The Buzz Bin

The Buzz Bin decided to turn the tables on interviewer-extraordinare Jonny Goldstein. Jonny is a well-known local social media expert, internet media personality, communicator, and teaching artist. He is also the executive producer and host of Jonny’s Par-tay with technical director Scott Stead.

Jonny’s Par-tay features people who do interesting work at the intersection of politics, culture, commerce, and social media. Jonny is passionate about cultivating creative communities on and offline. He currently combines community creativity and online contests to build brand image and awareness.

Here is one of Jonny’s award-winning winning haikus: cherry bloom pollen/gametes lewd spewn DNA/coats, clogs, your nostrils.

(Picture Credit: Carl Weaver)

BB: How did you come up with the idea for Jonny’s Par-tay?

JG:

Short answer:
I do the show, because technology has gotten to the point where I can. Why the name "Jonny’s Par-tay"? I liked the metaphor of a party. It’s not just a talk show; it’s a whole group of people who get together. There may be a guest of honor, and a host, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be all kinds of interesting conversation between everyone, including the audience.

I am a curious person who likes to ask people questions. I also like to express myself in a multidisciplinary fashion (live performance, writing, collage, drawing, music, etc.). I’m always looking for ways to tie these interests together. I also am fascinated by the way communication technology is evolving. A talk show on the internet seemed like a natural way to let me indulge all these interests.

Long answer:
I’ve enjoyed interviewing people for as long as I could remember. I think having someone ask you questions about yourself is very fulfilling–face it, folks pay huge sums of money per hour to have people ask them questions about themselves. The recipients of that money are called "therapists."

I have actually done some of that therapeutic interviewing in the past as a crisis hotline volunteer. The basic protocol would be to get callers to open up and talk about what was on their mind. And it worked. I had people who were ready to kill themselves at the beginning of a phone call, who by the end had made a plan with me to keep living. Just because someone was interested in their story. It’s a basic human desire to be understood and listened to. I like helping people fulfill that desire.

I also enjoy learning from people. I believe that everyone is interesting. We’re all so complex and have so many layers of experience. I think that’s what makes me a good interviewer. People sense that I actually care about what they have to say, so they open up.

Specifically with Jonny’s Par-tay, it’s the 4th talk show I have done in the last several years. I did a web radio show while at NYU called "Jonathan’s Throbbing Boil." That was from the lobby of the Interactive Telecommunications Program where I was getting my master’s degree. I would just grab random passersby and starting interviewing them. It became a mini-hit among my fellow students.

Then I did a show on Manhattan cable access called "Off, Off, Off, Vegas," which evolved from a talk show I did at Burning Man in the Nevada desert. It was fun having the Manhattan cable audience as viewers. I had a phone line people could call in on. You’d get stoned kids from Harlem calling in, shut-ins from the Upper East Side. It was pretty awesome.

The third show was called Reinventing Television. I had just moved to DC to join my wife who is studying at the University of Maryland. This great guy in Seattle, Peter Raulerson, had the idea of using a live web video proprietary service to do webinars teaching photography and digital video.

The classes did not take off, and Peter said, hey, why don’t we try to do an online talk show? So he paid me to produce a weekly talk show about the rapidly changing world of video communications. We had guests like Zadi Diaz from EPIC-FU and Daniel McVicar who is a star in "The Bold and the Beautiful" and who also does great DIY online video stuff. After the show had run a few months, we were having a great time, but it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to monetize it any sustainable way anytime soon, so we wrapped it up.

So I got a job here in DC helping a nonprofit with their new media communications efforts. At the same time, all these free live streaming video services were springing up like Operator11 and Ustream. So I started playing around with them–streaming from my apartment and chatting with people, riffing off the top of my head.
Then midsummer last year, I was like, hmmm…I could do a talk show with one of these free services. There was a service called Operator11 that I liked. It worked kind of like CB radio—you would toss the video back and forth. So I started doing Jonny’s Par-tay.

I am interested in the social media world. I have blogged since 2003 and I was immersed in the early videoblogging movement, so naturally, the first guests I had came from that world. Also, I needed people who were at least somewhat comfortable with computers–Social media people, online video people, and such folks, were going to have some comfort level with getting the needed tech stuff to work well enough for them to be able to participate in the show. It made sense for that subset of people to be guests just because they would be able to jump the necessary tech hurdles.

About six months into doing the show, this guy Scott Stead, approached me and said he’d be interested in helping me with the show. He’s an engineer at CNN by day. He’s also an extremely, funny, expressive, talented guy who was aching for some kind of creative outlet. So he started running the tech during the show and then stepped up to help with some of the production and promotion. He also started chiming in live during the show.

It’s been great having someone to collaborate with. Scott has become a real friend too, which is, as they say in the marketing world, a special value added bonus.

BB: What has been your most popular interview to date? Why?

JG: I’d say it was Rana Sobhany. I think her segment was popular for four major reasons: three great, and one kind of not-so-great.

1. The topic was interesting and useful. She was there to help people how to figure out their brand and to get that brand out there. That is very beneficial for people, so naturally, it was a popular segment.
2. Rana participates actively in social media and knows tons of people. She got the word out effectively and people responded by watching the show.
3. Rana is a very lively, engaging, and knowledgeable guest
4. Here’s the icky part. We were using blogTV at the time. blogTV has a lot of users who are there to just to ogle women. We were featured on the front page of blogTV and a my guess is bunch of those folks came by to ogle. Not that we were doing anything very ogle-worthy, but still, having an attractive woman on blogTV attracts a bunch of these knuckle draggers. We’ve since switched to mogulus.com, which seems to have less of that crowd. Putting that to the side, Rana is a fabulous guest and we look forward to getting her back on.

BB: Tell us more about the Haiku project with Utterz. What inspired it?

JG: I am always looking for ways to combine things in new ways. In this case it was poetry, community, and mobile phone multimedia web publishing.

I grew up around poetry. My Mom is a published poet, and I have dabbled in poetry from time to time. Back in January, I was feeling an itch to start exercising the poetic part of my brain. I had also started using Utterz, which is a service that easily lets you record audio from your phone to the web. I have this kind of art teacher part of me that likes to encourage other people to create expressive work and share it.

So the idea came to me that I would do a haiku a day during the month of February and see if I could get other people to also write original haikus and record them using Utterz. It turned out great. People from all over North America submitted poems, some of them surprisingly evocative. I particularly loved Shashi Bellamkonda’s poem about Valentine’s Day, and Julia Roy’s poem about a guy who had badmouthed her.

A random outcome of the project is that I was discovered by a reporter for the DC City Paper who recruited me for their first annual haiku contest, which I ended up winning. Maybe I should go hit the pro haiku circuit.

BB: Where do you see technology for Web 2.0 and social media types headed? Audio, video, both?

JG: It’s going to keep getting easier and easier to record and share audio, video, and text with your "friends." Different people will have their different preferences and aptitudes. Some people will want to stick to print. They just aren’t into putting themselves out there via spoken or video communication. Some people have a hard time writing but are great at spoken or visual communication. Some people are comfortable with all three. But it will all get easier.

I think anyone who really wants to stretch her thinking about communications should read The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. He projects what life might be like if information technology keeps exponentially improving. Whether you buy his premise that we are going to create fully intelligent, spiritual, creative, machines or not, if you read the book, I think you will be psychologically prepared for how much things might change in the next 20 years. We’re just at the beginning.

…to be continued…