record of so many lives.

How we age...People go through events, acute and chronic, online. Katherine Stone blogged through post-partum depression, a personal act that turned into activism. Laurie blogs her experience with cancer. Not Just About Cancer. Diabetes Mine. Amanda blogged losing her husband to cancer at a young age.

Changing the way we make a living...Bloggers have business cards. They represent themselves as business people. Chloe Spencer and Elise Bauer have been financially successful with their blog efforts.

How we participate...Politicians realize that they ignore people in the blogosphere at their peril. Even nonpolitical blolggers are participating...Talking to millions of people, especially women, who can swing an election.

Blogs and Hurricane Katrina...Grace Davis and the team of Cooper Munro and Emily McKhann started blogs to collect resources to send to people who lost so much on the Gulf Coast. Blogs got stuff to people before the Red Cross and FEMA did.

Chez Pim's A Menu for Hope has food bloggers gathering to raise money for UNICEF. Last year they raised $17,000.

Elisa was on a panel about social networking immediately following the keynote with Soni Pitts and Ruby  Sinreich.

What is social networking? How has it changed
Ruby says grassroots organizing has happened since there have been humans.
Internet allows us to do a lot of the same things.
Bloggers spread news and media are forced to address the issue.
No organization orchestrating it, not even individual leaders.
Five aspects : strong social ties/trust. People in the network like each other, trust each other…
Dense communication grid.
Meta – sense of purpose. Are they aware this network exists?
(I must have missed the other two aspects...hmmm)
Soni Pitts – social networking in a business sense.
Social networking has enhanced her social life and networking opportunities because she works from home.
You have a group of friends that is real whether they’re in front of you or are pixels on a screen.

Elisa – doesn’t get a lot of the social networking she sees. It's better to be selective/having it mean something vs. collecting as many people as you can. I find it a little overwhelming.
I understand meeting people online and then personally - I've done it plenty of times.  Why do people I don't know follow me on Twitter?

Audience–I follow people I don’t know on Twitter to learn more about them in the industry.

Soni -  celebrity syndrome…we think we know them but they don’t know us.
Audience: Social networking is about "amplifying serendipity" He got involved in podcasting, met all these people, planned conference. Allowed me to do some really great things. I'm not a person who’s good at shaking hands – having the internet has helped me do that.

The next panel was on journalism schools and how they're changing to help students work in the new media environment. North Carolina A & T will have the second acccredited j-program in North Carolina. Panelists were

Joe Killian from the Greensboro News & Record,  Dr. Andy Bechtel from UNC-Chapel Hill and Dr. Teresa Styles from A&T's program were the panelists. Some more discussion here on "are bloggers journalists?" Dr. Styles says no. I disagreed. Another person in the audience said that blogs are free-for-alls. No one will ever sue you for what you write on your blog. Again, I disagreed. How do we know? "Show me one person who's lost their house because of something they wrote on their blog?" he said. I can't. But what I do know is that this is publishing, and especially if you're affiliated with a newspaper's website, I can't imagine there isn't any trouble involved with shooting your mouth off - especially if what you say is untrue...I don't see carte blanche to libel being okay for the web any more than it is for print.

The gist here seemed to be that there aren't any clear answers. The bottom line is that good content is still the key - solid writing, a sense of one's intent. But it sure does help these days to know how to work a video camera.

SXSW Photos

Austin/ SXSWi photos are finally up. The set is on the right. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to make the Flickr Uploader rock and roll on the Mac. This seems really ridiculous, that anything was working better on the old computer.

Here are a few. I find Austin quite photogenic.

My favorite panel! The editors from The Onion, Mediabistro and Salon! I'm such a GEEK.

Austin's community art project that every city seems to have adopted - albeit with different totems - is the guitar. We got pandas in D.C. That kind of says it all. (Although the crabs in Baltimore were pretty cool.)

iLaurie

My iLife class started two weeks ago. It's okay so far. I don't love it, and usually I can tell by the second date if there's ANY chance in hell of that, so I'm trying to work through that particular angst that only I can bring to a simple software class.

