Sex @ SXSWi Interview #1 is Maria Diaz.  Maria is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. She writes for bitchbuzz and is a television writer for b5media. Most of her blogging is currently confined to Tumblr. Here she gets into her panel, “A History of Growing Up Online,” so it is not oversharing to tell you that it used to be “Growing Up As An Internet Oversharer.”

MGG: Who were the real early adopters of blogging, that we never hear about?

Maria Diaz: This is a difficult question to answer because back then the Internet just felt so much more disconnected than it is now — there weren’t these big central meeting places like Twitter or Facebook, and we all had our own little cliques and you really had to work to find people. That’s what was so exciting. You never knew who’s life you were going to get sucked into. There was diarist.net (which is now sadly, just a link farm) and that was the only real attempt to get everyone listed in a central place.

But for names, I’m going to say the people on my panel, naturally. Sarah Wulfeck, who used to go by Puce totally transformed herself her very simple site into a community site with a message board and her cam. I think it’d be almost impossible to have a site like that now. I can’t even imagine how corporate and branded it would be. Elly Millican, who went on to be a Suicide Girl and is still blogging in an old school non-Tumblr/microblog fashion, was another woman who put a lot of herself out there.

And we can’t forget all the people on webrings and of course all the domains we bought and the drama of being “hosted”. There were so many young girls who were teaching themselves web design, how to make their own sites, how to manage their online identies and so much of it was never taken seriously because we were talking about our own lives and not you know, politics or gadgets.

I think also from a different standpoint that you must give props to Diaryland and LiveJournal — they really paved the way for the kind of blogging we can do now that is so easy. Remember all that copying and pasting we used to have to do in Notepad?

MGG: What have we lost as blogging has become less about those practices from the late 90’s and early 00’s and more about — well, god, SEO and other tacky acts of “personal branding”?

Maria Diaz: I think we’ve lost the sense that we can just talk about ourselves without much of an agenda. The only reason I started keeping an online journal was because I wanted to have my own website and I didn’t know what else I wanted to talk about (I feel like this was the inspiration for a lot of us, right? We just wanted our sites on geocities but didn’t know what else to say? And what is more interesting to a teenage girl than herself and her friends?)  What’s most striking for me is that a lot of us were just doing this to meet each other, to share, to read.

But, now it’s really become so corporate and like you said, all about branding and optimizing for search engines, much more blatantly about finding other people to read your stuff.

We’ve also lost the old school, long form blogging now that Twitter and Tumblr and bite sized status updates are becoming the norm.  And don’t get me started on reblog culture, the birth of which I saw when “blog” became the prefered name vs. online diary. I resisted it for so long becuase I thought what me and my friends were doing on places like LiveJournal and Diaryland was so much more interesting than people linking to articles. And now that’s what we do — we link to articles and pretty photos and things other people said.

MGG: Is sex always considered “too much information”?  What are there ways that confessional/personal bloggers make that work for rather than against them?

Maria Diaz: No, I don’t think it’s always TMI. People seem to think sex is okay if it’s safe or if it’s in a heterosexual dating context. It’s always hilarious to me the arbitrary rules people set for what is “too much information”.  If there’s one hard and fast rule I’ve noticed is if the writer writes about sex in a way that’s not meant to turn people on — like talking about sex work in an honest way or for example, what Tracie Egan does (or did) at her blog or on Jezebel: talking about STD’s, abortion, having sex without a condom, all of those aspects of sexuality people would rather gloss over; that are sexual without being sexy, I’ve always found people get most uncomfortable with that.

I think the best way for confessional bloggers to make this work for them is to own up to what you are doing. I use Tracie as a good example because she is (a) not anonymous and (b) tends to never back down from her detractors. I’ve also always liked something you said a while ago: get the story first, tell your own story, don’t let other people tell the story for you.

MGG: Give me a point/counterpoint. Topic: we should get over “oversharing.”

Maria Diaz: Pro Overshare: The Internet was made for discussing secrets and peeking into the heads of strangers. The more open we are, the less stigma things like dirty sex, being gay, having STD’s, going through a nasty breakup, become.  Secrecy breeds fear. Con Overshare: The Internet has better uses than talking about your million emotions and your anonymous sex blog that no one cares about. Also, you’ll regret it one day, google never forgets, and whatever you say will come back to haunt you. Or get you a sweet book deal and the cover of the New York Times magazine.

(Photo: Amber Wolf)