By: Eileen Suarez

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Douglas, the creator of a comedic blog called Slacktory. Mr. Douglas created a panel for an interactive panel for this year’s upcoming SXSW. The panel is called “Misuse the Internet and Make People Love You.” There are also a variety of speakers that will on this panel as well such as Cole Stryker, Katie Notopoulos, Jon Hendren from Something Awful and Christopher Price from Tumblr.

Before Nick Douglas created Slacktory, he had done various blogs throughout the years for fun and for money. He was an English major at Grove City College when he discovered his passion for blogging and decided to make a career out of blogging. When I asked him about why he chose to create this panel, he said, “My first desire was to get a bunch of creative people, who do a bunch of silly things to get together to talk about all these creative things they have started and come across.”His main intention is to enable people who do not have a lot of technical skills to do great things in an entertaining way. Below is a video that Nick Douglas made about How to Make Siri Say Funny Things:

Slacktory, which was created on July 2011, is a comedic blog about pop culture of the internet Nick Douglas and a team of creative and entertaining freelance contributors analyze, abuse and ridicule the rest of the Internet. Slacktory is a part of My Damn Channel and the My Damn Channel Blog Network.

These presenters will mainly be discussing how social media tools, that were meant for creative purposes, have been evolving. Those who attend this panel will be able to learn the tools to create blogs, sites, and or Twitter accounts that can make you money and at the same time have fun while doing it. According to Nick, many of these panelists tend to misuse some of the tools of the internet to make it entertaining. He used Jon Hendren, creator of Something Awful as an example. Hendren decided to challenge the lead singer of Smash Mouth to eat X amount of eggs. There was no reason to this, but Hendren has not seen or heard from Smash Mouth in a long time so he decided to start something entertaining with them. Hendren was able to persuade many of his followers on Twitter and other social media sites to persuade the lead singer of Smash Mouth to “eat all the eggs” and to post of video of him eating the eggs. Finally, the lead singer responded by saying that he will accept the challenge if the audience raises and X amount of money for an organization. This is another example of how something so small can turn into a huge trend if one uses the right tools.

When asked about what the SXSW audience can expect from this panel, Nick Douglas replied, “I want to inspire someone to create another Tumblr or another site that draws millions of users. I really just want to give people more ideas, that inspires them to do something new. I want their brains to just think a little more and I also want people to be more entertained. A lot of people don’t know where to look for this weird stuff in between the lines of the internet and hopefully this panel will teach them how to do just that.”

Below are some of the questions that will be answered during the panel:

• What tools do creative people use online, and how do they stretch them to their limits?
• How are creative misusers rewarded, and how can specific sites encourage them?
• ‘Who are the greatest and the least appreciated misusers?
• How do some people make money or improve the world with this bullshit?
• Why do companies suck at this so hard?