When we started Medialoper a year ago, I had no idea what to expect. After all, we’d been having these discussions about media and technology and entertainment for a very long time and we were excited about translating them to the web, but there is a huge difference between red wine and whiskey-fueled bull sessions and sitting down and writing a well-researched, well-reasoned analysis on the latest developments in these fields.
And blogging? On a regular basis? Me? Hell, I’ve got a New Yorker cartoon pinned on my cubicle wall of one dog saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”
What I hadn’t counted on was how fun it is to do this.
There is stress. Our goal is to have at least one non-Daily Loper post every single weekday, occasionally one on Saturday, and the Weekly ‘Loper roundup every Sunday. However, except for the “That’s What I Like” feature on Fridays, there is no schedule of who is going to write what when. That means that we face nearly every single day with a “man, I hope that I can find something to write about” crossed with a “I hope that somebody else finds something to write about” void.
The cool thing is that somebody always does. Especially during weeks like this past one, where MacWorld & CES are spitting out new products at us faster than Barry Bonds spits out blame.
My personal goal is to have three to five posts up per week, every week. Sometimes I make it, sometime I fail, but at all times I am constantly trawling for ideas. After all, as Joe Strummer said: “To have output, you must have input.” And I’m not just trawling for posts, the other part of it has to do what I call “feeding Lopy:” coming up with those short, snarky paragraphs that end up in the Daily Lopers. Sometimes, the most difficult thing is determining whether or not an article is going to spur a full-out post or just an entry in the Daily Loper.
Usually the later, because it’s much easier to churn out a snappy answer to stupid headline than a full post on the subject of the headline. I actually think that the Daily Loper is quite possibly the most entertaining part of our blog: at its best, it’s an ongoing MiSTing of the news of the day.
While the formal manifesto for Medialoper was and remains the digital convergence of entertainment and technology, it soon became apparent that anything with the realms of Entertainment, Media and Techology was fair game. And that includes the quality of the content as much as it includes the quality of the delivery system.
It all affects each other: if the Web is going to be the next delivery system for TV shows, then it damn sure means we should talk about the quality of those TV shows. If Apple has sold 2,000,000,000 downloads — without the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Garth Brooks, then we need to talk about the 2,000,000,000 times iTunes users needed to circumvent Apple’s DRM in order to listen to those purchases on other devices. And so forth.
It’s huge, and its interconnected, and the fact that the media itself is now part of the story means that we can use our beat to discuss how the media is dealing with areas that we don’t formally cover: politics, sports, outer space, and for some reason, robots. Especially robots.
I also like that it all adds up to the fact that I’ve written more — and sometimes (sometimes!) better – er, stuff in the past year than ever before. Some of it has pissed people off; some of it has made people laugh; some of it has made people nod their heads in agreement. Some of it has made me cringe. And the vast majority has spurred no response whatsoever. But its all out there, and it isn’t going anywhere in the near future.
But the best thing of all is that it’s already been a year, and I feel like we’re just getting going!