Lisa Vandever, Co-Founder & Director of the Cinekink film series, blogs at CineKinkster.
When did you start blogging?
I started a personal blog about a year-and-a-half ago, right before I got married, to serve as a virtual scrap-book and touch upon on everything that was going on at the time. I launched the official CineKink blog late last summer, just as we were beginning to gear up for our annual film festival. I’d been kicking the idea around for awhile, then got the final nudge when I was asked to guest blog about my CineKink experiences over at The Reeler, an NYC film blog. That became the subject of my first post as “CineKinkster.â€
What do you like about blogging?
In theory, I’d say the immediacy of it – “in theory†because I often find myself being as editorially compulsive as I do when writing for other media. (See, I just went back and tweaked the preceding sentence twice. And it’s still not right!) But it is really gratifying to have a thought, put it into words and toss it out into the world within the next few moments. (Or next few hours, depending on how compulsive I’m feeling and how many links I’m referencing.)
In terms of CineKink, I also love having the extra space to touch upon things that might be a little unwieldy for our regular email updates, or that aren’t directly related to our programming but might be of interest to our audience, generally anything at the intersection of sex and film/television.
Is blogging a major or minor way of connecting to other people for you?
My personal blog, which is on LiveJournal, has definitely become a way for me to feel connected. Since I don’t work in a bustling office, my “friends list†serves as my water cooler, where I can check in for a bit of contact and gossip. Then post my own occasional tidbit and compulsively hit refresh until I get at least a comment or two.
The CineKink blog is much less interactive and feels more like me pushing information out into the black void. That might partly be a result of the CineKinkster voice, a kind of royal “we†that I co-opted from Defamer and such. It’s fun for the most part, especially if I’m feeling light and snarky, but it doesn’t generally inspire conversation. The only time I’ve ever sparked a number of comments was when I (we?) posted about Ann Coulter and her dominatrix-y ways.
Where’s your blog? Do you use a free hosted service (Blogger, WordPress, Livejournal, AOL, Google Pages, etc.) or do you have your own domain and web server?
CineKinkster is through Blogger, though it’s actually hosted on the CineKink domain and server. I chose it because it seemed geared towards a relatively low level of technical competence (i.e. me). It was a breeze to set up and has been absolutely great so far, but I do keep separate archives of all of my posts, just in case.
What do you do to promote your blog or your writing (using tags in your post, blog roll, del.icio.us , Digg, Pingoat)?
Now that Blogger enables them, I’ve recently started adding tags, though I still need to add them to my archives. I use Feedburner to make the blog available in basically any subscription format. I run a CineKink community on LiveJournal, then post back from there to CineKinkster to up my Technorati links. I submit to various blog carnivals whenever I have a relevant post (yay, Viviane’s Sex Carnival!). I push links to the CineKink page on MySpace and include them wherever I can in our email updates.
Mostly, though, I’m still just getting up to speed on much of this – and look forward to your workshop for help in sussing it all out. That, along with – what’s it called – how to “monetize�
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