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There Is Always A City

April 24th, 2009 by AV Flox in blogging, intarwebz, malwebolence, personal brand

Mark Zuckerberg is not joking when he says Facebook is the sixth most populated country on earth. It is a country. We build a space in it, have friends in it, work in it and love in it. Are our online properties not a home, in a sense?

Perhaps it’s just me. I don’t really have a childhood home the way most people do. I had many, all around the world. When I moved out from my parents’, I lived in many spaces, but these always felt temporary, too. I am a creature of motion. The places that were always a constant for me, the ones that I devoted time and energy into making mine, have all been online. I have made a few moves here, too, sometimes taking all my things with me, and sometimes leaving it all behind as one does when they’re walking out of a life that no longer suits them, with nothing but their name.

I can count these occasions.

My childhood homes, on the other hand—well, they require more than all the digits on that other hand.

I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

Yahoo is pulling the plug on its free personal home page service, GeoCities.

For those who were not around in the early days of the web, GeoCities was the original social networking site. Only clunkier, devoid of most features you use without a second thought on Facebook—and on dial-up.

Back in the days when basic knowledge of HTML was required to carve a space on the web, and when very few people really knew it, GeoCities gave us n00b pioneers the ability to get ourselves started without too many complications, as well as helped us connect with others through “neighborhoods,” a feature of GeoCities that subdivided its users into categories (Paris for romance and the arts, SoHo for the hipsters and the arts, SunsetStrip for music, SouthBeach for intensive socializing, etc.).

It’s nothing new now, but back then, it was revolutionary. In 1997, a little after I joined, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the interwebz.

I don’t remember the kind of stuff I put up there now, but I do remember the wonder of discovery as I began, for the first time, to make, what I felt, was a home online. Before this moment, I had “rented” on bulletin boards and chat rooms. This, however, was like “buying.” It meant long-term. I made my little Paris place home.

(Of course it was Paris. I was a fetus, give me a break.)

THE END OF AN ERA

Perhaps more than places of residence, spaces online are like lovers. We enjoy many people who touch our lives, but there are only a number of them that really change us so deeply, and teach us so much, that we remember them forever.

In a sense, GeoCities was that. It may not have been the moody codependent relationship I had with Diaryland, or the drama-filled, torrid affair I had with LiveJournal or the wild, no-strings-attached fling I’ve been having with Wordpress, or the warm marriage I enjoy on this self-hosted blog—but it shaped me.

Maybe it was my first crush.

And now, it’s gone. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for a sweet $2.9 million, will be closing GeoCities later this year. Their statement doesn’t say much else in the way of whys or hows, but that isn’t necessary.

We’ve grown up. That first crush doesn’t make our heart melt when we see it or think of it. Instead, it fills us with a nostalgia. Not for the thing itself, but for who we were when we were first discovering it. That wide-eyed wonder, where expression meets exposure: one part confessional, one part art exhibit, one part life with a dash of dream.

Everything has the power to trigger memory. A sunset, a song, a scent. And now, a site.

THE CITY AND THE PICKAX

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickax. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickax and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

– Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

So long, GeoCities. You may have already been forgotten, but our Facebooks, Tumblrs and Twitters will forever rest on the ruins of your temples.

More ruminations across the web:

As URLs Go By by Atherton Bartelby
Because, much like I can vividly recall the scene outside of my apartment’s balcony when my brother told me over the telephone that our mother had died, or describe in minute detail the scents that filled my nostrils as I lost my virginity, so too can I recall precisely which design forums I was frequenting when my father died, or which blog I was maintaining when I was told that my first friend to die of AIDS had just been diagnosed with it, or exactly how many subdomains resided on my website when I experienced the most soul-destroying breakup of my life.

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The Day The Brand Died

April 16th, 2009 by AV Flox in guest post, personal brand

Marlboto Man

Photo by MyEyeSees

I was 10 on April 2, 1993, the day that the brand died.

On that day, Phillip Morris dealt a 20 percent slash to the price of its cigarettes in an effort to take on bargain brands, which were seriously pwning Marlboro’s market share. The slash had serious repercussions. If Marlboro’s carefully groomed brand wasn’t enough to take on the generic brands, then there no longer was truth to the brand equity mania that had rocked the eighties.

