Back in the beginning of this year was my first encounter with Austin, TX and this little music, film and multimedia conference called SXSW. I guess a few people know about it since it’s been around for like 20 years. I’m well past doing a retrospective of it at this point, all but for one major thing. While I was there, I met a bunch of bloggers, mostly thru and ex-Yahoo! named Ernie. He’s this really funny gay Asian blogger @ErnieAtLYD who seems to know everyone. So, I’m hanging out with these bloggers during the interactive part of the conference, and then all of the talks that I sat in on during the music portion of this 11 day trip are all talking about blogging to reach your audience. Well, I’ve never been that great at math but, well, I got it…

So that week, I started a project. Ya see, I’ve actually been blogging for 5 years. In 2004, I hooked up CDBaby and the mp3s were downloadable and all that. I mean, just look at my web site and you’ll see what I mean. That was a lot of grunt work for one person to do. But, the sales sucked because I wasn’t doing any PR.

November came around and I decided to go to this conference called Road Rally. My Mom had been trying to get me to sign up with this service called Taxi which helps musicians and composers get connected with music placement peeps in Film and TV. These people are really hard to get to, believe me. I’ve tried. So, the service costs a chunk of change, and my first CD, “Rhythma” didn’t really have those “hits” on it. It was more for the music person who’s looking for masala instead of cheese. But with “Between the Lines”, I was feeling really confident that maybe I’d get the CD to the right person at the right time, and something unexpected and magical would happen. That didn’t happen, but I’m used to that it wasn’t a big deal. Anyhow, I popped into a talk that this woman Ariel Hyatt was giving. She runs this agency called Cyber PR and helps artists with online representation. I really like listening to her speak. She was really fluid, confident, and excited! She was one of the few things I walked away with from the conference and felt like there was something I needed to pursue.

So, when I got home, I went to her web site and was hunting around and came across this book called Music Success in Nine Weeks. I looked at the contents and thought, yeah yeah, I’ve heard this before, social media is where it’s at, you need to connect with your audience online, flickr, twitter, facebook, myspace… I’ve done all this. My first twitter account is REALLY old… my first post was on Mar. 5th, 2007. In internet years, that’s like 40! And MySpace? How about 2005?! That’s old and gray in internet time, for sure. I’ve gotten luke warm results from MySpace, mainly because I don’t really care for online socializing. I’m in this weird demographic that has the knowledge but would rather be hiking. I mean, really… I’ve been working on the internet for a living since 1996. That’s when I built my first web site for the company I working for, Haptek. I do this stuff all week long. Do I really want to devote MORE time too it to engage people that I can’t even see? I digress… Back to Ariel. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do things that aren’t the most pleasant to get the best results. I understand this. And there was something about the book, and something else about Ariel’s enthusiasm that struck me. Plus, it seemed like, “Hey, I know this stuff. How hard could it be to just dive in and give it a go. So, I bought the book

Now, we’ve nearly finished our journey around the equator and back to my dream blog. Ariel is all about blogging. She’s all about exposing yourself, well, within reason of course, she’s all about getting sh*t done. So, I’ve somehow beaten my nerves into submission, and decided to finish getting my blog online. I went thru 130 dreams and privatized that ones that I don’t want the world to see, and am putting the rest on my sleeve. I’m ready to jump in, eyes open and nose plugged, and see if the world is ready for me, and if I can handle the world’s criticism of my dreams, thoughts, and awkward taste, all with comments turned on!

So, if you’re ready, I’m ready. That’s why this is a big day for me. Strange, that too me, who’s already had a career in movies and television in front of the camera, released two CDs, and played music for the public for some 20 years, this is a bigger deal, for some reason. I guess because there’s no poetry or script to hide behind.

There’ll be three categories for my posts: My Dream Journal, which will be censored to protect the innocent (if there’s anyone left), Life in General, where I’ll share my garden pictures and maybe some tech stuff, and my Rhythma Music blog, which in the next 9 weeks will be getting the most attention. You see, Ariel has started a contest for 3 months of her undivided (well, maybe a little divided) publicity attention. All I have to do is chronicle my experiences with her book in my blog. So, expect that I’ll be doing my first 2 posts this week because I’ve already had the book for 2 weeks. Expect more soon.

And now, I big you adieu. If this were Twitter, they’d hang me.