Nelson

Location: 3SI offices, Macon, GA
Time: 4:07 PM

Name: Nelson Mitsuo Myiazatu
Age: 47
Where are you from? Brazil
Where do you live? São Paulo, Brazil
What do you do for a living? Sales and Service Manager
What are you doing right now? Talking with a nice person
Sum yourself up in 7 words: Happy, open mind, like what I do, love my family, like play tennis with my son, like learn and drink wine, like cook.

Raul

Location: 3SI offices, Macon, GA
Time: 3:50 PM

Name: Raul Padilla
Age: 51
Where are you from? Mexico City
Where do you live? Mexico City
What do you do for a living? Operations Director
What are you doing right now? Training.
Sum yourself up in 7 words: Enthusiastic, realistic, direct, formal, self-assured, happy, optimistic

Leah

Name: Leah Yu
Age: 22
Where are you from: Seoul, South Korea
Where you live now: Decatur, Ga
Occupation: Student.
What she's doing: "Making shrimp tempura. Battering shrimp."
Herself in seven words: dedicated, loud, pretty, aggressive, assertive, quiet, observant

Becky

Name: Rebecca Simmons
Age: 21
Where are you from: Griffin, Ga
Where you live now: Decatur, Ga
Occupation: "I'm a student."
What she's doing: Cleaning a deep-fryer.
Herself in seven words: busy, disciplined, pretty, sarcastic, friendly, clean, private

Trying to Get Started

I've been trying for a while to come up with a theme for a blog. I like blogs that have a niche and blogs that post variations on the same idea (ex: PostSecret, Found, pretty much all successful blogs), of course, and I also like people.

I've been playing with this idea of "seven-line interviews." I've recruited a friend of mine, Jay, to help me interview people, and he and I have been brainstorming how this is actually going to work. I know I want a single picture of each person we interview, and I know I want the interviews to be done in person and preferably with a stranger. It's kind of scary going up to strangers (but that's the point) so we might start out with people we kind of know.

Questions we've been asking ourselves: Do we want to ask the same seven questions every time, so we can see how these individuals differ? Do we want each question to feed off the previous answer? Do we always want the last question to be,"Sum yourself up in 7 words"? We will see.

I've made two attempts at interviews so far--the FedEx guy delivering stuff to my workplace and a man sitting on a bench in a park I walk through to get to my boyfriend's house--and I've met with two failures. As I said in my email to Jay, I'm batting 0.000 here. So we've got to figure out what works.

But what is the point of all this? Besides just to have a blog with a theme? Well, the "having a blog" part is important to me--I'm moving in August to Seattle (where Jay lives; I live in Macon, GA) to attend the University of Washington and work towards my Master's in technical communication. Part of what I want to study and what I'm interested in is Web 2.0 phenomena, particularly (what Jay has termed) "comment culture." Anyway, point is, if I am going to be studying blogs and how/why they work, I should have one that people read.

The second, but more important, reason is that I like people. It's interesting to me how limited we are in who we actually meet--people we have class with, or work with, or are in a fraternity with, or who are in our families. The guy from Stretch Daily does something similar by approaching strangers, getting to know them a little, and taking their picture in a photo booth. (Check out the website. I can't direct you to particular dates where these photo-booth photos are posted, cause I'm at work and I can't view Flash my computer is a piece of crap and I don't have administrative privileges and so can't install it. But check it out; it's cool.) SO, I wanted an excuse to meet people I might not otherwise meet, and to get to know them a little bit. Hopefully we can make this happen.