Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for May 30, 2010 – “Prose and Cons, 2010”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for May 30, 2010. I play (most of) a song by Phil Rossi; I do a recap of my time as an impromptu guitar tech; I recap CREATE South 2010; I play a song by Mudhoney; I talk about my experiences so far with Baltion 2010; I play a song by Jonathan Coulton as a belated birthday gift to spring. This episode was actually recorded onsite at Balticon 2010.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

My Social Media Vacation Begins Today

Last night when I went to bed, I shut down Twitter (HootSuite, really) and Facebook and FriendFeed. I’m not going to look at or log in to any of those things for the next 30 days. There might be slight exceptions if I get a Facebook invite to something timely I want to accept but even if I have to sneak back in, I’m not reading and digging through status updates.

This is a mental health strategy for me. I have found that the always-on constant update of social media has worn on me more and more over the last year. When I turned it off for a weekend or to go do things around my town, it actually felt like a relief to me to be able to step back from that. Bear in mind, without any sort of smart phone I’m only a fraction as connected as most of my friends and still it wore on me over time. I understand the ways it can be useful but we need to think about what it does to us long term to be connected so much of our lives to these fast twitch update systems. You ignore the long term consequences of your productivity tools at your own peril. Even crystal meth is an effective productivity tool if you only consider the short term.

I still need to do my writeup on this year’s CREATE South conference (now one week in the past.) The only reason I didn’t start this vacation earlier was because of that conference. A certain bit of coordination and promotion was aided by Twitter and Facebook so I bit the bullet and stayed connected until the mopping up was mostly done. It made me feel like a bit of a fraud during the conference itself because a number of our sessions were about strategies for using social media to add value to your life or business while I was just counting the days until I could get social media out of my life for a month. This year the official CREATE South Twitter account was completely run by Tee Morris and that was a fabulous success. Not only did he do a job wildly better than I could have, it meant I didn’t have to stay locked in on that account. The result was better and I was happier.

I have a goal (not a death pact, just a goal) to blog at least once per day over this period. As I put more energy into the ephemera of social media, I put less into the more durable work on this blog and podcast. As I’ve said before, blogging for yourself in your own domain is like farming, posting your witticism into Twitter is like sharecropping. The work is the same, it’s just someone else cashing out most of the value. I hope to move my mix into things of lasting value to myself.

On top of that, my goal is to spend less time in front of the computer altogether. If there is one take-away lesson from CREATE South, it is that you get a lot of bang for your buck engaging with the people and the world around you and we geeks do too little of that. I want to attend the next Rivertown Social in downtown Conway. I want to start kayaking up the Waccamaw River. I can walk to the river landing, for pete’s sake. As I put it yesterday, “I want to spend less time with Facebook and more time with faces and books.” It’s shut down until May 23rd. We’ll see where it goes after that, but for now I am taking a well deserved break and it feels great.

CREATE South 2010

This blog has been mostly quiet as I’ve been neck deep in preparation for this year’s CREATE South. It will be tomorrow, at the Horry-Georgetown Technical College’s conference center (the campus by the beach, NOT the one on Highway 501 in Conway.) There is so much good stuff happening in the sessions tomorrow that we all will have hard decisions to make (of the best kind.)

Thanks to all the volunteers and sponsors how made this year both the easiest and on track to be the best one yet. If you can, come out and join us. As I’ve been talking about my new media malaise, CREATE South is what I’m hoping is the shot in my metaphorical arm to rekindle all the things I loved about the medium in the first place. I will see you there.

Keep Blogs Alive

The Riverfront in Conway

My struggles with the online world continue. I am blogging ever less, podcasting ever less. However I remember the introduction to Ted Sturgeon’s short story collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . .. In it he posited that there is no such thing as “writer’s block” only changes in writing styles that require entering a chrysalis-like state for a while before emerging as a different thing. He thought that what seemed like an inability to write was the conscious writer requiring a quiet time to catch up with the subconscious one.

I hope that is what is happening to me and social media. The positive side about my online life doldrums is that is being matched with a ramping up of activity in my offline life. Just this morning, I rode my bike down to the Conway riverfront and around downtown for the first time in a long time. I plan after next weekend’s CREATE South to take one month off from social media – for sure Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other presence type services and possibly the blog and everything. I know Larry Lessig does one month a year entirely away from the internet and that might turn out to be a long term healthy way to live.

For now, I remain trying to adjust the needle to the sweet spot of the online/offline balance mix. Time to shut down the computer and go play some beach volleyball with friends. It seems like a better thing to do on a beautiful April day in Myrtle Beach than blogging. I’m just saying …

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for March 21, 2010 – “New Media Gut Check”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for March 21, 2010. I play a song by Chris Yale; I discuss the uproar in the podcast world following JC Hutchins’ recent post and my own shifting feelings about new media; I play a song by Paul Westerberg and pull the rip cord.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

CREATE South 2010 is Coming

On April 17th, 2010 we will have the third annual CREATE South conference in beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Our keynote speakers will be Tee Morris and Mur Lafferty, and the day will be filled with talk of new media, social media, technology, art, creativity and how to take your ideas and get them done. Registration is free, the day is guaranteed to be fun and we even feed you. Come join us and you will leave with a full head and a full belly and a full complement of new friends and associates.

The day is Saturday April 17th, 2010. The place is the conference center at the Horry Georgetown Technical College’s Grand Strand campus (one block from Market Commons), 950 Meyers Avenue in Myrtle Beach SC. The mission is fellowship, knowledge, interaction and fun. We shall succeed, and we shall do it together.