The Family Reality Blog

Atlanta poet, Tania Rochelle, runs a family blog. At first glance, it's clearly Tania's wickedly clever, jaundiced eye on her own life -- an interactive journal she keeps on-the-run as a mother, wife, daughter, writer, provider, observer, grocery shopper, teacher, supporter, recovered something, thinker, pet-lover, runner, worrier, you-name-it.

Then you come to realize that seemingly ALL of her numerous family members are joining in the blog reindeer games with their often contradictory and hilarious comments on every post she takes. Everyone from a grandmother, Mamoo, to a teenager daughter's latest boyfriend. You'll get to know them all if you're a regular to The Stone's Colossal Dream. Seemingly everyone she's responsible for, or who's responsible for her, or whom she knows intimately chimes in daily with their personal POV about Tania's World -- and exactly how they fit into the acknowledged zoo of it all.

Coming from a family that takes interest in, let alone something as ghastly as personal involvement in, one another's lives to disconnected heights of avoidance and contact akin to contagion units at the CDC, I marvel at Tania's blog's participatory, familial nature via new media.

With frequent visits, it's easy to find yourself feeling that you're a part of Tania's wacky suburban mayhem, where reflection and chatter and banter and argument and the spiritual and the mundane and seriousness and loopy camping trip behavior all reign and vie for more more more attention throughout any given day.

Tania's passed on her participatory, literate and literary tendencies to her oldest daughter, Sadie, who's now blogging from Costa Rica, where she's happily exploring the landscape, the populace, and herself.

Enjoy! It'll make you feel good, trust me.

Let's Pick On The AJC! Installment #853

I've heard, time and time again at various press-related functions, the good folk from Cox Media Plantations say news coverage is all going hyper-local, so thus they are too. So let's take a look at just where they've not bothered to "go local" -- on a day when the AJC.com's top, above-the-fold story is about Paula Abdul's makeup. (It was there early this morning, trust me.) Or when they do go hyper-local, it's semi-pointless. Hell, they can't even do "southern."

1.) The NYT had a cover story yesterday about a very dangerous home improvement product that lingered on the shelves of Atlanta-based Home Depot. Not only was the product, Stand 'N Seal, sold in Home Depot stores long after the product was recalled, the company that manufactures the hyper-dubious ingredient in the bathroom sealer product is based in... you got it... Georgia. But we get... Paula Abdul's pimple coverage instead.

2.) When churches throughout Atlanta had their annual pet blessing services to mark the Feast of St. Francis Assisi (historic pet-lover), and a delightful, heartwarming photo-op any 'ole time and place, the AJC runs a wire-service picture of a Golden Retriever in a church in San Francisco. Who needs to get out of the house and down the road a piece for a dog sitting in any church pew along Peachtree Road? Especially when Buckhead has more Golden Retrievers per household than any other place on the planet.

3.) Possibly the most head-scratching omission though is the failure of the AJC, a paper that helped shaped American history by its coverage of all-things-civil-rights, to send one of their own to Jena, LA to cover the civil rights march that happened there on September 20, not here. Rather, they relied on wire service reports the day of the march, choosing original reporting only for... the hyper-local perspective! Too bad that in this case the hyper-local was never where the heart of that story lay. How much can a Motel 6 in Louisisana possibly impact the bottom line?

Local v-blogger Amani Channel did bother to cover Jena, LA though. On assignment for HDNews. Twice. Here's just one of his many fascinating, personal, indie packages from the scene for his blog, MyUrbanReport, proving once again that blogs are now the best place to get your local, in-depth news coverage and analysis. Need more on the Grady crisis? Forget Cox Plantations; try Grift's crib.

NOTE: Once again I find that the best way to work your way through a social media-induced funk is to blog your way out. Confounding medium, eh?

Blogging Touches Lives

And for once I'm not being snarky. Blogging really does touch our lives -- in a way that's unique and participatory and fulfilling. Of course it also often punches us in the eye. Witness my on-going little tit for tat with He Who Must Not Be Named. Or Those Little Boys Who Should Be Named, Called Out Often, And Taken Out Behind The Shed And Whipped Soundly By Their Mommas Since No One Obviously Ever Did That Before And Sometimes Folk Just Need Some Common Sense Beat Into 'Em. (Did I just say that? Man am I getting mean and cranky and showing too much southern in my old age or what.)

Witness the comment left here. Or read James' Academy Awards acceptance speech here after winning CL's Best Blogger in Atlanta award this week. And yeah, he earned that puppy. Congratulations James! Enough earnestness in one post from me. That's your annual allotment now used up. Let's all go get wasted. DBT tonight at the Variety. Yeah!

