Ben Huh: your best bet is just to google my name
Who are you? The audience wants to know. Here’s his bio:
Ben Huh – “Business For Free and Profits For You”
Ben is the CEO of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and others. The success of his sites can be attributed to his knowledge of memes, viral content and crowd-sourcing.
If you don’t know who we are, we’re the ones who put up funny pictures of cats for a living, he says.
This is what you call a user generated presentation, he says.
Supposedly he went home early from the bar so he could work on his presentation. FAIL. The presentation won’t load. Hence, he’s just talking fast and loose and he is HILARIOUS!! I cannot type fast enough. And since this is LIVE. live blogging, a live unscripted presentation there won’t be a link to it later.
Now I gotta say, live blogging works when the system works. And this system here at LMU is NOT working. I just lost ten minutes of notes and jokes, a few of which I fortunately tweeted.
Fortunately, the right person over heard me complain about getting dropped about 30 minutes ago. He just got a phone call and I will likely be dropped again. Then will be able to stay on for 3 hours instead of 30 minutes.
MONDAY UPDATE: So who knows what happened, but at some point, as I was writing this, not only did I lose the rest of this blog post, which I recreated and then continued to write, but then, the blog post ENTIRELY disappeared! Today, I contacted WordPress supported and somehow, WordPress found this part of it and restored it. Guess something is better than nothing. Strange strange strange.
Failure is Job One: Micah Baldwin says “Go to the SEO panel”
Tony Adams of Yahoo SEO etc is on the other panel on SEO; Micah suggests that we go there. Micah says he’s lived a lot of failure so I guess he’s an expert. He thinks so. The idea behind the session as I understand it is to use failure to our advantage, to learn from it. He’s starting with video of Michael Jordan talking about all the ways he’s failed which concludes with “This is why I succeed.”
His own story has to do with twitter. He’s the one who started Follow Fridays. After he sent out a tweet that said he was the antiChrist of twitter–follow him and lose 10 followers. So he started Follow Friday. Read more…
I’m Shayne: WordPress MU & WP ecommerce
Speaker: Shayne Sanderson
WP & WPMU: Ecommerce
One of the big criticisms I hear about WordPress.com is that they don’t want you to make money off your site, . Well, it’s not that they don’t want you to make money–they just don’t want you to use WordPress.com, they want you to use WordPress.org. Doesn’t seem like that’s changed much but here’s an interesting option for making money using a WordPress platform–using WordPress MU.
Which is what Shayne wants to talk about. Read more…
Live Blogging From WordCamp LA 2009
Last weekend, dust storm white outs at Burning Man. This weekend, WordCampLA 2009! A bit extreme but I will bring you as much of it as I can! Then get back to writing about Burning Man…stay tuned!
Who’s speaking? Read more…
For this day of memorial, photos from Burning Man’s 2009 Temple
My friend Gary Stevens took these images of the Temple at Burning Man 2009. Once again, people placed pictures, poems, and other tokens to go up in flames on Sunday night.
This year you could walk up several ramps or climb stairs inside the Temple to experience the playa. The Temple also had a flame burning in its core. This view from on high directs you toward the Man and Center Camp.
I have to admit that the Temple didn’t move me as much this year as it has in other years. This year, we visited on Thursday night and it seemed like a disco inside, especially combined with the blaring of the music from the artcars ringing the perimeter. This sense of sacriledge made it easier to leave the Playa earlier than planned, before the Temple burn which I’d planned to attend with my nephew who lost his birth father last year. So when the second day of dust storms hit, we packed up and headed out. I’m sad that I missed that moment of prayer with him, for me, for the world. I did hear that it was a wonderful burn and that people respected the request for quiet from 7-9pm.
(Thanks, Gary, for letting me post some of your photos here today; more to follow of the Man and playa sites along with commentary. If you want copies of these images, please go to his site and ask him. If you’re interested in materials from this site, I appreciate that courtesy as well.)
Sonnet for September 11, 2001
Sonnet for September 11
thursday i listen to radiohead
in a new purple polka dot sundress
& i am trying to feel so modern
i search for more warmth for this sunny day
in my air conditioned office & heart
i want to wear my purple rain jacket
i want to ward off rain & fear & dark
i want to keep off terror & attack
i want to make tears & fog slip away
i want to live in a world where i can
wear my old purple rain jacket over
my new purple polka dot summer dress
& with this keep all the bad news away
& with this to find this big world okay
Dated Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001. Originally published in ArtLife Limited Editions October 2001. I posted this broadside last year on this date as well with details and a spoken word audio poem by Juliana Spahr. For more poetry online, check out the category here on my blog or take a ride on the Monday Poetry Train. This was one of the rare weeks I didn’t post on Monday as we were en route home from Burning Man.
You could also come hear me read next Tuesday, September 15 at the Artists Union Gallery in Ventura where California Street meets the sea. An open mic follows my featured reading.
finding wine tweeps & two twitter wordles
After spending the afternoon at a Social Media and the Arts workshop, tonight I’ve been following Open Wine Consortium founder Joel Vincent’s advice on how to find wine tweeps to follow.
Joel posted a list with 1000 twitter accounts here; in the course of about 10 clicks, 100 wine tweeps at a time, voila! I’m now following over 1000 people on twitter; I hope at least some of them will follow me back. In the meantime, seeing as how it’s harvest here in the northern hemisphere, it will be fun and informative to hear how it goes for the various wine tweeps I’m following. If it gets too overwhelming, I’ll just unfollow those who never followed me back and who didn’t add enough value to the conversation.
Because isn’t that what it’s about–being a part of a conversation??
Taking a break from that, I made these two wordles based on my tweets so far. Sometimes, I just have to shake my head and recognize that this world of ours is one wild place. Cheers!
PS If you, my dear reader, follow me @artpredator on twitter, I will follow you back! At least for awhile!
how to use social media in the arts: some case studies
ArtsLIVE conducted a workshop in Ventura County to assist artists in using social media including twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube channel, and newsletters. I arrived after the first hour, well after most of the food and drinks were consumed and the conviviality ceased (I was busy teaching at Ventucky College). I then struggled for the first 30 minutes trying to get on-line. Not fun and no support in sight. Eventually, I achieved cyber lift-off.
The quick and dirty presentation closed with a series of case studies:
Michael Lynn Adams, artist, has been using social media since January. Since then, he’s developed a large facebook audience of 1700 fans. He’s developed subscribers to his newsletter by giving away a poster with a subscription. His goal is to help Read more…
Burning Man 2009 video makes you feel like dancing on the playa!
The videos and photographs are starting to show up online as peeps get back from the playa and starting sorting through their materials. I’ll add the ones I find that are worth watching here. This one begins and ends with a plane ride and offers a nice overview of the city from different perspectives, high and low.
I’d Rather Be Dancing at Burning Man…
Yes, I would, I would rather be dancing out at Burning Man right now, even if it meant being in another dust storm…
Here’s Burning Mom Victoria and her daughter Daria dancing out on the Deep End where we had a good time dancing too…
Unfortunately for this cool Big Sound art space, they were located adjacent to the super big super loud sound art space of the Do Lab/El Circo’s Simpler Times… Not cool to bleed like that.
Other great music moments we experienced: Wednesday night’s Opulent Temple Show with Cheb i Sabah followed by Persian Dance and Jeremy Sole at Do Lab Friday morning where they misted us… ahhhh…
I heard about many shows, and we traveled to see and hear them, but with a small child in tow, too many of them had the sound too loud. Next year, we’ll remember to bring headphone for our son like Daria is wearing to protect his hearing.
What were some of YOUR favorite musical performances this year?
art predator 