Finally blogging
Originally published at Geekstress. Please leave any comments there.
I was one of a very very slim minority at the Blog Business Summit who doesn’t have a blog. Spending that much money to hang out with bloggers and I don’t even have one? Lame I know. So here’s why I’m so late to the game and yet not.
I love social networking software. My enthusiasm for blogs built while I was busy nurturing several small forum communities (I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake). Then I discovered Wordpress, which for me, seemed less like a platform to speak my own mind, and more as a means for me to give other people voices. Its open source and I am an open source junkie. I can hack and play with it to my hearts content. My first experiments in alternate uses of blogging software was designing websites for actors.
Down here in hollywood every actor (and there are millions) wants a website. And they aren’t looking for something that looks like a blog per se. They are looking for something that predominately features their photographs, their resume and a video reel. The entertainment industry also always seems to be slow to adopt, and so here, (as I’m sure you’ve seen on movie websites) Flash is all the rage.
Web designers down here take serious advantage of their audience’s lack of savvy. They charge nice easy to swallow prices for the initial site, and gouge people to death for the updates, which an actor needs constantly.
So I started building pages that incorporated all of these things but used a hacked together Wordpress framework to make it simple for actors to make changes to their news, their photo gallery and most importantly to their resume.
Then I went to work at TVI Actors Studio. There, besides building all sorts of software for young actors, I’ve been helping to develop The Actors Blog Network. Its tough and still a major work in progress. What I am doing with this is trying to introduce non-technical, non-savvy people to the world of blogging. They need to engage and be a part of the blogging community if they are to flourish, but most of them don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “RSS” or hell, even “right-click”. So my goals now are to find ways to bring the world of blogging to them. If these experiments and tinkerings bear any fruit I will be happy to share.
So there I was at the BBS without a blog of my own. I was scolded (in the most friendly of ways) by the likes of Triss Hussey and Jason Preston and realized I’ve spent so much time finding ways to get people into the conversation I’d forgotten to join myself. So, I make no promises other than that I will dive headlong and obsessively into this as I do with everything. Hi, everybody.