Fear and Loathing For Women in the Blogosphere

There's a lot to be scared of out there if you're a female blogger. From Slate today:

Sierra was a powerhouse blogger who in March shut down her blog, Creating Passionate Users, about the highly gender-charged subject of metacognition and computers. Sierra stopped bloging after anonymous critics posted graphic and sexually threatening material about her, both in the comments section of her Web site and on other blogs.

The posters (read them here) somehow confused death threats with debate on the merits of Sierra's views and policies. Some suggested that Sierra deserved to have her throat slit and to be suffocated, sexually violated, and hanged. Among the things Sierra wrote as she folded up her blogging tent: "I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same."

Then again, I bet some of the stuff that's said and sent to bloggers scares the total bejeezus out of men bloggers, too.

So guys, you tell me -- have you been totally unnerved by something in the blogosphere that targeted you? I know I have had my nerves rattled bad on a couple of, uh "postings," and I'm not afraid to admit that it set me to worrying... for about a day. Then I got over it and went right back to blogging.

Still, I don't have the kind of high profile that some women bloggers like Michelle Malkin do. Just good to know what's waiting for you around the great corner of success though. I soooo can't wait to get there.

Blog on ladies, blog on.

"You're Running A Blog Not A Democracy"

Take 'em out back and shoot 'em... Anonymous Trolls (ATs) on blogs, that is. The blogosphere is all a'twitter (lower case twitter, not upper case Twitter) about a call for greater civility in the blogosphere: codes of ethical conduct , rules, regs, ethics badges, pledges, notices of of honor codes one chooses to abide by -- or not. That sorta thing.

Jeez, I go off the grid for four days and the conversation changes... not one iota. Might just stay off longer next time.

I agree that ATs are the worst of the worst slime who live under rocks. They annoy me to no end too, but I can't say I've had a terrible problem with ATs. Only once were they an issue anyways, when I foolishly left Anonymous Commenting up on the SGR right after Neal Boortz had blabbed (and blogged) about this very blog while on-air. Even then, I just deleted the stream of really vile comments. Didn't have any kinda ethical or moral dilemma about doing so, either. As the great Rusty T says, "You're running a blog, not a democracy."

So I can't really get all fired-up over masturbatory debates about should anonymous commenters be allowed or not, not to the degree of this NYT article today at least. Then again, I'm hardly as popular as BlogHer, so I don't attract their kinda attention, good or bad. (And if you do read this blog, you'd likely come to the conclusion that I tack to the "no such thing as bad press " end of the PR spectrum.)

For the record, I do not allow annonymous comments here. That's merely a coward's MO, and hardly worth protecting, in my book. Also, the registration process is so daunting on Blogspot, that most ATs lose interest at the thought of having to register and use a nom de plume just to cuss me out. (I laughed my butt-off though when someone was such an AT, and thus too cowardly to leave a post on my blog, that they instead left an anonymous post about me on someone else's blog! Now that's slime so low no microbe could even get under.)

Anyways... here's the NYT article again. It features gals from BlogHer.com, a site I once tried to post what I thought was a fairly reasonable (I didn't even use profanity!) comment, but of course I got slapped on the hand and lectured to about "rules" on personal attacks when I decided to speak my piece about the (dubious) professional choices of a certain BlogHer blogger. (She once worked for Edelman PR.) Women really are annoying with all their nicey-nice rules and such. And that was, naturally enough, the last time I visited BlogHer.

Then again, no one really likes being called a "stupid illiterate cunt" and things of that nature for too long. And women are often targeted for particularly vitriolic comments in the blogosphere. Still, I kinda like the creativity displayed by a certain Atlanta-based, male photographer who commented here (anonymously, of course, other than noting his profession 'cause I guess he felt it/he was special) that I wrote like a "drunken five-year old."

If I ever met-up with that dude, I'd let him buy me a drink just so I could toss it in his face. Just like a boozing kid, eh? But no, I didn't delete the "drunken five-year old" comment. It's on some post somewhere in here for all the world to judge -- both me and the commenteer.

Frankly, if some of these pro-guidelines folks had come of age before the blogosphere with, say, David T. Lindsay as one's snark guru, as I did, they'd know perfectly well how to wield and weed the vitriol -- in just the perfect places, for maximum impact. Or for at least some damn flavor. And Lordy Mercy how most blogs need not so much a lot of rules and regs, but instead just a whole lot more old-fashioned... style and flavor.


The plan is proceeding as, uh, planned... Mahhhh-ster. (My advice? Always do the accent.)

