Let's Get Famous

« Adam Forkner's White Rainbow Leads Holocene's Church of Psychedelia | Main | 13% More Famous Than You Already Are »

Outplay, outwit ... outblog?

Think you're the Ultimate Blogger? Test yourself with the reality TV idea in an Internet contest

Saturday, February 18, 2006
by STEVE WOODWARD

The Internet now has more than 28 million bloggers.

But there's only one Ultimate Blogger, and he feels, uh . . .

"Oooh, all tickly," said James Voges, 23, a film school graduate and artist's assistant, when he won the title last year while studying Chinese in Taiwan.

Voges was crowned after defeating 11 other finalists in one of the Internet's first wave of reality shows, the Ultimate Blogger.

But Voges soon will have to yield the title to a new monarch as the second season of Ultimate Blogger goes online Feb. 27.

Created by three reality-TV-loving buddies in Portland, the contest grew from a gag for friends into a minor Internet event that attracted 6,000 individual daily viewers for six weeks. The finalists answered 10 blogging challenges ranging from writing about food to confessing personal secrets.

Week after week, the show's hosts, assisted by a variety of experts, voted finalists off the Internet until only one -- the "tickly" Voges -- remained seated at the keyboard.

"Tickly?" asked Steve Schroeder, when he -- with Ultimate Blogger co-host Mike Merrill -- called Voges long distance last June from the Hollywood Theatre stage to congratulate him on winning the global honor. The Ultimate Blogger team and friends had rented the theater for the ceremony, which featured a nostalgic video that recapped the season.

"Yeah," Voges replied, pondering Schroeder's question. "Is that a feeling?"

Schroeder: "I . . . I . . . Yeah."

Voges: "Yeah. I feel tickly."

Schroeder: "OK."

By the time Voges won the final vote, which included votes from eliminated contestants, viewers felt like participants as they read the blogs daily, took sides and posted their own comments.

This year, Voges is in Portland helping Schroeder, Merrill and Jona Bechtolt make videos that will introduce each Ultimate Blogger challenge.

"I haven't been blogging for the last few months," Voges says in an e-mail, "because I've been sleeping on couches, staying with my parents and visiting my girlfriend in Seattle, and haven't really found the time to spend on the Internet.

"But now that I am in Portland, I plan to become a very active blogger again."

Schroeder, Merrill and Bechtolt have big-league competition in the race to transplant the reality-TV concept to the Internet. Last month, AOL and reality TV mogul Mark Burnett announced they would make the first reality treasure hunt exclusively for the Web. "Gold Rush" will follow treasure seekers as they dig for clues hidden throughout AOL's online network.

"I feel like we can compete with that," says Merrill, 28, whose day job is office manager for Portland-based Panic, which sells Macintosh computer software and T-shirts.

Ultimate Blogger headquarters is a long table at a down-at-the-heels warehouse off the east bank of the Willamette River. A green, yellow, blue and white Portland city flag hangs on the concrete wall, above a United Nations flag and beside a flag showing a coffee pot and cup.

The team's production equipment is bare-bones: Apple computers and a Canon digital camera that can shoot video.

Merrill says the Ultimate Blogger is influenced on TV by Burnett's "Survivor" series and World Wrestling Entertainment. Though the blogging threesome doesn't routinely watch wrestling, he says, they are fascinated by "the fact that it is so transparently fake and yet so popular."

Just as Hulk Hogan challenged lesser wrestlers to bring their A game into the ring, Ultimate Blogger's creators are challenging bloggers -- an uninspiring ruck of scribblers, on the whole -- to add some crackle to their cackle.

"We want to give them ideas for what good content is," says Bechtolt, a 25-year-old musician, sound and video producer, and creator of an audio-visual electronic pop opera commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

Are you tired, for example, of reading tedious posts about a blogger's dinner?

So were Merrill, Schroeder and Bechtolt. Last year's opening challenge was to write a creative, entertaining antidote to the typical "vapid vittles" blog entry.

"So it is also in my homeland of Byelorussia and my ancestral Poland," wrote first-round winner Lyova Lyubov, "that we see the food only as accompaniment to the totally massive and, dare I say, bloodthirsty consumption of our national liquids, which is called 'vodka.' "

For that frolicsome prose, Lyubov won the Cyber Headdress of Immunity.

And so the challenges continued: blogs about fond memories of obsolete technologies; an evocative morning photo; creative conversation; new products; juicy gossip; pop culture; backroom deals; and broken alliances.

Finally, confessions -- including the most shocking confession of all:

Out of more than 300 initial entries from around the world last year, Voges and Lyubov, the last two finalists, were actually roommates in Taiwan.

"I was hitting the desk and screaming at the computer, I was so excited," recalls Bechtolt, the show's director, photographer and editor.

Gone were the Atlanta electronic media specialist, the Iranian student, the illegal alien in New York, the Oregon musician, the U.S. Army infantryman in Afghanistan, the Portland grad student.

Just like on reality TV.

"So many people are dismissive of reality TV," says Schroeder, 28, who runs an independent record label, States Rights Records.

But great reality TV is all about having a great story line, he says -- and Ultimate Blogger's second season promises to have just that.

Sitting in battered swivel chairs at Ultimate Blogger Central -- Bechtolt in a purple hoodie, Schroeder in a lime-green hoodie, Merrill in a pinstriped suit coat with "Make It Happen" emblazoned on the left sleeve -- the trio reel off their favorite reality TV shows.

Bechtolt: the A&E Network show "Airline," which features Southwest Airlines employees as they deal with drunk, unhappy, obese and stinky passengers.

Schroeder: "The Amazing Race" and "Project Runway," which pits fashion designers against one another.

Merrill: "America's Next Top Model," which he watches communally with friends each week.

Combining reality TV and the Internet is nothing that cultural purists should be alarmed about, the Ultimate Blogger guys say.

"Television is not bad," Schroeder says. "You just have to harness its power."

And Ultimate Blogger does just that.

"The medium is so expansive," Bechtolt says. "It's the way people can give you instant feedback."

But not just instant feedback. After Ultimate Blogger 2 concludes, like TV, you'll even be able to buy the DVD.

Steve Woodward: 503-294-5134; stevewoodward@news.oregonian.com

Comments