Aug/081
putting my money where my effing mouth is
In other words, it's time to start the embarassing parade of 10 year old websites and journal entries from high school. This thing I've started talking about, this part of the Internet that we all participated in, but no one has acknowledged thus far, I'm getting such a fantastic response about the topic that even if the panel doesn't happen, I think we should do something. All of us old school grrl goddesses. Let's all tell our stories, girls. And cringe while we do it!
But seriously, what should it be? Can we do an archive? Should a book be written? This is the kind of thing people go back to school for, but why keep it in the confines of academia? Also, I don't want to go back to school. But I do want to talk about this, because I think it's important.
So, without further adieu, without any editing whatsoever, I present to you, a tiny slice of the Internet, of me, of my life, as it was in 1998. And yes, the lyrics on the side are the Gin Blossoms. In which I talk about my SATs, and OMG how awesome my friends are, and what my predictions would be for their future lives. I was kind of right about one of them.
Aug/082
I am in it to win it with you, SXSW.
A number of you have been clicking through because of my SXSW panel submission on "Growing Up An Internet Oversharer". This is a topic that is super close to my heart, as I have spent the last 11 years blogging in some fashion, starting when I was 15 and coded my very own HTML pages (in Notepad. If you used Homesite, you were such a loser) and being an online journallist made me a much better writer and literally incapable of not sharing anything with strangers on a screen.
In the last few years, blogging has become a totally legitimate past time and people who didn't understand my compulsion to document my life online are now sharing the minutiae with the best of them through Yelp reviews, Myspace blogs, Flickr and Facebook. Furthermore, it's become professional, hell even I get paid to "blog" on a tech blog and my posts get edited now, we have style guides for this thing we used to do on the fly.
The point of my panel is why did we do it back then before it had a name, and why it never became a real thing people discussed until dudes started doing it. I have a few potential panelists that I'll be announcing hopefully very soon but they are all people who have documented their adolescence online before it was the cool thing to do. I think the panel will be lively, fun and hopefully include some mortifying reading of our old archives.
This particular blog you are reading is only a year old, but I have had so many! Over the course of the next few weeks, while voting is happening, I plan on linking to some old entries, ugly HTML, typing errors and all, in the spirit of my panel.
Who am I? I am Maria Diaz and I am a freelance writer. I do other things on the Internet, but primarily I like to write. I grew up in New York, am a 6 year San Francisco resident, and went to Oberlin College where I majored in drinking beer, English and Creative Writing.
Any questions or if you know anyone who'd be good for the panel or any ideas at all please email me at maria@onesharpbroad.com
Thanks!