“INABILITY TO FOCUS. HEY THERE 10 PAGE RESEARCH PAPER. I SEE YOU WAITING ON ME. HOLD ON A SEC, LET ME CHECK MY FACEBOOK A FEW TIMES. OKAY NOW I’M GOING TO TWITTER SOMETHING AND THEN CHECK FACEBOOK AGAIN. I SWEAR I’LL FINISH YOU SOON. BRB, EATING.”

-Amanda

A film written by Dave Eggers can be nothing less than epic amazingness. I haven’t even seen it yet and I already know it will be one of my favorite films of the year (hopefully. really hoping it lives up to that). Anyway, thought I’d post a little note to tell @focusfeatures that I have endless appreciation for making this little film possible but that I’m also really happy to see how you’ve engaged the community around its launch. A live Twitterview with Maya and John? Really, thanks for that. I only wish I hadn’t missed it and had to read the transcript on Facebook.

-Amanda

Via l*_*l     

-Amanda

Okay, I’ve held my tongue on this for about a week, but I need to let it out. Facebook is at it again, and this change has greatly impacted my site usage in terms of navigation, how I use the site, what I use it for, and the length of time I used to spend on it.

The “Friends” tab has recently undergone a makeover where the “recently updated friends” option has been eliminated. This feature has long been a part of Facebook, and I believe it is one of the main reasons the site has been so widely successful. Point being, you go on Facebook to see who has updated, as in, who’s uploaded new pictures or video, who’s got a new job, a new boyfriend, etc. Now, with the new layout, this feature is completely gone and we must filter through our friends alphabetically.

To throw salt in the wound, Facebook now has a “friend list” column where you can group friends. This was based off the concept of long forgotten friend details, which as I look through mine, none of them are remotely accurate, with outdated high school jokes and “family” consisting of everyone but.

Honestly, the change has basically cut my Facebook usage in half. There is no reason to click on anyone’s profile if you don’t know that they’ve changed anything. The old interface allowed me to see friends that I had lost touch with and see what the were up to. Now, I’ll only be going to the pages of people I care about offline.

–Sarah

#562: People post incredible stuff like…

This was #561. [Press play and see what happens].

-Amanda

I’m sooooooooo endlessly excited to be the latest blogger for PAPERMAG (Thanks David H. and Alexis for being so cool and inviting me to do this!!!). Each week I’m going to interview a young creative who’s sharing their work and building their audience on the Web. So I get to turn my obsession with Flickr, Lookbook, Etsy, MySpace Music, etc into something productive and meet and chat with cool people in the process. Seriously, I was actually giddy when Alexis, PAPERMAG’s managing editor, told me that my first post was up. 

Here’s my first post with Yokoo, one of my favorite young designers I’ve been following on Flickr and Etsy for a while. I was pleased to find that she’s even more interesting, friendly and cool than I imaged she’d be after seeing her incredible work. 

If you have recommendations of who I should interview next, drop me an email at mooney[dot]amanda@gmail or DM me on Twitter (@amandamooney).

Meet the newest member of our PAPERMAG blogging team, Amanda Mooney, a digital kid who spends far too much time in social networks and is addicted to finding fresh talent emerging somewhere between Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, Lookbook and MySpace. In her weekly column, “Wwwe Could Be Next,” Mooney will chat with one of these young creatives, to share their work, perspective and advice.

A few months back, I started seeing Yokoo, a self-described “accidental knitting wunderkind,” show up everywhere on the web. Known for her charming and slightly subversive scarves and accessories, Yokoo has taken a fresh approach to establishing her brand and audience. As sheposts her new accessories, scarves and dresses for summer and announces her new collaboration with BleubirdVintage, I caught up with her to chat about her work and adventures as a promising young designer with a growing roster of devoted digital fanboys.

OK, so in 140 characters or less of course, describe your style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFLqX_cYuVc

How did you get into fashion?
I fell into fashion by accident…. I was always inventive. And I always somehow knew that there was something just beyond the horizon of what most people considered success. I started to see other young people that were my age doing amazing things with backgrounds that were similar to mine. It took a lot of time to put it all together- more time than I care to admit.

And now, I’ve been able to quit my lousy retail job and dedicate every waking hour to turning my high school hobby into the launching pad for a handmade empire…. With backorders piling up, I’m adding new pieces to my line. That’s kind of nuts since I do it all by myself.

And how did you start sharing you work on the Web?
It all started with my desire to start a street fashion blog. I wanted to start a street fashion blog since being introduced to Cutie Magazine out of Japan. They would carry Cutie Magazine at the now defunct Toward Records. No one knew about them. And the stuff that American kids are doing now, they were doing ten years ago. So around 2004, I decided to start a street fashion magazine website. But the technology was not readily available the way it is today to make it reasonably efficient.

