Welcome to the Blogerrati...I Will Be Your Hostess: Conan's Studio, Marc's Chair, Jumbo Shrimp, and then..Mind Meld! The Long Version...;-)

I shoulda known that the WNBC Blogger Summit was going to be a little bit underwhelming when I got the internet "survey" that asked us some key surface questions but seemed to lack any real knowledge of...um...blogs and blogging. Im not saying that I am the world's #1 blog follower but I'm short on time so I limit myself to my narrow interest and scope (what was it the guy from fourfour said? Pop Culture and his Cat...and what a cat it is!!! Does blog etiquette allow me to lift a picture of that cat?....that about sums it up,) so I didnt go there with much of an agends besides looking around. I wasnt networking or trying to get links or whatever. But it seemed from the get go that it was going to be either a platform for them to get a look at us and pump us for information as to who is new and upcoming, (not me, thats for sure) or it was a trick and we were all gonna be gassed in order to save local TV news. When I found Brilliantatbreakfast she was already looking warily up at the stage lights and making some comment about where it was gonna come out...or was the other shoe about to drop.
In any case, I was wandering round and talking to people....there were guys with blogs seemingly about their bodies (I will try to get the links for all of these,) and software designers, and lots, oh lots and lots, of NBC employees and anchors who were very excited to have us there and really interested in what we do.
I kept feeling like maybe they were going to realize that I was an impostor there, in that I feel a little disingenuous amongst people who have a left hand side bar, actual formatting, incredibly cute cats, and real goals. I am still just paddling for my life and trying not to go under just from the sheer amount of material in my brain, so I don't know if I am so much a blogger as a long string of words that sometimes make sense and sometimes just expresses some sort of despair and stops me from curling up in a ball in the corner.
I staked out the food line of kalamata olives (and a developer of typepad or some such was offering me his food but I didn't like his selection,) dried fruit, hard indian bread, and ...ah, jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce! Hey! I'm not for sale guys...but I will wait till you all dutifully file out and cram a huge amount of shrimp into my mouth because I didnt really eat unless you count Special K bars in the car and lots o' coffee.
I used to stock one of the most rockin' craft service tables in the business and it was when Erin, our hostess, was literally 5 years old! I'm past the fixation of eating the swag because its there. hell, I have a credit card and can go and get the 24 oz steak at the Old Homestead, if I ate like that...or the Kobe...The point is that I didn't need the food to know that this was all a pretty silly exercise.
Conan O'brien is fanatical about no food in his little studio 6B, which made me want to do something crazy so badly. Yes, its tiny and the furniture is old and worth, according to Sports Anchor and all around good guy Bruce Beck in makeup and ready to go for the 11 o'clock news, $50....(hey, he blogged the Olympics!...but, he felt he was giving up alot of himself....hold something back was my advice...and stop doing free appearances fer Christ's sake! Charity schmarity...keep a little something for yourself!)

