Folk media

I spent last week in the mountains of North Carolina hanging out with a bunch of fiddlers. I listened to them stroke out Unbroken Circle, Angelina Baker, Amazing Grace, Ashoken Farewell, Soldier’s Joy, Lover’s Waltz and dozens more. Hour after hour, day after day.

As they have for generations, fiddlers threw their scrolls together and compared notes. Youngsters leaned in as old-timers demonstrated new tricks. All were giving voice to a conversation that stretched back across generations. Pulled across the loom of time by horse-haired bows, harmonies and counterpoints wove into a communal cloth.

Though I do my best while on vacation to not think about blogging, one evening by the campfire I was gob-struck by the idea that, if anything, blogging is a folk art.

Authentic, passionate, passed-from-person-to-person, idiomatic, bloggers spins stories that weave their passions together. Bloggers create a space around the campfire and make our lives a little warmer and more livable.

So I say screw the idea that blogs (and IM and forums and podcasting)are “user-generated content” or “citizens’ journalism” or “community media” or “p2p publishing” or “hive broadcasting.” And screw me for sometimes using those cruddy phrases! They are all way too geeky, clinical and/or faux academic, a clumsy plow to tart up the newest American folk art.

Why make this my first post in this community of marketers? Well, I need to jam out my first post. And I want to reinforce Brian Clark’s great preaching about the power of blogads. And I also need to remind myself and you folk what the hell we’re all doing. We’re having fun and jamming and, we hope, earning enough to buy a new fiddle occassionally.

So screw publishing.

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