That is, if the brand was not powerful enough to sway sales on its own, if a marketing icon like Phillip Morris had to give in to the utterly lowbrow price war being waged against it, then the brand was as good as dead.

The panic that spread over Wall Street was immediate: Philip Morris’s stock fell 26 percent, and with it, other high-profile brands went down, among them Coca-Cola, Heinz, Quaker Oats, and PepsiCo. The brand is dead, experts said. As a result, companies cut advertising spending dramatically.

But the brand did not die. In fact, the opposite happened… Read more at The Cause Is The Habit

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Who Are You?

April 7th, 2009 by AV Flox in blogging, personal brand

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence; at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes a day is very confusing.”

“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; ‘”but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”

“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

THE ELEVATOR PITCH

That’s the assignment: write an elevator pitch for your blog.

Assignment, yes. Darren Rowse at Problogger is hosting his biennial 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge, which combines theory and homework, and I’ve joined.

I signed up because I’ve been feeling a little disconnected from my blog and I thought that having a reason to reflect on it daily would be a good way to get back on track. I didn’t foresee that the first assignment would expose the main reason I’ve been drifting away from my blog.

I don’t know what my blog is about.

How technology is changing our our lives? Personal branding? What people are doing around the web? Traveling? Relationships? All of the above? Where do I fit into all of this?

“If you’re fuzzy on what your blog is about it’s unlikely than anyone else will have much of an idea either,” Rowse writes in his first post.

We all keep blogs for different reasons, but most of us want to be read, want to share, and a great many of us would like to give our careers, and maybe even our incomes, a boost through it. Having a focus is smart business. It enables you to connect with a specific audience and develop a community, it gives you visibility and credibility in your field, it allows you to effectively implement advertising and helps attract sponsors.

“I started out with a personal blog that covered everything from spirituality and church to photography to blogging (and more),” writes Rowse in his book ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. “And though the blog did become quite popular, after 18 months of running it, I began to notice a number of things that made me consider a new approach: some readers became disillusioned with the blog. My blog had a number of main themes and different readers resonated differently with each one… when I focused on a topic they were not interested in, they either ignored the post or, at times, pushed back… I began to feel guilty about blogging on certain topics.”

Rowse decided to break his blog into different, well-focused niche blogs.

“The result was a more natural blogging experience for me and a more useful one for my readers,” Rowse recalls.

REBRANDING SMUT

In 2004, my friend and fellow writer Laura Roberts turned me on to her newest endeavor: Black Heart Magazine, an independent webzine featuring “the dirtiest minds in literature.”

My career as a blogger started in high school, centered around the wonders of dating and sex. Before there were blogs, there bulletin boards and I was on there, pushing the pixels into elaborate recreations of my adventures and experiences. By the time Laura and I connected, blogs had taken off and we each had a nice crowd of readers who were eager for more.

And more we gave them. Even as we continued to evolve, wrapped up the college years, hit the workforce, got into more and more serious relationships, we continued to write about sex—how we liked it, how we had it, how it played into our everyday lives. We were driven by desire and desire would always enjoy an audience.

Or so I thought.

Last month, Laura sent me a direct message on Twitter asking what I thought about changing the tagline of the magazine to shift the focus from smut to literature.

“That will change the whole direction of Black Heart, won’t it?” I asked her.

Yes, it would. And that’s essentially what she wanted to do.

“Rather than cater to the sex crowd, when I find myself increasingly bored with erotica, I am looking to bring my love and lust for literature to a new format,” she elaborated on a Facebook note. “Black Heart will be moving in a new direction as a result of this, focusing more on the literature side of ‘literate smut’ … I’m looking for people who are passionate about reading and writing, who love literature in a slightly dirty way … interviewers, authors, book lovers, book snobs, lit pimps, booksellers, book publishers, book readers, book reviewers, academics, writers, dilettantes, anybody who considers themselves a writer of poetry, prose, journalism or blogs/rants/whatever pops into their head.”

I didn’t comment because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand what I felt about it.

The next time I stop by Black Heart Magazine, I notice the banner has changed from “the dirtiest minds in literature” to “sex, love, literature.” The featured story is “Poetry for the People.”

I don’t click.

Mind you, I love literature. But my relationship with my books was never what Black Heart Magazine was for me. Black Heart, for me, was about the ever-evolving process of sexual discovery. I don’t want to read that April is poetry month unless—pardon my boldness—the poetry in question is being written on my back in cum.

