I’ve said it before, but here’s the thing about blogging: It’s all about posting regularly, like daily or twice weekly, or shoot—monthly would be good!
As my high school classmate and hilarious blogger at The Coy McCoy put it in a recent post: “Blogging isn’t writing! It’s graffiti with punctuation!” (Yeah, I know, it’s a quote from a movie, not her. But, I think you should read her blog, so that’s why I credit her here. She makes me laugh out loud at www.jennifermccoy.net She also honeymooned in an Airstream hotel halfway around the world, which strengthens our “reconnection,” and I’m with her on the mini wine bottles. Read her: www.jennifermccoy.net)
Back to graffiti. I like graffiti; it’s funky street art. And I like writing. So when it comes to blogging with Food Truck Click, I’ve decided I’m going to start thinking of it as “street writing”—fast, colorful, slightly rebellious and noisy acting. Plus, like graffiti, it’s done “on the run.”
I know I have a lot to learn about blogging. Bloggers on the forefront know all kinds of things I’m still mostly in the dark about: hyperlinks, backlinks, or contextualized links or whatever, SEO optimization, the rss feed, and whether to include ads or not. Plus how to turn your blog into a book, which is what I’d really like to do, but then again, wouldn’t everybody?
Then there are these tips about blogging as it relates to social media like Twitter and Facebook. My sister says her media guru insists posts should be 285 or 300 words only. He’s probably right, but I’m going to make like a graffiti artist and beg rebellion on that one.
Demystifying the blogosphere feels like a need, so I’m talking to other bloggers and blog developers and designers, and reading books meant to explain this platform of expression. But all of this disciplined “study,” seems to go against blogging as a freeform, graffiti-style of writing.
Wikipedia says graffiti is “a rapidly developing art form whose value is slightly contested.” Yep, that sounds like blogging. And compellingly (to me at least), it feels like I can take the whole graffiti thing a step further as a food truck blogger. Get this: What graffiti is to art, or what blogging is to writing, food trucks are to the restaurant industry. Together, food trucks have formed a “movement” so “rapidly developing” that they are causing a stir in cities across America. Traditional restaurant proponents often argue about the value of the food trucks in the food industry. Are they creative outlets for chefs? Are they unfair competition for building-bound restaurants? Are they pioneers of a new kind of urban business model? Food trucks: Art, or anti-establishment rebellion?
In the spirit of the graffiti artist, I’m prepared to promote food trucks as edgy, noisy, fast-growing and colorful. Our little trailer café is closed for now, and we shifted our attentions into a kickstarter campaign that didn’t fund. Disappointing, sure, but our vision just didn’t translate. What’s resulted, is that our vision has cleared. Ahem! Our book idea has been honed.
We’re still on track to “write the book” on pop-up culture, because we want to celebrate the folks developing this new urban business model. Pop up businesses by their nature buck tradition. And at the same time, they are trendsetting and screaming for attention in cities all across the country. So we’ve dropped the paella tour part of our book, and we’ll park (instead of pull) our trailer when at work on the book. We’re gearing up to gather content more conventionally (send us word about your fave pop up businesses here an on FB), and we’ll pitch our book through publishing channels (instead of microlending platforms). In the it’s-almost-the-New-Year-resolution mode though, we are determined to produce it. Pop Up businesses deserve to be celebrated!
As part of narrowing our project’s focus, we’ll also be setting up a new blog to serve as a platform to promote and exchange info about pop up businesses. We’ll link you to it very soon—to a more interactive food truck and mobile business blog featuring food carts, Airstream-based vintage shops, trailer art galleries and more. We’ll post–graffiti style–fast, colorful, slightly rebellious and noisy stories and images from all the amazingly creative urban business bubbles popping up out there everywhere.
POP!