Then RSS feeds were introduced around 2006. That’s when I started to build what I thought was the first street fashion blog on the Internet. But then when I came across a Flickr group called Wardrobe Remix and it collapsed all of my dreams and ambitions because it was ten times better than my website. So I just started contributing my photographs to that group and working on other projects altogether.

What’s the biggest advantage or frustration of being a young designer today?
I would definitely say the challenge of the information age is both frustrating and thrilling to many of today’s designers. But I find this problem allows for the more creative designers to eclipse their competition. Many of the designers that I talk to everyday feel worn out and threatened by the speed at which the Internet has allowed personal expression to be replicated, commodified and quickly perpetrated, but I find that those with a keen eye for style can tell the difference, and those who don’t aren’t supposed to.

Before, you had so many close minded individuals who would never in a million years accept the work that I am putting out, who now find it daring and on the peripheral of what they might start wearing next season. This, to me, allows me to get out a lot of my ideas, and then move on to the next thing.

There is a new movement towards avant-garde street fashion that’s allowing a voice for young designers to be as expressive as your traditional runway designers, but still accepted as clothes the one can wear in the streets of bigger cities like New York, or London.

How have Flickr and Etsy specifically helped you build your brand?
I don’t think it was that easy. Branding is very difficult and something that takes more thought than I care to mention. Etsy and Flickr have allowed me to express my brand at a particular level. It allows me to enter at a particular market in specific kind of way. But at the same time it has also prohibited me from reaching beyond to other markets in a more traditional way. It’s upon the artist to decipher the riddle that’s involved in rebranding himself to a different audience. But it’s very much like a puzzle, and I enjoy it that way.

And on all of these sites, you’re the actual face for your brand. What’s that like?
I find when people sincerely let down there guard and open themselves up, they can be absolutely fascinating.Well, that’s all I am trying to do with my brand. I am trying to tell my little story in my little corner of the world. I know it sounds trite, but that’s what it is.

Leave us with some links… Who are your favorite people on Lookbook and what sites are you devoted to on the web?

Lookbook: PASCAL, MARTHA, IDA and CEDRIC JEAN PIERRE.
General sites: Garance Doré, Dwell, Boracat, The Sartorialist and NY Times.

Images from Yokoo on Flickr. 

-Amanda M. 

I was talking with my brother this weekend and the subject of Oprah on Twitter came up. He said her first tweet all in caps reminded him of our dad. Ha. My dad uses caps as a shortcut and we’ve come to love that only we can tell that HE’S ACTUALLY NOT YELLING AT US AT ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL. :) Oh and I actually love celebs on Twitter. Aside from random challenges to get a trillion followers for no intelligent reason, celebs like Shaq are fun to see in my feed. But yeah, I too was #herebeforeoprah and pretty proud of that. 

Image via one of my favorite Tumblr blogs. 

-Amanda Mooney

I’m watching Coachella live via AT&T here.

I love when brands sponsor this kind of stuff. AT&T has me sitting on its site for at least a few hours now. Better than any standard ad could ever do.

-Amanda

I was trading links with @lizlee a week or so ago of random Facebook groups like this one that remind us how amazingly privileged we are to be ’90’s kids/digital hipsters. 

Rebecca, whoever you are, you’re amazing for putting this up on Facebook. 

Oh and I also think the good, upstanding people responsible for putting the following up on the Web completely deserve our undying appreciation:

MASH Game. BTW don’t you wish you could update your Facebook relationship status by playing this?

This…

Super secret note squares

This… 

This…

You know you’re a 90’s kid and getting old if…

You’ve ever ended a sentence with the word “PSYCHE!”

You can sing the rap to “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air”

You know that “WOAH” comes from Joey from “Blossom” and that “How Rude!” comes from Stephanie from “Full House.”

You remember when it was actually worth getting up early
on a Saturday to watch cartoons

You got super excited when it was Oregon Trail day in computer class at school.

You remember reading “Goosebumps.”

-Amanda

I’m completely impressed and (somehow still) always surprised by the way digital kids my age are taking pretty basic sites and making them so compelling because they have the guts to do more than throw up a few posts and have the creativity to rethink and rework the medium. As Tommy quotes Sontag on his Facebook profile, “There is the surface. Now think- or rather feel, intuit- what is beyond it.”

I asked Tommy if he’d mind introducing himself to everyone reading here and dropping his thoughts on his work and how he’s using the Web to tell the kind of story he wants to share as a photographer.

