Interview with blogger East Village Idiot (Part 5 of 5)

Quest: So you work in advertising. Do you think the industry affects your sense of humor or perhaps what you blog about?

Chris: I think it restricts what I blog about. I don't specifically blog about what I do. I don't write too much about my worklife. The people I work with know I have a blog and some of them read my blog. I don't want to impose on them, or paint a bad image of myself or my company on my blog.

Quest: What about industry specific? Blogging about the advertising industry?

Chris: I ranted a few weeks ago about an ad that's actually made for one of the clients at our firm. We didn't create the ad. I won't point it out. I don't know if I really should really say this. But I had to say something about it because it was driving me nuts. I take a laymen's perspective of advertising on my blog. I don't necessarily utilize the fact that I have experience in the industry. I'll leave that to the professionals. Like, have you ever read Copyranter?

Quest: Copyranter? No, but I have see ad...ad....?

Chris: AdRants? There's a site called Adrants. The Copyranter--I wouldn't say he's grizzled, but he's definitely a disgruntled copywriter who rants about some of the crap that he sees in advertising. And occasionally stuff he likes, but mostly its stuff he hates.

Quest: What about the AMC original series, Mad Men?

Chris: Oh, I love that show!

Quest: Never seen it. I've only seen the advertisements!

Chris: It's hilarious because it's not too far-fetched to think that the Ad Industry was totally full of sexual harassment and blatantly out in the open at that time. When I was in school, we reading about advertising ---learning about advertising--we read books about what the ad industry was like in the 60s. Doing Liquid lunches. Smoke in your office.
Although I did have one co-worker who smoked in her office.

Quest: Liquid lunches?

Chris: Drinking on the job.

Quest: When did the blogging bug bite? When you came back from Vermont?

Chris: I was blogging while I was still up there. But the purpose was not to blog obsessively. I think it was when I got that first wave of attention--it was like, "BoOM, wow, this is kinda fun. Maybe I should do this more often." That was about a year and a half ago. It just took off from there. I think that was about the time I started posting every single day. And then it became multiple times a day. Usually, I try for twice a day.

Quest: What about weekends?

Chris: Weekends I take off. No one reads on the weekends! I'm serious. If you look at my traffic, there's a little dip every weekend--Saturday and Sunday. I've probably done myself a disservice by not posting anything on weekends. Because even if they are online over the weekend, they probably think, "Oh, he doesn't post anything new." Like I said, I write on the weekends. I store material for the week ahead. I don't post on weekends. Weekends are my down time.I don't need to be obsessed with my blog on weekends. During the week, I'll check my time, statistics. I'll check my email like four or five times a day.

Quest: Why did you start?

Chris: I started to keep my friends updated on what's going on in my life. It was a fluke that it took off and became anything other than that. If you look back at my archives, to the very beginning. It was stuff like, "I went out with my friends for a mutual friend's birthday. Here are some pictures of us falling over."

There were actually very few pictures of me on my blog. The one's that I do have are hard to find. I was never someone who has wanted to be stopped on the street. That hasn't happened although I have run into a fan by accident. And this kind of freaked me out.

I got invited to this party associated with this website. Most of the people who were there were users of the site. I hadn't used the site, but they tried to get me to use the site. So I was sitting around with a bunch of people who were users of the site.

So they said to me, "Why are you here?"

I responded, "I write a blog."

"Oh really? What blog do you writer?"

"The East Village Idiot."

And right after I said that, this one guy at the table jumped out of his seat. "OMG! You're the East Village Idiot!?! I read your blog everyday."

I was like, "Whoa!" That was the moment when I realized that maybe this is something bigger than I thought.


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