Who Loves You, Baby?

Last night I spent a couple of hours at Beer and Blog, a weekly get-together for those of us in Portland, Oregon. The premise: Bloggers helping bloggers over beer. We usually meet at the Green Dragon (who love us). Sometimes we work together, and sometimes there is a specific (and tasty) topic of discussion. Suffice to say, it's a popular event among local bloggers, and when you have a popular local blogger/author/startup entrepreneur leading the discussion you can be sure lots of people will show up.

Melissa Lion, author of Swollen and Upstream (which has been optioned for a movie, whoo-hoo!), book critic, creative writing teacher, Recovering Californian, and one of the brains behind the delicious storytelling startup Back Fence PDX, talked to a very crowded room about narratives techniques in blogs. Any blog. Now, Beer and Blog is an eclectic group of creatives, techies, ad peeps, and the in-between (that's me). A lot of us are on twitter. (You've heard of twitter.com, right?) We're a nice cross-section of the kind of professionals that Portland attracts. And, unlike other West Coast tech-focused cities (*cough*San Fransisco*cough*Seattle*) we adore tooting each other's horns. Loudly. (Kinda like I'm doing now.)

When I began tweeting last year I didn't really "get it." You know this story: I heard about it, was intrigued, signed up, but initially didn't see the value of sharing the events of my mundane life. The fact that I got bacon juice on my new Victoria Secret ass-enhancing slacks or that my green pepper plant had finally sprouted a pepper, only to be devoured by some bug, seemed trivial. Then suddenly people started to reply to my tweets. And following me. Some of the earliest followers of mediaChick were Rick Turoczy, Melissa Lion and Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web. (I've never seen Marshall at a Beer and Blog; I'm mentioning him in this post because he is awesome and a poster child for the Portland way of being both uber talented and so generous with his knowledge of geeky things. Seriously, go read his bloggie.)

So, I checked out Rick and Melissa and Marshall and slowly it dawned on me that I had been blessed with an audience of people who rawked it. Hard. And lived HERE. I had these insane thoughts like "Wouldn't it be cool if I met Rick and he wanted me to guest blog on his brilliant blog Silicon Florist?" (I swear I'm half done with it, Rick!) And, "Dang, it would blow my mind if Melissa published!" (She did, on Back Fence PDX!) You see where I'm going with this? Eventually I caught the attention of Miss Burrows and Cami Kaos and Banana Lee Fishbones and a huge number of local folks who let little ol' me sit at the cool kids table. Every week I meet more talented, funny, helpful, encouraging folks. (See us ladies huddled around Rick? Left to right: mediaChick, Rick, Miss Burrows, Cami Kaos and Banana Lee Fishbones. Lots of love there!)

Many of my tweeties showed up to hear Melissa at Beer and Blog explain that blog narrative is important, no matter what you write about. She talked about plot arcs and characters and why linking to and commenting on other blogs is super important. She also said "the best blogs update every day."(I'm pretty sure she was looking at me when she said that. Ahem.) I'm reluctant to show favoritism, but damn if this Beer and Blog wasn't the best one yet.

Bravo, and thank you to all the participants of Beer and Blog. Justin Kistner, the man behind the curtain, should be immortalized somehow for his tenacity in pulling this off weekly. I met a lot of new tweeties that I've had my eye on for some time. I look forward to seeing them again and talking blogs over beer. And we can't forget: this kind of collaborative love fest wouldn't work well in any other city. Portland, me loves you!

(By the way, thanks also to those "get well soon" messages. Recently I've had some asthma flair ups and I almost didn't make it to Beer and Blog. Also, thanks for not staring when I puffed away at my inhaler. Sooo not sexy! Also, sorry if I've offended anyone from San Francisco or Seattle. Just a little barb for laughs!)

Let's go steady!