Vilnius Media Seminar

Do It Yourself media in internet for off-line campaigns

Topics of “Samizdat” is very common again. Samizdat war born during the “cold war” as practice of intellectual opposition for ideological mainstream in Soviet Union. Now, when we use not only have sometimes access, but own copy machines, personal computers, printers, scanners, internet communication etc., is difficult to understand how people was able to make “books” and “magazines” only with typewriter. But they did it! 

In begin of twenty first century is possible to hear about intellectual or cultural alternative only in traditional form of samizdat, by production Text (with big fist letter), text on papers for slowly reading. This way of interpretation of modern culture is very, even extremely traditional and pretend to recognize only high or elite culture. But this form of culture didn’t recognize media culture as culture at all. Because, clips and blogs, comics and stickers are not acceptable for high culture.

In my presentation I try to give some example of convergence of traditional and new media. Traditional media, especially printed media, has a big trouble with fixed text. I can say that they just suck with their own non-hypertext structures. And all printed media came always to late. They just print instead news some common things and article which pretend to be much more analytical then they can. And blogs are not the same ting like samizdat magazine. Bloging give for activists much more possibilities then blank paper’s page.

In my presentation I will try to present some answers on next two questions:

1. Why stand alone blog is better for supporting a media off-line campaign?

2. How we can make alive text on papers? Or how we can write more on small paper?

1. Why stand alone blog is better for supporting a media off-line campaign?

It is better than different blog servises like livejournal.com or blogspot.com via folowing reason:

• Nobody can not delete or block your account
• You have full control on you site, design, adds
• You can use you own URL as OpenID for authorising in livejournal.com or blogspot.com. Even if you have not an account in this networks.
• For each big project or event you should create own site (blog). And very quickly you will have small ring of site. So you can fill yourself as “Lord of the ring”. It’s very good source for promotion you next projects.

2. How we can make alive text on papers? Or how we can write more on small paper?

Printing now is not cheap. It’s OK when you need 100 pages. But when you need some thousand? I this case you can use next strategy.

It’s a game in two levels. On first, you should to build independent website on your own domain name with full (more that 100%) information about coming event. And try to promote this site in google or other search engine with some keywords. After two or three monthes you can check the result. Just “googling” in google your keywords. When you will have like and some of your keyword are in firs ten, you can make second step.

For example, you can check in google mediabarcamp:

On second level, you prepare and print small outlets or papers, but type in bold charset some keywords which correlete with you site in google search result. And in bottom of outlets you should write something like: “for more information just google words typed blod”.

That’s all. And it google will help to you.