Thomas Crone wrote a nice article and took a nice photo (above) for St. Louis magazine this month.

The RFT wrote an article about the take down notice I sent to YouTube because some dick posted my stuff there and edited out all references to me or my site (I don’t have a problem with people sharing my stuff. I’m not a copyright Nazi–just give me credit and a link please).

And Deb Peterson wrote a really nice little paragraph about my winning the Portable Film Festival.

Not bad. Kinda makes me feel famous or something.

I’ll be doing some media interviews here and there. Most notable will be an interview on KWMU (St. Louis NPR) on their mid-day Friday arts program “Cityscape” on July 20th at 11:00AM, “The Wire” on August 6th at 7:30PM and an article in upcoming fall issue of St. Louis Magazine.

Paul Schankman of Fox 2 St. Louis did a piece about me and vlogging on the 9 o’clock news tonight. I was worried it would suck, but it was pretty good. Check it out here.

So funny yet so sad. From the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Blog this: We need you more than we need your opinion.
By Scott Anderson

03/12/2007

The Wall Street Journal recently reported there are more than 70 million blogs — diary-like Internet sites where individuals post their opinions and readers post their reactions — in the United States today. That’s twice as many as there were just a year ago.

Which means that more than one in five Americans are providing ongoing commentary on topics ranging from politics to Ashley Simpson to high school sports to how to bake a turkey.

C’mon, do we have that much to say? And if so, is this really the best we can do?

Umm who is this guy and who is he reading? Yeah there is a lot of inane stuff on blogs but also a lot of great stuff. And yes there is tons of valuable stuff written on blogs all the time.

In the days before the Internet, those of us who had opinions sometimes did something quaint: We actually met with other people who had opinions.
We did it in all sorts of places: in our homes, our churches, our neighborhoods, our taverns. In some cases, especially when it came to my fellow Catholics and me, we shared opinions in all four places on the same day. We shared those opinions in the open light, and the feedback was instantaneous.

What we did not do was hide in our bedrooms and behind our home-office doors and the anonymity and secrecy of fake web names.

It was called conversation.

In the old days if you had an interest in some obscure subject it was very unlikely that you could find anyone at your local church or pub that you could talk to about it. In the blogesphere conversations are happening all the time across city, state and national boundries on a vast number of subjects, from the inane to the profound. Often news events are blogged before they are reported in the mainstream media—sometimes days in advance. This means that information spreads outside of all the artificial filters that we’ve had in the past. Information is power. Power is what is needed to DO THINGS.

I don’t understand why we celebrate the growth of blogs. It seems to me that they are just another expression of our fascination with our own opinions. We are fast becoming a nation of Sayers, rather than Doers.

Ummm yeah. How does one know what to do? How do we find out about what needs to be done? Where do we find information about if we are doing something right? What if what we need to do requires up to date information? Blogs are about conversations, and conversations are about exchanging information. When more people are sharing information, more people are better informed about how, what, and why things need to be done.

For all the hype about interactivity, blogs are first and foremost the epitome of one-way chatter. You can sit at your computer and spew a stream of consciousness. You can chuckle at your own funny lines, pat yourself on the back for a pithy comment, stand up and shake your fist while driving your point home.

There is no HYPE about interactivity. Blogs are the epitome of an interactive public conversation. There are lots of conversational tools built into blogs. Comments, and trackbacks are integral to blogging culture—and are interactivity. Much more interactive than OP Ed’s in the newspaper for instance. Some of the best bloggers are great conversationalists, who interact regularly with their readers.

I have what I hope is a helpful suggestion for bloggers: Instead of just sitting inside your house and commenting on the world around you, why don’t you, um, get up and leave? There is a whole non-cyber, non-virtual place waiting for you and your opinions. It’s called the world.

Most of the bloggers I know and read are well versed in the world. They blog about their own little corner of it regularly. Their blogs are often catalysts for doing things in the world. I personally have done more, and met more people in the real world because I have a blog. Blogs make my interaction with the world a much more rich experience. Because of blogs I know more about it.

And maybe more than our opinions, the world needs our help. The homeless shelter down the street needs our help. The local school needs our help. The food pantry needs our help. And if you want to get really local and personal, it’s a fair bet that our spouses and kids and neighbors need our help.

Have you read any advocacy blogs? There are lots of conversations about how to do all these things happening all the time. Bloggers ARE very often doers.

If there are 70 million blogs out there, chances are really, really good that I have not read yours. But I have a hunch: We all need your help more than your opinion.

But yet you offer yours. Nice. I would suggest that you go out and learn a little more about the subject at hand before you embarrass yourself in public like this again. Would you like to suggest that people stop reading and go out and do things too? How about wasting their time writing op eds about things they know very little about?

If I had a blog, that’s what I would say.

If you had a blog you might be a little better informed about blogging.

Scott Anderson lives in Des Peres and owns Physician Risk Services, a small health care consulting firm in Clayton.

It seems that a person in this field could find one or two blogs that might be useful to his profession, or have something valuable to share with others within the realm of his expertise. It’s too bad that he has no clue what blogging is really about.

Looking back on it I was slightly disappointed about the backdrop that they chose for the majority of the interview. I have these shelves in my basement that at left over from the previous owner. And I’ve found a use for them. Namely as dividers for separating my little end of the basement from the rest of the basement. They aren’t pretty, they are cheap, and they have some clutter on them. So of course this is what they use for the back drop. OK maybe they were tight on my face and you can’t see the clutter or the shelves. Maybe I’m obsessing too much … yeah thats probably it.

So I have to say that I wasn’t all that excited about getting interviewed for TV. I mean, I wasn’t disappointed by it, I appreciate the attention. But for some reason I just didn’t really get all that excited about it the way I might have say, a couple of years ago. Maybe it’s because I do some of that kind of thing myself. But I tend to think it’s because I’ve already had some experience with the press, I am becoming jaded. I just hope it turns out ok and I get lots of traffic from it. But I ain’t holding my breath. My experience with the MSM is that it doesn’t do a whole helluva lot for traffic.