The new NBC tech Guru is Shree, who is trying to blast his archaic bosses into the 21st century while insuring an influx of tips and hot gossip, and we were just the interactive exhibit to prove to them that there is a rumbling out there. Whats the deal with the ...um..brown tech guys? Oprah has one: Omar with the dreads?...and JillBrill posted some others today. Is there something that network news wants to tell us about geeky white nerds and tech? Or is it that puffy white guys don't know tech anymore... is this supposed to be a pictorial representation of tech in America? OK. Shree is a professor at Colombia University and he is very knowledgeable, but he is dealing with blogs 101 over there and a TV crowd that doesn't seem to even read them.
It became immediately and painfully clear that this wasn't about us as much as it was about showing the suits that not only is there a world beyond HuffPo, but that the local evening news has become obsolete, and that they might want to look out for their very jobs, by the time interactive media gets through with them.
I was sitting towards the back with JillBrill, and some of the "cool kids," snarking about the level of discourse and the amount of times that they mentioned the shrimp, and the "after party" at the Channel 4 Bar (whose owners definitely know which side of their toast the butter always hits the floor on, ) while explaining what RSS feeds are and introducing us to a Gawker employee, who was telling us the secret to success (something about an English accent, a buyout, a huge staff that is just like family, and a SoHo loft!! Nice!)...and notables from News Channel 4, where my ex-step Mom and all around horrible person, Jo Giese Brown, used to work as food squeaker (never worked out that squeaky voice,huh Jo?...thank heavens for divorce settlements and inheritance,) Oh hell, maybe I went in with a bad attitude because I had been there and hung with Gene Shalit's moustache already...jaded, yes I am.
All of this makes for some pretty fun commentary amongst the fun folks around me, and as Jill mentions in her post today, some news woman said that she would have been happier to listen to what we were saying than to listen to the silly Shree going round like Phil Donohue and talking only to the big established bloggers and creating his news bites for 11 o'clock (look for it kiddies, we were told...you're gonna be on TV!!!!) But I was sitting next to an uptight young blonde out of the Stepford blogs who was taking crazy notes in a little kitten notebook and sort of leaning away from us laughing and snorting about the chair where Maron sat and our, "show us the money", and comments about how we watch keith and the Daily Show etc... Waving my arms around to try to get the mic to say as much LOUDER....but to no avail, because, Shree had decided already who to talk to and the line about this being as much about them as us was total bullshit... Bruce Beck even mentioned how "beautifully produced" it all was...yes, but then its not a real conversation.
The Stepford next to me writing n her girlish script turned to me and said snottily that she was really enjoying this but just couldn't with my ongoing commentary to which I said "well, Exxccuuussseee meeeeee!!!" ...a little of my Brooklyn came out for a minute and I took note that her blog is called something like Trailer Trash....um, let me check my notes....Ah, here we go:
Trailerspy, which I wont link to because she is a bitch...but suffice to say that she might not be writing about movie trailers and telling many of her hits that this is not a site about trailers or spying on what goes on in trailer parks. if she paid more attention to the col kids!..I guess she used to be a talent agent's asst or something and now shes a....well, she has a very nice haircut and she was working that channel 4 bar pretty hard afterwards, so, who knows? ...looking for a nice blogger husband no doubt so she can move up from the trailer into a house...
That aside, I met some nice people with really interesting blogs: Gabriel Shanks of Modern Fabulousity, which is pretty great from what I read last night, and Maryann Johanson of flickfilosopher and geekphilosophy, among others and Liz Anderson of Politics on the Hudson, who I didnt get to talk to much, and I heard from some who's exact addresses I didnt get but I will post 'em when Erin sends us the complete list: among them East Village Idiot (to whom I say, if you don't own your apartment and are renting then you are an idiot...if you own an apartment over there then you're a genius...welcome to retirement!) Laidoffdad, Cityrag and her husband Wordless Photo (who had to explain to the NBC news brass about the RSS feed thing...,) Rod of ManhattanOffender says that his blog is really awful, but he is pretty funny.... At least he's sharp enough to be able to get passes to things...as in the big question of Why would we want to give WNBC anything...they are trying to tell us that they deserve our scoops because they gave us some jumbo shrimps. So, maybe they could offer us a link of their up and coming interactive site...um...no real plans for how thats gonna go yet? Cash? They never thought of that!!!! A big THANK YOU, and maybe the possibility of being on TV or something...
Um...do we ever use video clips? Ever heard of YouTube? CrookandLiars?
Where have these folks been?
So, Shree, afterwards was quite surprised when I told him about HuffPo's new Huffit feature, which in a snarky or incredibly stupid nod to spray paint and its wonderful effects, steals the Digg model but allows the readership to post their own profiles, pictures, and diarys!!
In Shree's defense, he has 3 year old twins....but he also has a professorship at Colombia which Im sure affords him research assistants!...
All in all I found the thing to be pretty lame and as I told the sportscaster, in my experience in the film business and being from a family of Directors, if I had presented something so ill prepared and researched when I was Erin's age, I would have been drummed out of the business. You don't approach a room full of people who have contacts and information and ask them for content without a clear picture of what you want to offer them or at least how you're gonna showcase it. I think that maybe the local news is a little starstruck with itself, if it thinks that we are gonna give them anything for a link on a site that gets very few hits and is not consequential in the REAL world.
The moment that Shree decided to concentrate on the bigger bloggers with SoHo lofts and corporate buyouts, he had already missed the point. Yes, you own those people because they will be featured on the 11 o'clock news with maybe one strange little blogger offering (I dont know because I watch the Daily Show and not the quaint local news which is all fires, shootings, weather, sports, and TALKING POINTS!!) Those people are already over because they are already in publish or die mode...they have rent to make and hits to count.
Good luck to the local news...adapt or die baby!
Check this great post by Tata at Poor Impulse Control
who did a great job of expressing a little of the very serious side of why the press is rather over as far as the new model goes.


Some notes from yesterday:

-I wanted Jay DeDapers nameplate...or at least to meet someone with the last name DeDaper. he didnt show and I was unable to steal it...though I tried. Those pages are pretty sharp.
-They gave us HATS!! I wore mine to bed! (I told them that I would be more impressed if they had filled my hat with jumbo shrimp to take home!
-They put fancy blue covers on Conan's furniture at night even though it looks like it came from a junk store and apparently it did! (I snuck a jumbo shrimp into his chair....think he'll notice?)
-Driving back on the gloriously empty Henry Hudson Parkway I noticed that the lighted newsfeed on Fairway Market at 125th St says first FRESH PRODUCE....and then JOHN KERRY DROPS OUT OF PREZ BID....So, if the news is that old, why should we trust the produce?
-Chopper 4's Dan Rice blogs about the view from above....anything can be news!
-Lots of people want to have their picture taken next to Mighty Max Weinberg's drum kit....thus proving that the crowd there was not exactly Erin's age!


And on the home front:
-Sandy had 8 teeth removed yesterday...yes 8...and thank god for credit cards!! Her face is still swollen!
-Buck has not only Lyme but a new thing that dogs get from ticks called Anaplasmosis ...he needs further tests but if its bad it attacks the red blood cells and he will be very, very sick , very soon...Its a little unclear to me because this unfolded as I was at the blogger summit so I'm waiting for blood test results.
-Will has a cold still....or he just wants to stay home for a couple of days...?
-The Google crawler is finding more and more Marc Maron stuff...the internet is abuzz with Marc Maron and Air America Radio...I hope that means good things are in the works!
-Apparently Friday Night Lights (some TV show about a small town and football) used a Richard Buckner song, Figure, in its last episode....love the song, sorta iffy on the show, but anything that makes Rick a residual is good by me!

Politics?...I dunno....I hope the world is still turning when I drive out there....