Here in Katie’s Head

One of the editors at work just offered me the opportunity to introduce Matt Haughey at our National Writers Workshop in a couple of weeks.

Several months ago, when this editor was trying to figure out what speakers to invite to the workshop, he asked me to give him ideas of who might be a good speaker for web-related topics.

I interpreted this as “pick someone from your blogroll who you really, really want to meet.”

I suggested Matt. My editor emailed him. Matt said yes. I said “holy crap.”

(Sidenote: I’d suggest a Metafilter meetup but there are only a tiny handful of members in Wichita. I know I have at least one reader who’s a Mefite. Wanna do something? I’d think a visit from #1 is a worthy occasion.)

Posted: 3:49 pm · Category: Geek · Comments: 1

I officially take back anything disparaging I ever said about Johnson County boys.

That is all.

Posted: 12:09 am · Category: Boys · Comments: 3

You may remember when I joined MySpace and quickly got fed up and deleted my account.

That was back when I lived in a college town where everyone was on Facebook and they all turned up their noses at MySpace. But now I live in Wichita where anyone more than a year older than me is “too old” to have a Facebook account.

A friend at work told me she’d decided to do her blogging on MySpace instead of Blogger. Okay, fine. I give up. I will stop pretending I’m too good for a freaking social networking site.

The worst part? Having to re-add all of my friends, all over again.

So. Wanna add me? Right now I have three friends, and one of them is actually a website that I run.

Posted: 9:47 am · Category: Geek · Comments: 4

Sometimes, if you are very lucky — and I happen to be an exceptionally lucky person, for reasons I may never know — you get exactly what you want.

Let’s say there’s this person who you really want to loathe because this person is kinda perfect or kinda too lucky or kinda making you infinitely jealous. Details are unimportant, but this person drives you crazy for — honestly? — no good reason. And let’s say one Friday night after working a double shift, you hit the favorite bar with a friend or two. And let’s say one of these friends, after drinks and drunken ranting and laughing too loud about things that aren’t that funny, reveals that he or she has a perfectly awesome story about that person, a story that no man has ever heard before. And let’s say that that story is pretty much exactly the just-incriminating-enough type of story that you needed to hear about that loathsome person.

Hearing that story tonight brought joy to my evil, hater heart. I slapped my hand down on the table and laughed an evil cackle of a laugh. And I will probably never share this story with anyone. But I will cherish it in my evil, evil, arbitrary, jealous heart forever.

Posted: 11:14 pm · Category: Misc Friends · Comments: None

So at work today, the boss and I were brainstorming domain names for a project we want to start. It was agreed that the name should both convey something geographic — Wichita, Kansas, south central Kansas, whatever — and something about the content of the site.

We both sat at our computers, plugging ideas into whois.net and finding that, curiously, many of them were already taken by domain squatters.

“Damn, __________.com is already taken!”

“Well…________.com is still available.”

“Yeah, that could work. Maybe.”

Now I’ve been through the name game before. Don’t get me started on my unparalleled working name for what became The Hall Monitor. Upper management is not enamored with my edgy brilliance.

So when I shouted out, “what about Wichitard.com?” I knew it’d get turned down. But we laughed for a while first.

Not long after, we came up with a couple other names that (a) I actually like and (b) might actually fly with the higher-ups, and if you’ve picked up on my characteristic contrariness yet, you could probably guess that those two things often appear mutually exclusive.

And not long after that, wichitard.com was bought, paid for and forwarding back to my blog. And when I told the boss? He was a little disappointed that now he couldn’t go home and register it himself.

The fact that I now have a boss who thinks wichitard.com is as awesome a domain name as I do is a big hint as to why I started really loving my job a couple months ago.

So. Ideas for what I should do with my new awesomely cool domain name?

Posted: 9:29 pm · Category: Work · Comments: 4

Today at work, we started putting some of our videos on YouTube.

Ron Sylvester is our main video guy, and I’m lucky to get to sit right next to him at work. He’s come a long way since his first video last December. I spent a couple years in college teaching kids my age how to do this stuff, and I’m a bit in awe of how quickly and enthusiastically Ron has developed his skills. If the 19-year-olds I taught were this excited to learn new skills, I’d have a lot more faith in the future of mainstream media.

I’m on a zillion mailing lists for various aspects of online journalism (mostly from a newspaper viewpoint). All of us newspapers are tearing our hair out trying to figure out how to do this whole convergence thing. We’re banging our heads against the wall because it’s hard to learn to do video (or Flash or databases, etc.) and teach our collegues to do the same, and our early attempts never get many page views, and then we’re worried that maybe we shouldn’t waste our time if our viewers aren’t interested in our videos.

I’m the middleman in all of this. I don’t shoot the video, I don’t edit it. I play armchair director when Ron calls me over to assess his latest work before he exports it. Then I upload it. Then someone else watches and obsesses and analyzes the traffic it gets. So I can’t claim much credit for any of it. (I made the watermark, though! And the chyron templates, although I’m loving them less as time passes.)

It’s going to be a little while before we’ve got the kind of video offerings that will genuinely drive traffic, but and it’ll be nice to look back in another year at the frustrations we put ourselves through to get such amateur little videos online. But right now? It’s pretty fun to throw things at the wall and watch to see what sticks. It’s even more fun when something actually sticks.

Posted: 9:28 pm · Category: Interactive, Work · Comments: None

I have been challenged.

j.d. has written about how his readership is generally more liberal than he is. Apparently he thinks we’re reading because of all his political posts. Ha! I’m in it for the hat.

Posted: 10:35 pm · Category: Flair · Comments: 1