Anyway, I took advantage of said glitch and signed up for free ticket to a panel held by AIGA’s New York chapter, titled “Fresh Dialogue 25: www.DesignBloggingIsChangingEverything.com”. Huh.

Now, me, being a fresh little freelancer, I have grand ideas of what these great big fancy “Graphic Artists” events might be like. Especially with a panel of well known bloggers from sites like Core77, SwissMiss, CoolHunting and Subtraction.

And to be honest, the discussion was anything but fresh.
I came hoping for an intelligent look at how blogging affects design in the real world and insight on the trend cycle and how it’s sped up and influenced by social networking. I came away with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a someone preen themselves in the mirror for too long. Most of the speakers just ran through a history of their site, how it came about, and a little about their process, there was no real discussion that hasn’t been heard over and over again.
One audience member even managed to ask “What is the future of newspapers?”
Really, anonymous audience member? Are you really going to ask a bunch of bloggers, “Is print is dead yet?“.

Khoi Vihn, of Subtraction, postulated the both easy and pessimistic forecast that the future of design blogging is moving towards Twitter, and that a well-curated batch of Twitter feeds could provide a rich and deep experience Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use Twitter, I like Twitter, but I’m tired of reading breathlessly exultant odes to Twitter. It’s a tool, just like everything else. And it definitely doesn’t take the place of my feed reader (and a good cup of coffee) in the mornings.

Vihn suggested that content will move towards primarily visual “bursts” of information within social networks, instead of centralized personal websites with a carefully crafted voice. I disagree. I think thoughtful, intelligent discussion on design, especially in the context of sociology, is important and increasingly relevant in a culture that has begun to consume content at warp speeds and an increasing desire for immediacy. We have to look at how we digest this information and how it affects our interactions and ideas. Does this unstoppable flow of words and pictures make us more creative via inspiration and possibility or does it dumb us down to simply passive sponges?

There was a lot more chatter that really just felt rehashed from much more thoughtful discussion on the web about advertising, “selling out”, monetizing your blog, social media, etc. I know all this already! Tell me something new!

I found Tina Roth Eisenberg to be the most compelling speaker, because she is a storyteller and made her presentation a personal one, showing photos of her childhood home and family. Her presentation alone embodies what I like about her blog and many others, the element of humanity, story, and personal fingerprint. As you get to know a writer, you begin to value their way with words and narrative, even if it’s in a purely critical context.

This is what makes blogging good, in my opinion: where you begin to develop a connection between the reader and the writer. I don’t need a stream of all the coolest, latest, newest stuff thrown at me. I grew up online, I know how to find these things already. Consistently, the content I value is based in personal taste, style, opinion and curation. Personality.

This is where my own roots in blogging started, as a digital extension of my diary, at age fourteen. Now, it seems absurd (outside of LiveJournal, at least) that one would spill such private thoughts in such a public arena, but there was a time when the internet felt like your own private corner of the world, and only your closest friends had the URL. And it seems funny to me, at least, to see bloggers a few decades older than I, would present the idea of personal narrative as a novel concept in the blogging world.

I suppose, all in all, I was most disappointed that the things I wanted to discuss and think about were not even touched upon, so then it is up to me to start the discussion. But the questions I went in with were much different than the questions I came out with.

What interests me most about the internet and technology is how it changes our social customs, how we interact with one another, how we connect, how the nature of ideas and creativity and collaboration is affected by it. I think that’s a million times more interesting than profit and advertising revenues and unique subscribers.

• How does technology change the way we make art?
• How does it change how we connect with the other strange beings that share our planet?
• How does it affect our discussions about art and culture?

One of my early layouts for Broken-Echo.net

On October 26th, thousands of blinky GIFs flashed their last frame and scrolling MARQUEE tags came to a halting stop, as Yahoo closed down Geocities, its free website-building service.

I honed my web design chops on Geocities, almost 9 years ago, at age 14. It was my original HTML playground. I started doing web design after coming across an anime art site, and was inspired to create my own digital exhibition, spending weeks teaching myself how to construct a basic document and upload it to the web. Learning HTML was my first brush with the professional design world, and also with teaching myself a concrete skill outside of a school environment.

It’s interesting to look back at that era and what I was a part of. There was a definite group of young girls who got together and built incredible blogs, webrings, fan pages and cliques. Many owned their own domains and would often share their space with girls they barely knew. It was a mark of respect, to be handed a subdomain and 10MB of space. We changed our layouts the way we’d redecorate our lockers, constantly outdoing the previous design, constantly looking to improve.

We were the forerunners of blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, the whole damn thing. We bought domains with pocket money, we doled out subdomains like they were candy, and we designed in colours of black, white, purple, red, and sometimes pink. We coded everything by hand, we tried all the latest in Javascript, and we bitched and ranted like nobody’s business. We were hosted between 1997(ish) and 2003(ish). We were aged between 13 and 21 (again, ish). We were girls – but there were boys too, if we let them in the clubhouse door.

We were mostly girls, we were all geeks, and we were very angsty!
-Naomi Eve

It was a demographic that had previously never really played a part in the web in this way before, and was definitely an important part of my teenage years. I met internet friends that I still keep in touch with today, collaborating, critiquing and putting our creative ideas together (and also gossiping about our lives, of course).

Here’s to you, Geocities.
Thanks for the memories.