one sharp broad sex & geekery

I am in it to win it with you, SXSW.

A number of you have been clicking through because of my SXSW panel submission on “Growing Up An Internet Oversharer”. This is a topic that is super close to my heart, as I have spent the last 11 years blogging in some fashion, starting when I was 15 and coded my very own HTML pages (in Notepad. If you used Homesite, you were such a loser) and being an online journallist made me a much better writer and literally incapable of not sharing anything with strangers on a screen.

In the last few years, blogging has become a totally legitimate past time and people who didn’t understand my compulsion to document my life online are now sharing the minutiae with the best of them through Yelp reviews, Myspace blogs, Flickr and Facebook. Furthermore, it’s become professional, hell even I get paid to “blog” on a tech blog and my posts get edited now, we have style guides for this thing we used to do on the fly.

The point of my panel is why did we do it back then before it had a name, and why it never became a real thing people discussed until dudes started doing it. I have a few potential panelists that I’ll be announcing hopefully very soon but they are all people who have documented their adolescence online before it was the cool thing to do.  I think the panel will be lively, fun and hopefully include some mortifying reading of our old archives.

This particular blog you are reading is only a year old, but I have had so many! Over the course of the next few weeks, while voting is happening, I plan on linking to some old entries, ugly HTML, typing errors and all, in the spirit of my panel.

Who am I? I am Maria Diaz and I am a freelance writer. I do other things on the Internet, but primarily I like to write. I grew up in New York, am a 6 year San Francisco resident, and went to Oberlin College where I majored in drinking beer, English and Creative Writing.

Any questions or if you know anyone who’d be good for the panel or any ideas at all please email me at maria@onesharpbroad.com

Thanks!


2 Comments

Yes! I think we may have very similar backgrounds with the internet. HTML in notepad (which I still do, eek!) & internet friends as long as I can remember, back in the days of angelfire & geocities webpages!

Posted by Melisser on 12 August 2008 @ 3pm

Hey sweets, I’m a total blog/tech neophyte, I know nothing, but I *am* a writer, and was writing for a while through traditional tangible methods before blogging. The reason I started blogging was because there were more personal things, things I didn’t want to necessarily go through with an editor, and more sexual, pervy, obstacle-esque things that were therapeutic for me to kinda work through. And its been great. I dunno if that’s what you’re looking for, but this will be my first SXSW; why not do a panel? Hit me up if you’re interested. I kinda am. ;)

Posted by Derrick on 25 August 2008 @ 8pm

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Save it till the morning after putting my money where my effing mouth is