That’s the reaction Rowse was talking about—that’s the reader pushing back. In this case, it’s not that the blog has gone off-course. Laura has carefully navigated where she wants to go after some careful deliberation and discussion with her contributors. She has done everything right.

Still, here I am, staring at the main page of Black Heart Magazine and feeling, though I’m sitting in an office wall-to-wall with classic literature, that I no longer belong.

WHEN YOU TURN INTO A CHRYSALIS—YOU WILL SOMEDAY, YOU KNOW

Blogs are not static because people are not static. The reasons for choosing a blog with a specific focus have been enumerated here and elsewhere. But just as they give you a solid framework within which to work, they also serve to restrain you.

“I would really like to be one of those bloggers who is comfortable with being all ‘niche,’ all ‘industry-specific,’” my friend Atherton Bartelby remarks in a post regarding the elevator pitch assignment. “I would love to be termed a ‘design blogger’ or a ‘media blogger’ or a ‘gay relationship blogger.’ But neither I, nor my blog, will ever be just any one of those things, because one’s life is not single-faceted like that; one’s life, and certainly mine, is multi-faceted: the professional and the personal, the good and the bad, the specific, and the all-encompassing.”

WHO ARE YOU?

After thinking about my blog for several hours, I decided to let it speak for itself.

Since the inception of this blog, I have put out seven interviews, 11 news items and 26 essays relating to blogging, web culture, social media, old media versus new media, oversharing, cruelty on the internet, branding, marketing, gender, relationships and, on two occasions, travel.

As more and more of my relationship discussions move over my column at BlogHer and as more of us begin to settle into the world of new media to the point where it’s no longer appropriate to call it “new,” the content that initially made this blog an adventure in discovering how technology is affecting the way we interact with one another is becoming scarce.

Further, as I continue to attend events and meet people working on web-based projects around Southern California and elsewhere, the focus is shifting to them and their endeavors. Four of the seven interviews conducted on the blog happened after 2009 kicked off, and I have quite a few more in the works.

So what are you, blog? Or should I say, what are you becoming in that chrysalis?

A reflection on the web—the people in it, the things we’re doing, the customs we’re adopting, and the things we’re leaving behind as we venture forth into this uncharted territory of trial-and-error, where more and more, the digital is colliding with the analog.

And I hope you, dear reader, will stick around to see the wings that surface from this chrysalis and the many, many rabbit holes thereafter.

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“Coming Correct” in Self-Promotion and Other Tidbits from E! Online’s Leslie Gornstein

March 16th, 2009 by AV Flox in integrity, interview, personal brand

While Celebrity gossip blogs have existed for a while and Hulu, which brings film and television to computers everywhere, won best of show for film and TV at the South by Southwest: Interactive awards this year, in general, the merging of Hollywood and the web has been slow and clumsy.

Enter Leslie Gornstein, the Answer Bitch for E! Online. After working at a start-up that failed and spending some years freelancing, Gornstein got a column online when an editor at E! approached her in 2004.

“He was looking for a sassier, angrier ‘Ask Marilyn’ character,” Gornstein explained over coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood, where she met with me, Laurie Percival, editor-in-chief of Lalawag and Macala Wright, director of marketing and PR for 1928 Jewelry.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to be the answer bitch, you can be the answer bitch,’” Gornstein recalled. “I said ‘all right.’”

Thus, the entertainment question and answer column ‘Ask The Answer Bitch’ was born. Gornstein never looked back. After living and breathing the celebrity lifestyle for four years, writing a book was natural progression. Her book The A-List Playbook, was released by Skyhorse Publishing last month.

“Despite what’s going on in technology right now and despite the ways that you can push yourself out there to a lot of people, people still see a book as a calling card,” Gornstein said. “I learned some really fascinating basic facts about Hollywood. But there was no compendium of it anywhere—the fact that celebrities have three nannies per child, the fact the average celebrity spends an hour a day with their child, and maybe three to four during a vacation period, the fact that most celebrities get 20,000 dollars a month of free stuff—and the fact that’s how you can gauge if they’re A-list or not. I wanted to put it in a survival guide format because I thought that was the most fun way to read it. But really it’s a window for the rest of us about how those people really live.”

