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August 31, 2007

I Fellate the KATU Blogger Meetup

Well, in spite of the fact that I wasn't invited by KATU (which I was told paid a contractor $10,000 to read OrBlogs and create an invitation list that somehow excluded me!!!) I WAS invited by Drew to attend the KATU blogger meet-up and I'm SO glad I went because I met and got to hang out with some really charming people. I'm going to express my gratitude by actually blogging about the event, because I assume that was the point ... (Wait, what WAS the point?)

The food was really weird. Like a lot of us, I find it annoying when people who say "random" instead of "weird" so I'm going to start saying, "weird" instead of "random." But in actuality, it was random: california rolls, tiny ruebens, a meat, cheese and olive plate, chocolate-covered strawberries, spring rolls, bread sticks, and a shrimp bowl. But plenty of everything, so I only experienced a tiny twinge of buffet anxiety. Plus, there was beer and wine. (Sadly, I was too much of an idiot to realize I had a clean bento box with me, where I could have stashed lots of "left overs." :( :( :( )

So what was the point? Kai from Portland Met Blogs told me that she was told it was an attempt to bridge the divide between mainstream media and ... whatever bloggers are. An ABC affiliate in Seattle held a similar identical event, which seems to have worked pretty well for them in terms of coverage. So maybe that's the point?? (thanks to Justin for finding the Seattle event). Khris Soden (who I was delighted to meet! I've admired his Portland history comics for ages!) had a theory, which is that this was a Vortex 1 for bloggers -- Vortex 1 being the rock festival held in 1970 to draw the radicals away from Portland so they wouldn't cause trouble during an American Legion convention. But what else was happening that night, other than a land-use meeting in Lake Oswego??

Who knows.

There was some very lightly branded schwag, which, interestingly, didn't include a url or anything (and the logo didn't seem to connect to anything at all) -- so, I guess there was no content at stake. There was a photo op -- with the promise that our group photo would be uploaded to flickr, and the encouragement to tag our own photos. Yay! Photos!

It was obviously some kind of branding event -- or at least, an event where someone convinced someone else that they should throw money around so they could get all up in the Web 2.0 or something.

I sometimes think that people are convinced that marketing is effective if it's confusing, and this kind of was confusing. So, by blogging about it, am I rewarding KATU for doing evil disguised as weird appetizers? That's a question for Thomas Frank. But yeah, probably. But not very much. (My readership is pretty low.)

But I met such nice, smart people, and I left semi-full and slightly drunk -- I really can't really let my righteous disgust about "post-modern" branding events for lazy, exploitative, and generally reactionary local news media trump my sincere gratitude.

As I mentioned, I was thrilled to meet the talented and charming Khris Soden, and other nice people I met included Dave and Thom from a beer blog!. I have to admit, at first I was kind of like, "meh, beer blog," but then I realized what humble rock stars these guys actually are! They are the BACON and LABYRINTH guys!! Anyway, they were super nice and funny and made me feel like less of an asshole at a social event, which is absolutely to their credit, not mine.

And Dave told me about Photosynth, which is really cool and I recommend checking it out.

And that's my report!

(p.s. I have recently learned good angles for people with double/no chins to pose for photos, and this, btw, is not one of them.)

Posted by mary at August 31, 2007 8:36 AM

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Posted by: Chris Higgins at August 31, 2007 2:44 PM

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