village voice music editor, nyu adjunct, accidental blogging pioneer. i like loud music and room-temperature seltzer, and my dream job is to be chief fact-checker of the internet.MEMORIES! Of me losing my wallet in Austin (although, ha ha, I do not actually remember this?) and antipathy toward blogging from people who were into hand-coded sites that were filled with lengthy essays and Ben’s rant that reminds me of Chris Weingarten’s “crowdsourcing killed punk rock” talk in a vague way:
I’m shaking really hard, I can barely breath, I don’t know what’s going on. Derek says something like “Are you sure you’re done?” and he smiles at me because he’s nice, Derek’s nice and he’s good, and I say “yeah,” and then I say “No, no wait. A few minutes ago, Derek was saying that the organizers here at SxSW wanted to do a panel on personal publishing, you know, journals, zines, that sort of thing. And Derek said ‘Oh no, that’s so uncool now. Do it on weblogs.’ and see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about here. A year ago, people were publishing zines! 10 people writing these 3000 word essays together, putting them all up online, making some noise! And that was fucking amazing. That was cool. And now, you guys say that the future is these little snippets, these little blurbs, and man. I’m one of two engineers at a brand new startup, ok? I’m building this big huge application, and I still find time to write 3000 (5), 5000, hells, this one here that I’m writing now, it’s like almost 6000 words already and I’m not done yet, you can find time for your art man! Don’t wimp out, don’t write TV Ads! You can write your entire life out online. And that’s a revolution, man! That’s beautiful.”
This is kind of making me wish I was going to all of SXSWi, although I think what I would see there now would terrify me. (Apparently 13,000 people are registered for it this year, which is a bonkers number!)
