The Inaugural Shred Blog Summit
This was the moment in the party where I thought, no one is going to come and I am going to have to drink 60 beers by myself. Photo: Jared Souney
In 1997 it wasn’t OK to meet people on the Internet, especially not as a 15-year-old girl. But despite all the creepy pedophiles surely lurking in AOL chat rooms, I managed to meet several people who I am still in touch with to this day. One of them was Lee Crane, who at that time was working at an early online media source essentially doomed to fail (at that point mostly because other than pedophiles, no one had computers.) Part of this venture was Snowboarding Online, which is where I spent my allotted internet time each day — talking shit and bragging about my sweet Original Sin sponsorship. I also met Rachel, who was my original partner in crime at YoBeat, and because of YoBeat, Lee took notice and soon hired me to cover some east coast events, essentially starting my career as an extreme journalist. It was that easy.
Fast forward to 2010. Things are a bit different, as between facebook, myspace, twitter, electronic dating sites, craigslist, etc etc etc, “the Internet” is is a completely normal and acceptable place to meet new people. With so many blogs, it can be hard to stand out in the over-crowded landscape of the world wide web, and no one is really hiring anymore anyway. But at least everyone has a computer. When people ask me for advice on how to “make it” in this day in age, well, the only answer I have is do it. Maybe it will work out. And after spending two days at SIA talking to brands, it’s become abundantly clear, media has definitely changed. The old model of big business publications is dead and the era of the independent media is here.
Danger! Lee Crane, Nick Lipton, Josh Parker and Nick Visconti. Photo: Jared Souney
In the snowboard world, there are several great blogs, several mediocre blogs, and tons of crap. I spend a good portion of my day checking them all out, and I’m always curious to meet the people behind them. It also seems to me that with so many blogs, trying to compete with each other is almost pointless. We all have our own audiences and our own ideas. Which is why the idea of hosting a blogger summit came up.
Lee and I decided it was time to get everyone together and talk. Nothing else. No ulterior motives, no super exclusive invite list, just an email to everyone with a blog or site, that we wanted to meet and/or thought would have something to add. The Shred Blog Summit was born, and took place on Saturday, January 30, 2010 in a desolate conference room in the annals of the Colorado Convention Center. In attendance were bloggers, filmers and weblebrities including tahoedangerzone.com, easyloungin.com, rumorator.com, powderroom.net, boardistan.com, brobomb.com, angrysnowboarder.com, Fuel.tv, and of course, Yobeat.com. We had one guest rider in the form of Billy Mackey, one girlfriend, 60 PBR’s, and it seems there may have been some pot cookies in attendance as well.
We each told our stories, our numbers, and our goals, and realized the one thing we all seemed to share was a desire to do what we wanted to do, because we wanted to do it. Beyond that though, the goals for each site were different — drive business to a shop, promote sponsors, or just to say fuck you to the haters. After two hours of talking, I feel like I came away with a better understanding of what everyone was doing, laughed a lot, and learned something from everyone there. We didn’t come up with a surefire path to Internet success, but I felt it was valuable and not NEARLY as nerdy as I expected it to be (thanks mostly to the Tahoe contingent.) I’m going to call the summit a success, and I’d just like to say thanks again to everyone who came. Hopefully we’ll do it again next year with a new crop of bloggers there too. And maybe by then we’ll all be rich! (jk, lol)
Blogging is serious business.