(If I Could Not Be A) Camera

I sense coming up on a watershed moment with blogging. For about two years now, I've been nothing but a camera with this blog: documenting, producing, taping, recording, writing, agonizing, goofing off, journaling, pleading, hand wringing, shouting, responding, whispering, thinking, pondering, dreaming, crying, screaming, muttering, mumbling, laughing, ROFLing, singing, scrutinizing, cajoling, forgiving, understanding, opinionating, falling, linking, resourcing, referencing, researching, stabbing, touching, linking always linking, reaching for, falling for, liking, contributing, taking a stand, embracing, accepting, rejecting, pleasing, surprising, dismissing, roaring, spitting, denying, ignoring, inspiring, bashing, beating, breaking, hoping, defeating, hitting, caressing, creating, molding, tearing down, loving, hating, burning, tossing aside, turning within, turning outward, stepping on, fucking with, seeking, proselytizing, flipping off, preaching, kissing off, making out, friending, antagonizing, pissing off, getting off, shooting the shit, annoying, flirting, spurning, pleasing, irritating, inciting, boring the shit out of, living out loud with anyone who stumbles into my world here.

But I reach a point of exhaustion and burnout, and yes, even for me, a point of informational overload. I wake up at 6am. By 8am I have a backlog of things I feel inspired and compelled to write about and respond to. I immediately start to prioritize, ranking what deserves my attention that day, in terms of blogging. And off I go. To nowhere, and for no apparent reason. Yet, should I not respond, for instance, to Mel's blog entry, then I won't rest easy until I've done so. And as we blog, war just rages on pointlessly, relentlessly over our heads. Born in domestic strife, and the national strife of the Vietnam War era, seems we've all been waging war since the day I first took a breath on this planet, stopping here and there only to catch our breath and build the machine back up in our momentary lapses of peace.

Lately, I've been late to appointments and meetings and such, due to my need to blog it out. Yet before blogging, I was an extremely punctual person. Old producer habits and organizational skills die hard, unless you're blogging every day. Something's been altered in me by blogging. Something has changed within my DNA almost. But I do not know yet if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I do wonder though, if I need to step back and try to figure out where to go next, or not, in terms of indie blogging?

This post put together with help from... my generation:

PodCamp Post-Mort

Why write a post-mort yourself about PodCamp Atlanta when others have already done the heavy lifting for you?! Some excellent feedback, thoughts, ramblings, musings, general commentary on PodCamp Atlanta are all over the Internets. Here's a list for you:

Ellie's Dad -- I love that a techno-biggy introduces himself at a conference as the author of the "Ellie's Dad" blog! That's soooo social media. Love his remarks here too.

Bernaisesource -- No one writes with the clarity and precision as that Dan Our New Media Man.

GriftDrift -- Always sticks a knife just where one is needed.

Radical Georgia Moderate -- Looks at things in a way you wish you had. Rusty can rearrange your thought process.

Peachtree Screed -- The Godfather.

Amber -- Goddess of social media cool. Damn fine PodCamp organizer too!

Stephanie -- Delightfully readable blogger.

Josh at Hyku -- Our blog guru. Everything we know trickled up from FL with Josh.

What A Concept! -- Sherry the idealist, sets our ATL new media moral compass.

PJNet -- Head counselor at all Media Camp. Leonard keeps us grounded in first aid, safety and media reality.

Mike Schinkel -- emerging on the Atlanta tech blogger scene. Good photos.

The Shelbinator -- the one to watch.

Jeff Haynie -- serial entrepreneur; serious techy.

And then there's the MSM dude's (AP) report.


As Greenfield suggests, you tell me what kind of report/reporting you like best about PodCamp Atlanta '07!

Technorati tag: podcamp atlanta, podcampatlanta2007, podcampAtlanta

Those Wacky NABET Dudes

Click To Play

(or click here)

My favorite (DC) NABE, Jim Long, keeps playing in the social media sandbox. What will the NBC suits think? Heck, what will POTUS think! And will Jim keep his day job? Will he want to when he wins the 25K purse from this contest?

So many unanswered questions, but one thing a lot of folks might want to ponder over in their squirrelly, entrepreneurial-ish minds... when more and more of this generation and this skill set hit the social media scene, run for cover, youths. The bar's going to be re-set. Real high too.

The big guys are in the house now, so Ladies and Gents, I give you Jim Long, or @NewMediaJim over on the Twitter box.

Big Media Stops To Assist Stranded Blogger

In what could very well be another shot in the media revolution, I just had an AJC reporter email me to correct a glaring error on my blog. You eagle-eye fellow bloggers, that would be me too, never caught that I'd written "Bob Woodward" all over a blog post instead of "Bob Woodruff." (And yeah, I had to go in and re-order some posts, so if things look weird upon your return to the SGR, it's because I had to delete the original "Bob Woodward" post and replace it with "Woodruff." Screwed up the timeline for the day.)

