22h14 heure de Montréal, 21h14 Austin.
I left home around 8h30, arrived in Austin around 16h. My first ‘official’ trip on US ground. What of a contrast it is to leave in the cold and be landing in a city where people are wearing t-shirts and shorts. Même les gougounes font partie intégrante du décor.
Welcome to summer city. I needed this.
Taxi-bikes are rolling around, Tacos shop are on most street corner, and the city is, due to its inhabitant care or strict city rules, damn clean. Oh, and vedgie friendly food for me. One thing i remembered: i hate these city hotels where you cant open the windows. I am an air sign, i need open windows to feel and hear the environment i am into – if not, i feel i am missing something.
I havnt been able to do that much so far, a little tired and this headache just wont leave me. We attended a pre-sxsw interactive 6 to 9 thing tonite, and already ideas are starting to pop. I’ve met these folks who started a web based service where bloggers will be put in contact with publishers from traditional media (ie print medias) so that content from bloggers could be printed in your favorite newspaper next saturday. (* name of this service and the people coming soon, cant remember it right now).
This just made ideas and thoughts spin around my mind. What i have been thinking about over the last week, trying to define who the average blogger is, or who i am as a blogger, is starting to take shape, and make more sense every day.
I am not a diarist, i am not a journalist. I am stuck in between. I am a new personage in the scene, a new actor in your favorite movie, Ze Medias. The information i report, the way i do bring it to you, is unique – so is it for the billions of blog entries posted everyday. And there is a demand for that, for user created content, but there is a gap between this new content and the one coming from traditional medias – how will we cohabit? How will traditional media adapt, how fast will it change, how ready are the big players for this transition? Money seems the be one of the big issue, because without anyone afraid of loosing billions, all this could look like a playground where we would be changing and shaping the new face of medias.
Another idea flip flop fly’n on my mind since a few days is about the ‘voyeurism’ tag associated to blog readers since blogs are blogs: blog writers are self centered and egoistical, and blog readers are feeded by intimate life details, ideas and thoughts coming from the blogs they read.
What if on the opposite, being closed and not interested in what other people have to say-think-do – what if this would be wrong, and much worse than doing all of the mentioned above?
Bloggers may be self-centered, or at least, some of them, but at least, they want to share and they are willing to read about others.
Whenever I write in my blog, I think about all those celebrities who say : “I want to use my celebrity to raise consciousness about this or that issue”. Among other things, blogs make it possible to raise awareness without become famous first. I can’t see anything wrong with that.
I certainly am self-centered, in that I love talking about my life, about myself, about what I think. But doing it alone is of no interest to me, not having any feedback is of no interest, and not having anyone to share their own thoughts with me is even worse.
We’re not would-be celebrities. We just enjoy knowing our thoughts aren’t meant to be shared only with a select bunch of friends around coffee or beer.
Hi-o MC, je dois être à Austin dans 2 semaines et j’y suis pogné pour une nuit de trop, donc si tu as des recommendations pour un bon bar-disco-party-endroit-taverne qui vaut la peine…
Hi-o MC, je dois être à Austin dans 2 semaines et j’y suis pogné pour une nuit de trop, donc si tu as des recommendations pour un bon bar-disco-party-endroit-taverne qui vaut la peine…