I attended my first blogger meeting, or convention, or seminar, or whatever you want to call it. Officially, it was the American Cinema Foundation's Web Logs: Technology and Freedom in the 21st Century, held at the A.F.I. school in the Hollywood Hills. The seminar itself was pretty dull, with bloggers ranging from the right-of-center to the far right, and only Matt Welch standing up for the rest of the human race. The most interesting panelists, Emmanuelle Richard and Heather Havrilesky, discussed their largely non-political blogs, giving a good sense of where this technology might actually be heading, particularly the vast artistic potential of this new medium.

The exciting news, for me at least, concerns the new L.A. Examiner, which its publisher, Ken Layne, assured me will be available at your nearest bar or convenience store in June. The prototype brought to the seminar looks to be a combination of the late New Times, the National sports paper from the early 90's, and your typical tabloid weekly. The backgrounds of Messrs. Layne and Welch give me hope that their new venture will go beyond the stale, cliched format of other newspapers and tabloids and provide some interactivity between publisher, writer, and reader via the Internet. Anyways, check for it sometime around the start of the NBA championships.

Afterwards, all of us (panelists and audience) got together and shared a single bottle of wine, reinforcing my belief that journalists are congenitally incapable of throwing a good party. Still, I had a good time, met some of the most decent people in town, and was able to get a number of right-of-center sites for my blogroll. As a favor to me, check out the site for Howard Owens; not knowing me from Adam, he offered me a ride back to the subway stop at Hollywood and Western around 11 p.m. last night, enabling me to avoid walking through a rather nasty four-block section of Los Angeles in the process.