Boy, do I feel like a total chump. So much for our editorial system of checks and balances here in the blogosphere. Gotta get bailed out by MSM. Hummmpppphhh.

Oh well. You get what you pay for around here. Or maybe they just read Leonard's open letter and decided to "open source" their copy editing skills! Whatever, I'm grateful that someone on the AJC payroll even took 30 seconds to e-mail a blogger. Of course, I'd prefer that he'd posted a comment, but I'll take what I can get.

One email at a time... (Email -- so last century.)

Vaspers the Grate: MySpace Is A Toilet

This is America in action, begging the question: just why are so many are so darn keen on getting here? Wouldn't they really just rather stay home and throw rocks at somebody?

My Blogger Addiction

It's so bad that I'm in this edit session, with my cousin Al, you know how we Southerners like to keep it in the family, and I'm just looopy-distracted by the wonderful little shit storm going on over at Peach Pundit, whereby last time I checked, James seems to be kicking Erick's ass all over the place because Erick seems to be suffering from "I Believe Everything I Hear On Neal Boortz" disease.

Gawd I wish I could, consensually of course, tape that little set-to. A wonk's idea of porn.

SoCon07 Blogger Un-Conference Happening

I'm at SoCon07. Where are you? Josh Hallett is live-blogging at Hyku. Nik from Augusta has thoughts here. Leonard Witt, a co-founder, has more poop here, and pics from last night's dinner and today's conference are here. Atlanta-based SoulPress posts a clip of keynoter, Chris Klaus. SOT from Josh about the use of social media is on my YouTube channel. (Audio was off-mic so you'll have to crank the volume on that one.)

And here are your Georgia Podcast Network hosts, Ladies and Gentleman, put your hands together for America's Bloggeratti Couple of the Year, capturing all your southern podcasting needs so you don't have to... Amber Rhea and RustyTanton:

And the Shelbinator captures me doing my video Diane Sawyer-Of-Social-Media thing:

And more of me, and then the glamorous Jen from Who Is Jen Gordon? Answer: She's the other gal from TrueGritz!


For SoCon08, let's add dancing!

Technorati tag: socon07

John Edwards Plays The Donald

...and gives bloggers a second chance. Did the un-fired gal bloggers cry their mascara off for the media too? Get to keep their bloggerati crowns? Have to go to re-hab? Maybe they should to help further any lingering campaign issues.

My my my. The boy Edwards' and his people have a spine! And they aren't afraid to flex it. I'm loving this. Chalk one up for those "liberal feminist blogger" types. (And Sara/James: you'd have sold us down the river pretty quick-like, eh? I'll remember that.) From today's NYT:

Mr. Edwards announced on Thursday, after 36 hours of deliberation, that he would keep on his campaign staff two liberal feminist bloggers with long cybertrails of incendiary comments on sex, religion and politics. Mr. Edwards could keep the women on his staff and have to answer for the sometimes vulgar and intemperate writings posted on their personal blogs before he hired them late last month. He could dismiss them and face a revolt in the liberal blogosphere, which is playing an increasingly influential role in Democratic politics and could be especially important to his populist campaign. Some bloggers saw the controversy as manufactured by conservative groups.

Most importantly:

He (Edwards) also said he would not allow his campaign to be “hijacked” by religious conservatives who had pointed out the bloggers’ most provocative comments and demanded their dismissal.

Well... back to the cauldron for me! Gotta go stir-up lots more "incendiary" comments on sex, religion and politics. There's a lucrative future in it now.

True Confession: I'm totally sucked into Anna Nicole Autopsy Watch. Yeah, so who's the media 'ho now?!

Edwards Campaign Fires Bloggers For... Blogging

Seems some are shocked, just shocked, that bloggers hold strong opinions -- and are fond of expressing them. Of course, our Ministry of Faith and (Religion-based) Values is out there waiting to get you if you dare cross their idea of what "the line" is. And we worry about Sharia law...

As usual, the Daily Kos brings nothing but prattle-babble to the table. (Is it just me, or is that Markos Moulitsas dude the worst political writer ever?)

And Terry Moran, hon, we who often speak-up and out on matters of religious zealotry don't "hate" the sinners who impose their religious beliefs on this nation and throughout our system of government; rather, we hate the sin (of religious imposition, of course).

Quote of the day, from a senior CNN staffer who will remain anonymous: "Things are so bad here (CNN), that I'm now calling for seperation of media and religion."

Meanwhile, back at the Ivy Ranch, Harvard can't get enough of that olde-timey religion. Fine by me. They can have my share. Forty-something years of Christian Fundamentalist-driven culture, etc. is more than my fair share of the burden. I'm tired of the shit. Let someone else deal with it.