NYC blogger summit: smell the glove

Okay, I’ll be a bit more blunt than Gabriel was: The upshot of this event, the reason NBC gathered together around 130 NYC-area bloggers is because they would like us to bend over, take it up the ass from them, and then say Please, sir, may I have another? NBC expects us bloggers to share our content with them in exchange for “credit” -- that is, a link on WNBC’s own site, which they admit gets no traffic. See, we’ll be delighted to get “respect” from the “MSM,” because that’s all we crave -- we’re all such starfuckers that a link on WNBC’s site will be a thrill. Though of course we were already sexed up by the shrimp they fed us, and also by the fact that we got to sit in Conan O’Brien’s studio -- at that point, we were all so worn out from multiple orgasms that linkage would just be like NBC cuddling with us in the afterglow, asking us about our feelings, and getting up to make us a sandwich at 2am.

I’m not sure which was more breathtaking: the condescension roiling off the NBCers, or the pants-wetting fear. They were all so freakin’ terrified of the Internets and we pajama-wearin’ bloggers who have crashed the information party that they were practically shaking, and yet their utter cluelessness about the Internet itself was hilarious. One VP of Thinking Like Your Grandparents took the mike to inform us, as if he were handing down the 10 commandments, that, my god, the fastest growing segment of online users is over 35... at which point all of us over-35 bloggers, which was most of the room, started wondering whether this was supposed to be more flattery, if of the dense variety. But no: I think this was a symptom of how NBC thinks the Internet consists entirely of teenagers downloading songs for their iPods and getting hassled by perverts on MySpace.

Listen to this. This is Sree Sreenivasan, who is WNBC’s tech guru, and also the dean of something or other at the Columbia School of Journalism -- he hosted the evening with a kind of breathless obliviousness:

Once you have been reading blogs for a while, you can even start your own if you wish. All you need is to be passionate about a topic. The only technological knowledge you need is the ability to word process. I tell folks: "If you can do e-mail, you can blog."

This is from his Advice on Blogs. C’mon: it makes you want to kill yourself, doesn’t it? Sree also believes that “it's easy to be dismissive about blogs and bloggers.” I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a part of an organization whose "tech guru" says crap like this? And it’s totally easy to see how seriously funky shit like Fourfour or Manhattan Offender -- whose proprietors were at the summit -- would blend right into the hip, happenin’ vibe of WNBC, where one of the top stories at the moment is “Gasoline Spill Sparks Massive Fire In L.I.”... and that really is what the story’s about.

Still, I did get to hang out with my old friend Jill Cozzi of Brilliant at Breakfast, and my new blogging friends Melina Brown of RIPcoco.com, Dean Kaflowitz of Blue Jersey, and Benjamin Kabak of my favorite new blog discovery, 2nd Ave Sagas, which is about subway matters, particularly the legendarily delayed Second Avenue subway (hint to non New Yorkers: there isn’t a subway on Second Avenue, though it’s been promised for something like 80 years).

And hey! I got a hat! And I might, unlike Gabriel, actually wear it!

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