“Are you using social media to promote your book?” Lalawag’s Laurie Percival asked.

“Everything that has an internet connection is now my bitch when it comes to promoting my book,” Gornstein responded, laughing. “Facebook, MySpace—not so much, there is something really disco about that. It looks like a Lebanese disco whenever I go on there! I can’t deal with that. So Facebook, Twitter, E! Online—even World of Warcraft. If it has a line out to the world, it’s my bitch.”

Gornstein, who started tweeting as @answerbitch only last November has almost 2,000 followers. She follows almost everyone back.

Macala Wright can’t get over the information saturation that comes with following that many people on Twitter. She confessed she’d pulled a Loic just a few weeks ago to make her stream more manageable and reflected on how annoyed some people got when they were unfollowed.

“Someone has decided following everyone back is Tweetiquette and you know what? I think people are taking things way too personal,” Gornstein replied. “Because, what does that mean when I don’t return someone’s phone call? Sometimes I’m just not going to return a phone call.”

“I think about this all the time, too,” Laurie Percival pitched in. “Do I have to reply to every @message? How do people do this all day long? There’s no way!”

She described with awe the people who sent personalized direct messages (DMs) after she followed them.

“I just don’t know how they have time,” she said. “So I just don’t do it.”

“You could send out auto-DMs.” Gornstein suggested.

We looked at her with horror. I think one of us even gasped.

“The only reason I think an auto-DM would be offensive, and I got one of these recently, ‘thank you for following, be sure to link my blog’—that’s not cool,” Gornstein defended her position. “When people follow me I send out an auto-message that says, ‘Welcome to the all American festival that is me!’ I don’t see that as a particularly obnoxious thing to do.”

Gornstein seems to have an inherent understanding of how to work new media and leverage the power of real-time user feedback.

“I’m really careful to do it,” she said about self-promotion. “You have to come correct about it, as the drug dealers say. You come to people correct and you say ‘yes, I’m pimping now,’ or I’ll make it participatory and say, ‘correct me if I’m wrong…’ and people like that. It’s conversation. I think that’s respectful.”

She limits the bulk of her self-promotion to Sundays and constantly invites input from her followers and readers. To a large extent, the web has allowed her following to grow and thrive.

“On the internet we have the concept of microcelebrity—being famous for fifteen people, as Momus said in the early 90s,” I told her. “Do you think of yourself as one?”

“I’m definitely famous for fifteen people,” she responded. “My husband loves me!”

“Do you think microcelebrities could apply some of the knowledge found in your book?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “You really need to be visible planet-wide to be able to sling this kind of power around.”

“So you don’t think Julia Allison could get through airport security without having to remove her stilettos?”

“No,” she replied. “Microcelebrities are most famous to themselves. Without the internet, would these people be famous?”

Sounds like a challenge to me. Hear that, NonSociety?

Gornstein pointed to a copy of her book on the coffee table, buried under iPhones, packs of cigarettes and idle Flip cams.

“These people are all cross-media megastars,” she said. “If the internet did not exist, Julia Allison would be a nice intern somewhere, working her microminis and then maybe one day meet Tina Brown and have something nice happen to her for a year. She’s extremely bright and when you read what she writes you see it’s well thought-out, but to be really famous your face needs to be recognizable, your name needs to be recognizable—by more than a small subset of people. If you said, ‘I saw Julia Allison yesterday!’ most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But if you said, ‘I saw Julia Roberts yesterday!’ they’d know what you were talking about.”

She’s right. Even so, the section about how Paris Hilton plays the press (“The Paris Hilton Method,” page 65) could be of some use to aspiring fameballers—I’ll trade Laurie’s home phone for Owen Thomas’!

Seriously, though, the way fame is spreading on the web, and with microcelebrity having such a wide and bizarre array of wonders and dangers (from the power you can exert dating the founders of your choice start-up to death by commenter execution) I think there’s a definite sequel there.

Of Possible Interest:
Leslie Gornstein will be signing books and holding a live chat in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 7:00PM at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 189 Grove Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036. Call (323) 525-0270.

Full disclosure—Leslie gave me a copy of her book. Yes, I’ve read it, but I’m not gonna tell you just how juicy it is. I’ll leave it by saying that two friends have already attempted to steal it.

