I was proud to see so many Pittsburgh bloggers, podcasters and photographers — the three titles often overlapping — representing social media at Liquid Sundays. The partnership between PodCamp Pittsburgh and the art & music event Liquid Sundays was forged by crossover Social Madia, who blogged about the event in a more linear fashion than I am inclined at GeekStar.com. Despite a lighting issue which was promptly fixed and an audio issue which could not be, the event’s organizers were accommodating to the creators of various forms of social media, even printing and distributing this flyer at the event:
Click on the flyer to see a list of content generated at the event, including the afforementioned bloggers plus Fashionista, Mike Sorg, writing and photography by Kim Reed, and the Wrestling Mayhem Show’s interview with semi-supergroup Western Plains.
Since this Liquid Sundays was also a fashion show, three general groups of people mixed, stirred, but rarely shook. Afterwords, at a late-night greasy spoon while waiting for Nate the cook, JustAnn and I discussed synergy and community. People not mixing is nothing new outside of a baby in a blender joke, but the conversation stirred something deeper.
I was the most interested when Justin hit on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is community in a smaller sense: a group or, often termed in retrospect, a movement. In his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author Henry James wrote “the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation.”
It’s freeing to write for a blog that nobody reads. You’ll ruin it for me, and I’ll be happy you did. But for now, writing this blog is like keeping a journal.
I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. I understand the reasons to keep a journal, but only with half of my brain. This is the same way I understand creating art, and the reason I’m a designer.
I understand design and blogging.
Good for me. But what’s in this for you? I’m really not sure; that’s the domain of my unpredictable right hemisphere. In the meantime, I’ll style some headers to break up the text, and embed a StromHuelsman video using Viper’s Video Quicktags:
What are you gonna do on a personal blog, John?
—Lyrique Tragedy
The term “personal blog” is significant in that question, in that I’m not sure if a personal blog should have a focus. True but unsatisfactory answers might be “whatever the hell I want” and “I’m not sure”, but a better guess would be that this blog will fill in the blanks not covered by other blogs that I author, edit or co-produce. For example, a 15-second video of my dogs that I shot yesterday probably doesn’t belong on any blog, so I’ll post it here.
I was on the phone with my mother when I noticed Janet (the black dog) staring at a bulge in the side of the couch. Since the bulge was moving slightly, I realized that it was my other dog who had somehow and for whatever reason gone underneath the slipcover. I grabbed my Flip Video and caught some footage for Grandma:
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