Chi Town, Parts 2 and 3

As it turns out, the New York lifestyle (where I am currently) does not lend itself to lots of free time at night.  Fortunately, I had saved these two parts as a draft.  I’ll post the 4th and final installment in a bit.

Anchors

So, I’ve already covered how blogging in an active community sense will land you in a city you’ve never been, will drop an excess of 25 (give or take) BFFs into your life, and will make you perpetually a drinker.  But what was really nice an unexpected until about a couple of days or so before I got here was to discover that one of my best friends from college was willing to make a 3 hour road trip to this city just to be able to hang out.  After all, it’s so rare that I’m in this part of the world that an opportunity to connect in meat-space with old friends.

And even that much planning was spur-of-the-moment.

Essentially, the conversation over email was:

Maren: Hey!  What have you been up to lately?
Nico: I’m going to Chicago!
Maren: No way!  When?
Nico: June x to June y
Maren: Cool!  That’s really close to where Shaun and I live!  We’ll meet you there!
Nico: What?  Really?  Awesome!

I believe that may be paraphrased but there’s little more to it than that.  And as a result, my college friends got to witness firsthand how close people get to each other from simply owning blogs.

And it is always great to see people from the past if you’d spent a significant amount of time with them.  It makes sure that they don’t get swallowed by the past, and always stay in the present.

This, of course, means my next mission is to visit Fred in the land of the Rising Sun like Stuart did not long ago.  I’ll think about that when my bank account recovers from this series of trips.

And I fully intend to, and have no idea when, but I’d honestly like to see Halifax, D. C., Johannesburg, Florida, Nashville, among many, many others.

My point is, this generation is able and probably more willing than that of others’ to drop anchors in many parts of the world, and more quickly and efficiently than given credit.  And it’s not even for any practical reasons. It’s just a side effect of living life publicly on the internet.

We are world class networkers.

Which makes me wonder why our modern aristocracy doesn’t take up blogging more often. At least they’d have the money to visit the friends they might make.

Incidentally

I will admit that I almost pooped myself a little in reaction to see how excited phampants would get that, without me really being a part of his intricate and very-different-from-the-blogosphere video editing community that exists on YouTube, I had inadvertently seen one of his videos. Many high-fives ensued upon this discovery.

There’s a logical progression for this. As you probably might know, we all have friends who pass us links to videos. Out of force of habit, I tend to click on every-goddam-link that comes to me even if it means I’m getting rickroll’d. Why? Because I’m an information junkie. I can handle lots of video links, articles, and music.

If you’re in your 20s, there’s a good chance you’re an information junkie, too.

And if you get along with other information junkies, you know that one video leads to another. And one brief quip about Easter will inevitably lead to Wiki’ing the pagan holiday Ēostre, Googling for the craziest decorated eggs you can find, and of course, YouTube searching the term “Peeps”, because we all know about how we’d like to see peeps in a microwave but we’d rather someone else did the work for us and so kindly uploaded that video to the internet.

Okay I got a little of track there.

The point of this was more along the themes of “we live in the future” as I say almost on a daily basis. It was Katie Cat that identified that phampants’s excitement is probably natural, if you think about it.  As a photographer and graphic designer, she would be just as stoked if someone she didn’t know, who had flown across the country in the name of the internet, had also said, “Oh, wait, I’ve seen that work at [x].”

And it’s probably the same for my bloggy-musician friends as well.

And this is the importance of incidence to bloggers.

Alright, I’ll start from the top:

I am under the impression that there are two kinds of blogs.  There are the blogs created to be journals or news feeds or editorial, to detail things of themed ideas (eg., the gaming industry, celebrities, human rights, blogs about blogging, etc.). And then, there are what I am heretofore calling the escribitionists.

As you might expect from this form of journaling, there’s a strengthened sense of self-awareness that comes from blogging.  It’s not like we’re rattling on about our lives oblivious to the idea that we might be a little self-indulgent.  Popular techniques to diffuse this perceived self-indulgence include but are not limited to self-deprecation or hyperbolic megalomania (you know, because it’s funny).

So because of this self-awareness, there’s a strong need to diffuse it. Having long been trying to be an escribitionst myself, I get the feeling that escribitionists’ interests span much further than simply blogging.  Just a hunch.

If I had known all along that peoples’ interests span much further than what they appear to write about, and my company is constantly looking for new ways to organize and classify blogger research, then why had I not considered building a semantic tool for tagging blogs?  Or better yet, just open up an account on a semantic bookmarking site from a company that already exists?  Which are free?  And private? And integrate with my web browser?

Oh, fuck me, this shit is easier than I thought.  I guess I just realized I have suddenly created some work for myself.

Anyway, here comes the point:

The way to connect to with the blogger that is an escribitionist is fairly simple — we give you resources to get in touch with us all over the damn place.  But, if you really want to connect with us as people and loyal resources, it certainly helps if can provide that incidence.  There may be some caveats as far as what lines you should and should not cross so as not to be creepy.  But on the whole escribitionists, especially in a group, are more powerful voices than they first appear.  And once you get that trust, you get to participate in our economy mentioned in my last post.

This isn’t a trend.  This is basic addition.