BLOGGER STORIES!!

Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing runs a really cool blog called Blogger Stories. Each week various bloggers are profiled and allowed to tell their stories. I was fortunate enough to be selected this week, and you guys should go check it out. You can also see the stories of regular Musical Ramblings commenters, like the lovely and talented Ann Handley, and the somewhat less lovely but doggone it we like him anyway Mack Collier.

You guys should go over there and read his site first, but I wanted to post my story here too so you guys can point and laugh at me.

Blogger Stories brings to you the guy who invented podcasting .. J.D. Matthews. But it was J. D.'s American Idol interviews that set his blog buzzing in the blogospshere and out with mentions in USA Today, TV Guide, Reality TV Magazine and more.

Blogger Story Teller: J.D. Matthews, Musical Ramblings

Okay, so Ann Handley invented blogging, but I am here and now claiming podcasting as my invention, thank you very much, Mr. Gore.

I knew I wanted to be a DJ from the EARLY days (Fridays) and I've been performing since I was a zygote. My cousin and I would sit around with a dual tape deck and a microphone, and we'd record our voices making commentary and talking about these "new" songs we'd heard (probably Journey or something current with the 80's) and then we'd play them. I have hours and hours of tapes like that. You don't want to know how many tapes I have of myself as an ACTUAL disc jock. I make narcissism look like bad self-esteem.

Blogger stories... Hmm... let me see. Okay, here goes.

I'm J.D. Matthews, a worn-out disc jock and social worker trying to turn things around and get a job in the journalism field. I write Musical Ramblings more or less every day. It's one of my main passions. It's the first thing I check when I wake up, and the last thing I check before going to sleep. Feel free to email me your shrink's number.

I got into this blogging thing more or less out of curiosity. I have what I like to refer to as "Broadband ADHD" which means that when I go online, I tend to wander around to other sites like a three year old in the Toys R Us, picking up shiny objects, oohing over them, and generally forgetting what it was I was there for in the first place. Nine times out of ten, my original purpose for being online gets accomplished maybe three hours later than I actually started.

So on one of my ADHD trips, I just sort of wondered to myself if I would be a good blogger. I didn't know. I hadn't even really read blogs before. I had heard of them, but I wasn't sure what they were all about. I just knew that I was a voracious writer, but that I was bored with prose, and I wanted a way to just type stuff out in some fashion. I never really pictured it taking off.

Then I hit my first roadblock: I didn't know what websites hosted bloggers. So, on a guess, I typed in www.blogger.com and it led me to sign up, and the rest is pretty much history. (Yes, Blogger sucks. But I still use it. Because, that's why.)

The topic, music and its surrounding periphery, was pretty much a given, since that's the one thing that's a factor in my day-to-day life. I quickly found that the trouble with a set topic is that quite often there is NOTHING to write about on any given day. My first few topics were really crappy, mostly dealing with whether or not Ashlee Simpson was a ho-bag or a review of a craptastic R&B CD.

It was frustrating, because my blog was very quickly going down deep in the bogus bag, and I had a hard time keeping it up. Then I let my topics start wandering all over the place, until I hit a nerve with a blog on a controversial television show. I decided to cross-promote the post by going and posting meaningful and long-winded comments at other blogs and forums and inviting them back to mine. Suddenly, I went from zero or one comment to a whopping twenty.

I learned that community is what it was all about, and like a fungus or a tapeworm, mine slowly and steadily began to grow. I found that, horror of horrors, people actually wanted to read the bull crap that I was writing.

And then came American Idol.

I live-blogged recaps of that show to an ever-growing audience, and this time I took a different approach to increasing my traffic. I took those posts and copied them directly onto the official American Idol boards, the usenet group, and anywhere else I could find. I cultivated a group of (insane) fans there, brought them back, and built my base.

But I'm never content to just do the minimum. So instead of just recapping the shows, I decided to go one step further, bust my butt, get out of my house and actually interview the contestants. Nobody was doing this anywhere in the blogosphere. Suddenly, I was coming up with original content and people were reading voraciously.

I was getting FAN MAIL, for pete's sake. And when I would respond, little girls would be like "OMG, I CAN'T BELEEEEEIVE YOU WROTE BACK!!!" It was insane. And God bless Kellie Pickler, for better or for worse she's been the reason for a lot of it. I'm still waiting on her to tell me whether or not we can go on a date.

And that's where I am today, and despite the unfathomable reality that doing this has failed to bag me one single chick, I will continue to do it until my fingers fall off (which may be next Thursday.) And if it's not possible to continue by typing with my nose, I'll stop. But until then...I press on.

Consider this: I've been blogging only a little over 9 months, and I've already been mentioned in USA Today, TV Guide, Reality TV Magazine, Fox's Reality Remix, the official American Idol website, and various other publications. Why would I stop now?

That's my blogger story. You can all wake up now.