Profiles

I've been very cautious about adding new "social media" (or as I call them, so-called media) to my life, but being experimental and also to a certain extent sentimental, I've added a few this year, and I'm seeing how well served I am by this proliferation of profiles.

Seesmic seems to be part of the furniture now. The original video conversation network, I keep returning to Seesmic for social reasons, much as others use Facebook, which I completely neglect. I find it's one-to-one video messaging invaluable for both private messaging and business.

12seconds.tv I quite enjoy for it's quickfire nonsense. I have the domain 12hours.tv ready to go - need a backer to help me build a website for 12 hour-long Warhol-style (or not) webcam videos "because anything less is superficial".

Vimeo is a totally splendid video site, very useful for work, with a great and talented community. HD quality, fast uploads, fast conversion to flash, passwords, and the free version gives you 500MB a week upload. Great package.

I already mentioned Blip.FM, from which I take teenage delight - I should also add I love any site which allows me my first name as a user ID. I carefully update the professional network LinkedIn because it's so very sensible.

I've just added Behance to see what will happen. I'm also a member of Discogs.com, in order to reclaim my musical past in the name of my future, as I return once again to the path of inner truth.

Funk Social Media Experiment

The Funk Social Media Experiment: One Dollar

History is being made - I just made my first dollar from the blog I started writing in June 2004, shortly after starting this one. This didn't take long, I'm happy to report, just few days to reach a whole US dollar or 50 pence as we like to call it.

Funk had 57,525 visits and 252,435 page impressions in June 2007, using 16GB bandwidth.

New Frontiers In Blogging

The BBC website gives me hours of pleasure. Today I found an article entitled, "New frontiers in journalism" which was about using social media. I'm not certain that my rather cynical comment will be appearing any time soon though:

"YouTube, Flickr, Del.icio.us and Twitter." Why stop there? And, why choose these four? Why not, Digg (which is much more directly related to news - although people might not vote you to the front page), Facebook, MySpace and Slashdot, to name but four more ?

These "social media" sites attract (and are the venue for) many different, only slightly overlapping groups; by choosing the few you mention, and not using others, you are weighting your internet content towards certain constituencies and away from others equally valid.

Admit it: your choice of networks is not made just on popularity, is it? You've gone for YouTube fair enough because the BBC have a deal with them, but the others all tend to be favoured by the new media "Twitterati" currently in broadcast jobs.

Until news media actually engages with the great internet unwashed on their own terms, it's just playing at internet for the sake of appearing relevant, IMHO.