Digital Multimedia Platforms / Spirit of Place

Day #3 at the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston and the StrangeTango.com launch. I've been attending the panels on digital multimedia platforms and social media and technology. There is so much valuable take-away information that I will write the recap, in my signature thorough and engaging style, this weekend.

I do see the imprint of Sangita Chandra, convention co-chair, in the thoughtful offerings. Sangita, along with longtime AAJA/New England treasurer, Dolores Kong, has been involved with StrangeTango.com from the website's planning stage a year ago to its debut this week. With both the convention and the personal website, Sangita brings the qualities of refinement, perfectionism, and professionalism to everything in her purview. We first met as Hearst-Argyle Fellows at WCVB-TV 5 in Boston more than a decade ago. A mentor, then the director of community relations at the station, had encouraged me to introduce myself to Sangita, the fellow from two years previously. Sangita recently won her first Emmy Award!

At one of the panels where I was passing out my business card, I was thrilled to learn that a person sitting next to me, an Assistant Managing Editor at the Los Angeles Times, had first heard about StrangeTango.com through a Facebook post a week ago from a mutual friend in San Francisco. Rene Astudillo had sent out a post urging his Facebook friends to bookmark StrangeTango.com. People are sometimes incredulous that I write my essays, commentary, and observations from my home office in southwest Oklahoma. The internet makes our world so much smaller.

In fact, my collaborators--Raphael, Marlee, Brian, Chris, and Daniel--and I worked on the website through email and Facebook. We're based in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Virginia, and Oklahoma. We had no budget, and we're not monetized, so the project was pretty much done pro bono. We're sharing StrangeTango.com with the world as a labor of love and a platform for original and passionate creativity. As the website becomes established, I hope to showcase emerging talent and new ideas on this platform. About 75% of my family and friends in the real world do not use Facebook or Twitter, so the website is also a way for them to stay connected with me without being a part of Facebook's grand social experiment.

On the website, the Millennium Muse chapter is scheduled to open in Autumn 2009. We wanted to give our visitors something new and fresh to look forward to in the next few months. Muse is also a major project in and of itself. It will feature New Age Traveler, a chapter from the manuscript, which details my travels on 35 countries and 5 continents. Our visitors will authentically experience the spirit of place through my eyes in image and documentation. Dan Brunelle, our music virtuoso/visionary, will compose the original music score and design through special computer software that will provide a unique experience for each visitor.

Our challenge was to merge both iconic style and content in a technologically sophisticated way. Well, I did flatly declare up front our ambition: there is nothing on the web like StrangeTango.com.