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Sexy Snacks: How To Make Web Like A Porn Site

January 17th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz, interview, social media

POPPORN.com offers an light-hearted spin on adult entertainment industry news and events and provides regular fun, irreverent video content. I caught wind of it when they added me on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I knew right away I had to get some more information, so I shot off an e-mail to editor-in-command Brian Bangs to get the skinny on how the site came about, how they’re making use of social media to gain popularity and where they wanna take their vision.

When did POPPORN get started and what’s the concept behind it?

POPPORN started unofficially in March of this year. Our goal with the site was to create something that offered a totally different perspective on the adult industry and then cross over adult and mainstream content.

It seems that even as the adult industry continues to reach into the mainstream there aren’t many sites dedicated to this concept. Sure, you have adult industry news sites which serve a great purpose, but they don’t really offer much to the casual adult fan.

POPPORN tries to create an environment that can reach into a more wide-spread demographic and retain a sense of humor about what adult content is.

How did the idea come about?

The idea was kind of a fluke. We are all amateur film makers with an interest in the adult business and I’m kind of a project guy so we decided at last year’s AVN [the Oscars of adult entertainment] to bring a camera and interview folks. Our perspective is a little more skewed than most adult news or review agencies and the folks and studios we covered really liked what we were doing: giving adult an attitude and opinion. So we figured creating a blog where this content could reside made the most sense. Sort of right time scenario.

Do you feel the industry has a need for this kind of angle?

I’m not sure there was a need for what we were doing, It would be a little arrogant to believe that, but I think what we saw was a void in the market for this kind of content. We knew that we could do something a little different that could put an edge on adult content, yet still keep it more mainstream for folks who aren’t diehard porn fanatics, while at the same time, adding a little levity to the adult industry as a whole.

So you see yourself developing into a mainstream-adult industry hybrid media outlet, a sort of sex for the common man, fun, accessible and real.

I would be cautious in saying we believe we can become a mainstream porn outlet, I don’t see that as a goal. But I do see us as being a fun resource for folks who are either into porn or curious about porn. A site that can give a laugh while still giving folks a valuable look into the adult industry.

Would you say it was accurate to say POPPORN was an SNL-meets-The Onion of adult entertainment?

Hmm, I never thought about the SNL angle, but maybe, yes.

Are you making money with the site? If not, how do you finance your endeavors?

We are making money off of the site. We sell advertising and while it’s not making us rich, it runs our site.

A lot of people are getting on the social media bandwagon—obviously Twitter was how we connected initially. How has that been working for you?

I think that taking advantage of social networking is the key in a web 2.0 environment. Twitter and Myspace have been excellent resources in helping folks find us who may not have had the opportunity to find us in the past. Those networking sites spread like wildfire and we’ve been very successful with finding new readers taking advantage of them.

Honestly, the success we have had has been through a lot of persistence and word of mouth. We’ve just focused on trying to create something new and unique, something that we are proud of that makes us laugh. It seems that kind of attention to the process has resulted in folks responding very positively and it’s trickled down from there via word of mouth.

What are your visions for POPPORN in the future?

A ton. We actually launched a sweepstakes for this year’s AEE [Adult Entertainment Expo] show sponsored by AVN so we’ll be running around shooting tons of content there. We’re also shooting the red carpet at the AVN Awards with Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake, she’s co-hosting with our host Spock Buckton and then in the New Year we are shooting our first adult film. We are partnering with a major adult studio to bring our retardation to a living room near you!

What’s your first film about?

Our first film is kind of classified at the moment. Ideas tend to get ripped off like crazy in the adult business but it will tie into POPPORN very directly and feature a lot of the characters and stars we feature on the site.

As filmmakers do you eventually see yourselves eventually running your own studio?

We are considering developing into a studio; however, there is so much bad porn out there we want to take it very slow to make sure what we put out is worth the consumers’ dollars.

What do you mean when you talk about bad porn?

There is an influx of cheap, poorly-made porn. Bad lighting, poor production values, etc. When someone tries to make a funny adult film, it’s rarely funny. I mean, watch Not The Bradys XXX and you will see what I mean. As for how we can improve on it—I think that we have a certain personality that will come through in our films.

POPPORN isn’t currently looking for talent for their debut film, but they’ll always take your n00dz.

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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