First of all, it is the Cocoon of classes. Like the movie? Yeah, approximately ten senior citizens were beamed down from the spaceship to take this course. The sight of this many gray-haired Mac geeks is giving me a glimpse into my future that I'm apparently just not ready for. One lady who appears to be in her late 70s/early 80s, whose name rhymes with "furnace," that's all I'm sayin', is down with all of the new gear. She's all, "1 Gig? Ha!" when the teacher says something, and yet she looks like my grandma when she used to get dressed up in her best duds to go to Bingo. On the one hand I like it, because hey...I'm the last person to be ageist (I was a social worker working with seniors for years, and I'm down with the over 70 set, trust me), and why shouldn't older adults be a part of the revolution too? But on the other hand, and this is terrible, she annoys me. Her voice is annoying. She sounds like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Imagine every word sounding like his affected pronunciation of"Shweetheaht", except for in a woman's voice, and followed by a sly little grin and a weird little laugh. It's so odd! That's shallow of me, but I can't help it. It grates, and for some reason I'm very sensitive to voices. There are singing voices, for instance, of very popular performers, that just tweak me for some reason and I can't even stand to hear them. I know. Freak.

She's also quite self-righteous about her Mac Mommy status, and shakes her head while she's unloading her stories about her gear, like "I know, please don't hate me because I have the BETA version of blahblahblah." I didn't think that kind of geek oneupmanship was possible in anyone who was alive in aught-12, so it's kind of intriguing. Plus she's got the disposable income to equip herself with the entire Apple store inventory, so "Ha," she says again. The people who took my last photo class were the same way: "Oh, I'll just go home and print this out on my SuperMegaMan 50,000 printer with the most excellent resolution available at the PROSUMER LEVEL", and they would, and I'd spend my scant two hours in the darkroom, coming out with a muddy shot of a building to show for it. Ergo, my print would kind of suck, and theirs would have that tinny glow of perfection that only Photoshop and a high end printer can provide. Never mind that it was a PRINT PHOTO CLASS, because my professor was of their peer group, and wasn't about to argue with them about the TINY matter of it being a black and white FILM course, especially swayed as he was by their outstanding equipment. I took solace in the LEARNING PROCESS that I was experiencing. Right. And then I told him how bogus and unbalanced I thought it was, and he ignored me, which only served to remind me how often unproductive it is to argue with The Man.

God, where did that rant come from? That appears to have been pent up for a while. No wonder I eat too much chocolate. ANYway...Part of not being ageist (and this sounds bad, I guess) is that I do not think all old people or all children are sweet, just like I don't think all people my age are sweet. People are people, regardless of age, and some of them I like and some of them I don't, which is exactly their perspective on me, so it's all good.

For instance, R., the Mac "genius", who is assigned to our class...I'm not fond of him either. I think he's really, incredibly rude, and I don't understand people who go into a social and especially a professional situation where they aren't the boss and ACT OUT. This man cannot handle a question without sighing or scowling or somehow nonverbally implying his relative greatness. He's ostensibly there to provide "technical support," and yet gets exasperated by the slightest question. As he stalked around the lab self-importantly and crankily scanning the bar codes on the mac.com accounts so the students could see them, I waited for a break in his action to ask him a simple question about how to proceed through the actually pretty altogether simple mac.com set up. He was all, "I am not here to answer PROCESS questions. I won't steal the PROFESSOR'S thunder!" So I said, "I'm sorry. I wasn't sure of your FUNCTION here. Now that I understand it's simply to take up space and collect a paycheck and act important for no reason it's cool." I'm there to learn something, not to spar with anyone, and why, oh why must people bring the attitude in so many no-attitude-required situations? Universal health care AND anger management for everyone! Posthaste!

So I figured it out without him anyway, which is no big surprise. Trust thyself, the spirits say, and it's proven time and time again. And not a man, clearly, who seems to need to remind a room full of senior citizen computer geeks, and me, and a couple of other people, that he uses similar passwords "like, on, haha, swing dance and DATING websites," to make it easier. Whatever.

So anyway, enough of them. I'm going to keep showing up and I'm going to ignore them and I'm going to learn how to make a MOVIE. And a podcast, maybe...and a song? Who knows. I'm iLaurie now, because all the other account names I wanted were taken, and iLaurie, as f'ing incredibly stupid as it is, makes me laugh. And why not? Everything else has an "i" slapped on the front of it. I'll just consider it ironic commentary on THAT little marketing scheme. Maybe Steve Jobs would pay me if I actually legally changed my name.

I'm becoming a bigger idiot by the day, and you know what? I'm embracing it. You heard me. I'm giving it a big, fat hug, because why not? WHY? NOT? At least I don't pretend to be a genius.