Amanda: Hey Tommy, tell us a little about yourself…

Tommy: I describe myself in my profile as “a literature graduate, aspiring philosopher, habitual drunkard, amateur actor, avid reader, occasional writer, pretentious fop and…first and foremost, a photographer. The truth is, though, I’m just like everyone else, trying to make sense out of life and get through it in the best way possible. We all use different tools in this quest: mine is the camera.

Amanda: When/how did you get into photography

Tommy: When I was fourteen, my parents gave me the digital camera that was a free gift with the PC they’d bought. I remember very vividly that summer afternoon when I ran about photographing everything I saw, and my Mum saying “Tom has a new toy!” By the standards of today’s technology, though, it’s obselete: 0.35 megapixels! As I got older, I bought new cameras at the rate of one a year or so – digital point and shoots – and learned more and more about their functions. When I was 19, I bought my first SLR, a Nikon D70. I worked completely manually, but I didn’t understand the technicalities of shutter speed and aperture: I only knew that “if this number is higher it does this and means that I have to do this” and so on.

Amanda: Describe your style…

Tommy: Cinematic, certainly. It’s the sense of detachment that I like: when I photograph someone, I don’t want to produce an image of her as she is when a camera is being pointed at her: I want to photograph her in her life, I want her to forget that the camera is there.

Amanda: Your Flickr feed is like a movie. That’s one of the first things that struck me about your work. When you’re posting photos, do you think of the story each will tell individually and what story your whole Flickr feed tells?

Tommy: Absolutely. I have always had a love for stories, fictions, narratives. When I was very young, this expressed itself in the computer games I used to love playing: fantasy RPGS like the Final Fantasy series, which is very story and character-based. As I grew older, this developed into a love of novels, which took me to University and to a degree in English Literature.

I always had the desire to create, but I found that I didn’t have the imagination to write novels or stories. I would have these ideas I thought were wonderful, and then I didn’t know where to take them. And photography was the perfect outlet for that: all the stories I would see taking place around me, I could make an image of them, of a single moment. Each photo is only a suggestion: the viewer creates his or her own story around it.

Amanda: It seems like Flickr and your Web site are the key spots where you share your work? What purpose does Flickr vs. your site serve for you?

Tommy: My website is really aimed at clients, larger organizations who may not be interested in me as a person, they just want somebody to take good photographs for them, and so it contains only what I feel to be my best work, and without much background of the images themselves. My Flickr, on the other hand, is very personal and very open: it’s used by my friends and online acquaintances, and has also been a wonderful place to meet new friends.

Amanda: How have you used the Web to grow your audience?

Tommy: Flickr has been key in this regard, too. People who have never heard of me might stumble across my work and mention it in their blog, spreading the word even further.

Amanda: Are most of your followers and commenters on Flickr people you know or random people you met while sharing your work on the Web?

Tommy: Mostly the latter, many of whom have become people I know and whose work I also admire.

Amanda: And besides photography, what are you into?

Tommy: Other than team sports, there’s very little that I’m not into. I devour books, films and music, and I love to cook, to eat, to drink, to dance. I love to be outdoors and indoors, I love the country and the city. All these things would be almost meaningless, though, if I did not have friends and family to share them with. And what is wonderful about photography is that I can incorporate it into every one of these.

Amanda: And besides Flickr, what sites are really important for you?

Tommy: YouTube, certainly, I think it is invaluable, and one of the most important cultural creations of my lifetime. Likewise Wikipedia. Comment Is Free is the Guardian’s politics and news blog where I spend a lot of time. Other than that, not very much, though: I used to spend a huge amount of time on the internet, and only quite recently did I realize that it was taking a great deal away from my enjoyment of life. Now, I try to limit myself. Instead of wasting an afternoon chatting to friends on Facebook, I’ll arrange to meet with them and spend some real, quality time together.

Amanda: Leave us with some of your top favorite young photographers on Flickr we can check out.

Tommy:

Graeme Nicol – www.flickr.com/slavers – Frank O’Hara once remarked that, other than his own, he didn’t really like poetry unless it was so good it forced him to admire it. I feel more or less the same about photography, and Graeme’s is one of those streams that insists on being admired. I was lucky enough to discover it during my first week on Flickr, and it has been among my favourites ever since.

Lavi – www.flickr.com/mayastar – My admiration for Lavi’s work is seemingly endless: her ability to make the ordinary utterly extraordinary never ceases to amaze me.

Markus Bollingmo – www.flickr.com/sipho84 – a wonderful talent, his work is just so human.

Image used in this post are all from Tommy’s Flickr feed here.

-Amanda Mooney