Once again, I’m going to post off-topic. I saw part of the filming of Transformers 2! I happened to be hanging out in my parent’s condo in Long Beach this past Wednesday evening and it overlooks the end of the 710 freeway, where the crew was filming some car stunts.  I’m sure post-filming special effects will make this shot even more spectacular, but seeing it live was pretty neat (and by “neat” I mean heart-thumping: it looks like the camera guy nearly got killed, and a 1/4-ton piece of equipment got ejected over the bridge and director’s head to land in the palm trees near the foot of our building. The post-explosion cheering comes from a group of people watching from a nearby parking garage).

Here’s a short video I took with my little Canon Elf.

Live from the Olympics: Pissed-Off-Me.

I love our athletes. They worked hard to qualify for the Olympics, they trained their asses off on the way to Beijing, and they’re giving their hearts and minds and muscles over to winning the games.

But after the race, or meet, or game, every time, they’re dealing with the sharks.

The American media.

Why is the media so hard on the athletes that trained and raced and qualified to be on our American team, but “only” got silver, or bronze, or didn’t get a medal at all? Why does an adult ex-athlete ask another athlete, moments after losing a qualifying match, “do you think this is because you changed coaches last year?” or “Your family has been with you all along. Can you tell us how they felt just now [as we watched you sob into their arms]?” The guy did his best and came up short - often less than 30 seconds ago - and now he’s on international T.V.! Is making him cry into your microphone really that important?

Then to cutaway and see the tremulously toupeed Bob Costas comment “he just dropped an egg in The Bird’s Nest”… ARGH! Give him a freaking break, dude!

Obviously I’m conditioned to political reporting, where the hard questions and mean comments simply never come. Can you imagine any American other than Jon Stewart asking President Bush if he thinks he made the right call on… anything?

Why is it okay to be this harsh with our athletes and not our elected politicians? Can the media get in the game, please?!

I’m about to give a talk on Creating a Web Presence and barely had the presence of mind (ha) to write a post on the subject. Luckily I’m giving the talk with the detail-oriented, brilliant, witty, darling, nose-pierced lovely known as Emma Clair, who would kill me if I didn’t at least write one little post on the subject. Nothing like a healthy fear of death to inspire a late-night blog post.

First off - for those of you who are about to attend, or who have already attended our workshop, the handouts and supplementary materials from the workshop are available over at Emma’s site.

I’m not going to try to recreate our talk in this post, but I’ll say this: you don’t need to know much about the web to have a website, or a blog, or both. You also don’t need more than about $8/year* to have a site of your own. And it’s really, truly, honestly not hard. Go to Wordpress.com** and sign up for a free blog (even if what you really want is a website and not a blog). Once you have your free Wordpress blog, write a few pages; you now have a web site. Write some posts, and you also have a blog. (Don’t want a blog? Don’t write posts.) Choose a Wordpress ‘theme’ and you have a professional design. Write compelling, audience-focused content, and you’ll have an audience!

Yeah, okay, that’s some work, I grant you. But hopefully it’s not too scary. (Secret/not-secret: You can create many Wordpress blogs! for free! if you hate the first one, make a new one. They’re all always free.)

I hope that I get to see some of you tomorrow, and for those who attended the workshop and are reading this post after-the-fact, thank you for coming! I appreciate you taking the time and hope we were of some help.

There, now I can fall asleep without the fear of Emma’s wrath following me into my dreams.

(Who am I kidding? Emma put her stuff up on her site WEEKS ago. She’s wanted to kill me for WEEKS.)

Happy Conference!

* To register your domain name (also known as your “URL” - for example michellemcginnis.com). More details on that over at Emma’s site.

** No, I don’t work for Wordpress. There are other excellent, free blog/site options out there, and we list a few others in our handouts. I’ve just personally used Wordpress the most often, so I feel the most comfortable recommending it.