My Blogging Style

For my New Years Resolution in 2011 I decided to record and photograph and blog about every show I went to that year. It was fun and interesting and thrilling and hard work. I blogged just over 100 times that year and saw more than 380 acts.

Committing to recording and blogging every show made things a bit of a production, almost a job. This inevitably diminished my enthusiasm to go out and listen to music somewhat since I had to have enough energy to also record it and take pictures and blog about it immediately before I forget the details. The rate decreased until I finally threw in the towel and started going to shows as a fan again last year. No requirement to blog or record anything. 2013 was my most media free Bumbershoot in a while.

My blogging ran out of gas and I posted my last blog in August 2013 for Mudhoney's free Mural Amphitheater show.
If you're paying attention you'll notice the Mudhoney video is from Bumbershoot rather than the Mural show.
I continued to go to an occasional show though not too often. As the New Year rolled around I decided to get tickets to the EMP Sound Off! shows. I got my friend Charles Oppelt to go with me and he took some wonderful pictures and the show was fun and energetic and I decided to blog about it. The next week was arguably even better so I blogged about that too. I enjoyed blogging again after the layoff, and I got a pretty large amount of traffic for some reason. I even got linked by the Seattle Weekly, a first for me! It was due to Charles' awesome photo of Noah Fowler really, but I was happy to get the traffic.

Speaking of traffic, my EMP Sound Off! blogs got more traffic faster than any of my blogs ever did before which was gratifying on some level. Don't get me wrong, I'm only talking about hundreds of views so it's not going to make me wealthy - heck, it's not going to make me any money at all, it's just a hobby. I do get some ego inflation out of viewers and it encourages me and predisposes to blog more.

My live show blogs are all pretty similar and largely follow the sequence of acts in the show and comment on each, always saying something positive.

At the end of the year I did some retrospectives and Best-of-2011 lists. I enjoyed doing those both for the fun memories and the ease of using already recorded, processed and uploaded videos.

I've been playing with the idea of blogging about who I thought the next breakthrough Pacific Northwest act would be, so I went ahead and finished writing it and tossed in videos I've recorded live for many of the bands I single out, which was fun: the videos are already recorded and wrangled up to YouTube properly so again it's quick and easy, no cameras to operate.

I'm playing with the occasional "non-(show w/bands in order narrative)" post like this one. Not that I have that much to say at the moment, but I want to try playing around with saying things in different ways.

Posting Mechanics

I posted about quite a few shows last year, and any passionate hobby starts to become less play and more work as the total number of hours spent on it passes forty in any given week. I'm not exactly whinging well, only whining a little, I suppose. Going to multi-day festivals (Sasquatch, CHBP, Bumbershoot) and taking hours of video and hundreds of photos a day was fun and occasionally grueling, and I built up "media wrangling debt."

Getting 2 or 3 hours of video footage groomed down to identified bands performing one or two numbers, properly uploaded, titled, tagged and licensed on youtube, photos up on flickr, videos off of SLR onto youtube rather than flickr, audio files identified and labelled, backups of audio, video and photos onto local external HD, refs generated for embedding into blogs, all that has to be slogged through before writing and posting the blog. Half the time I needed the videos to remind me which acts I saw when, and what they sounded like. I have now had the charming experience of wrangling files from a performance a semi-missed that kicked my ass in retrospect. I was there to start the recording, but I was busy doing something like making tacos so I didn't actually experience the performance live. Later as I uploaded all of the files I listened to an audio recording and the song was excellent, I was floored by what I had missed. I don't even know who it was, and I don't have a good method nailed down for posting audio, so you'll have to take my word for it - it was a fascinating experience.

I haven't "solved" using audio in my blogs, but using videos with youtube and photos with flickr couldn't be easier (once the content is uploaded, anyway) and I can link anything in that tickles my fancy so the blogging process is mostly pretty good.

In this last week the winter storm and its aftermath made the internet based tools I rely on unreliable and I was reminded how much I take for granted. My camera takes better pictures than I could if I had to do it manually and it's easy to take piles of photos, post them on flickr, and use them in my blogs.
No negatives to mail in, no physical prints to pay (and wait) for, no need to scan for on-line access, they're already digital. Now throw in 60 frame/sec HD video with reasonably good audio that can take high volume situations and still deliver reasonable quality and make that easy to trim, label, tag, upload, and embed. No lab work needed, no physical tapes to send anywhere, as long as the internet is available I can publish word-wide in a few hours. The same week wikipedia and other sites went dark to protest SOPA my internet access went intermittent to unavailable right at the peak of being snowed in and really wishing I had internet access. Nobody was hurt and we kept ourselves occupied, so it really wasn't a big deal, it just brought home to me how thoroughly the internet has ingrained itself into my media production and consumption patterns. It wasn't that big a deal because the internet was back working normally within a day; I do require a functioning internet to publish world-wide for free.