My Night at the Streamys

First, if I know the audience who reads this blog, you're asking yourself, "What are the Streamys?" Well after tonight you're going to know.

It started off like this: I'm in bed about to go to sleep when I check my twitter friend feed.
A little bit of news, a word or two from @patricknorton, a bite from @wilw. Then there was @wmmarc aka Marc Salisbury.

He says, "Need an assistant for tomorrow from noon to late. No $$ but access to Streamys & After Party. You'll meet a lot of cool people!"

And for some reason beyond myself, I write him back saying asking what "said assistant" needs to do. After a little talking, Marc gives a young 23-year-old journalism student a shot. I didn't know what the Streamy's were but I study up.As it turns out, this was one heck of an opportunity.

The Streamys are an awards show (this was the first annual) for those involved in new media. Think of it as the Academy Awards or the Emmys but for people like you and I hosted by people like you and I, with the interviews of the actors and actressed done by people like you and I.

One good example of this is Felicia Day's The Guild. The pitch for the show would go like this: let's do a tv show about people that are really into MMORPGs (World of Warcraft). Look them up. They are a hilarious group of independent content creators who turn out some really unique and entertaining stuff.

Back to the story. So after taking a risk taking on a guy like me who he doesn't know, Marc picks me up and we head to do a photoshoot (where I got to meet @Sunnygault). I'm having a great time. Marc even buys me In-N-Out (i.e. fast-food ambrosia). Later we finally head off to the Streamy's and it turns out some pretty big names don't have such big heads. Some actors you may know who do these webshows are Lisa Kudrow (she does a show called Web Therapy) or Neil Patrick Harris (actor in the Whedon clan's Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long blog). The place is pretty packed.

A few (thousand) photos later (@wmmarc I'm guessing will post them on his Flickr stream), we head into the Wadsworth for the ceremonies. Talk about funny.

My favorite part was either when Kudrow was up on stage ad-libbing her lines or when Felicia Day gave her acceptance speech for The Guild (an aside: they stole the night for the awards). Day really laid into traditional media and rightly gave credit where credit was due, to normal people who had an idea (one of Streamy's steps to success btw) and ran with it.

And that is what the Streamy's is folks. It is a bunch of people who got around the system with creative ideas and took the initiative to go for what they wanted to do: make entertaining content.

Two shout-outs:
One to Efren of TechZulu. The guy is intelligent and knows his field.

Second, a big shout out to Marc Salsbury because without him, I wouldn't have been able to have such a fantastic evening or met so many people in the industry I dream of (and find myself already) working Marc, for those that don't know, is chronicling the history new media through photography, and he is good at it. His reputation stands on its own. If you want to know more, give his stuff a look over. If you're in this industry and you have ideas, he'll make you look good.

UPDATE: Did a little grammer check.
UPDATE 2: Tech Zulu has the award winners and a written snippet of Felicia Day's speech can be found at NewTeeVee