FrankenMedia: Input Devices

I’m in the process of setting up a weblog for an artist.  She’s creative, not technical, so I’ve been considering the social media jungle from the standpoint of maximum exposure and creative control with the simplest possible interface mechanism.  My first instinct, as alluded last post, was to use WordPress as the primary media gallery, using appropriate options and plugins to maintain creative control and automatically republish or send notifications to addition social media outlets.

Unfortunately, the powerful WordPress interface was arcane enough that the artist found it an obstacle to creativity rather than a useful addition to a creative toolbox.  In trying to find a useful compromise or bridge, I started playing around with Posterous.

While it remains to be seen if that solution works for the artist, I think Posterous might be the solution to a problem of my own.  I’ve never been happy with bookmarking solutions.  Browser bookmarks, del.icio.us, Evernote, Gmail messages… I’ve tried a lot of methods for keeping track of interesting things that may not be of practical use at the moment, but I’d like to keep track of and perhaps get back to one day.  There’s a “Post to Posterous” bookmarklet that works the way I expect and doesn’t add much overhead to my established web surfing process, I have a cloud-based, tagged repository for miscellaneous interesting items, it’s presentable in and of itself, the tools are built in to republish or announce content to an on-the-fly choice of a range of media services… and I can add to it from any device that can send an email.

Posterous might be my model for the perfect social media input device.

Rolling your own social media

It’s a universal truth of computing: don’t put your data someplace unless you know you can get it back out.  I learned it in the days when “connectivity” meant I could hack the disk drive on my Atari to read and write to IBM-formatted disks… then translate ATASCII to ASCII… then still not have a program to read the data on the other side.  Computing in general has made data integrity across systems a simpler task, but social media, as it takes the place of our photo albums, record libraries, and video shelves, has presented the problem again: as MySpace waned and Facebook waxed, there was no easy way to move photos, videos, links, and friends to another site.

I’ve always liked the idea of having your own place for your own stuff, and I’ve really enjoyed working with WordPress here in my most recent bout of having my very own server space (well, no, not this particular page, but jeffjewell.net, for example).  I can make WordPress do media pulling or pushing for me: no need to upload photos again, when I can use a widget to display from their flickr page; no need to repost to Facebook and MySpace when I can tell a plug-in to make those updates automatically.

Don’t think of WordPress as yet another social interface with dwindling marginal value, realize it’s the control room for the rest of your online social life.

How fads become tools

The embattled Iranian election has pushed social media upstart Twitter, previously best known for appearing on Oprah and Ellen, to the fore of the “real news” scene.  Twitter can be relevant, topical, and as current as we presently know how to be… in addition to having worldwide reach.

Whatever else the future holds for Twitter, one thing is certain: Twitter is destined to follow MySpace down an unpredictable road led by too many users who don’t understand how to use it.  Social media may very well be the next big thing, but right now it’s a confusing, over-populated landscape of over-lapping and redundant tools and reports.  As a wise man once said, “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  We must be careful.”

Indeed we must.  As entrepreneurs and businessfolk, social media offers us lip-smacking opportunities to reach markets, but this still-evolving territory requires the following precautions:

1. Don’t forget the map – remember that the point is to engage people in your idea… have them buy your product, support your party, subscribe to your service, or join your congregation.  In addition to keeping your contributions focused, remembering the audience helps you with…
2. Don’t step in the quicksand – there’s usually a lot of mindless fun available within clicks of social media sites… but that’s not the reason you’re there.
3. Don’t spook the natives – As Facebook can attest, users can get downright cranky if they feel their data or user experience is being unreasonably monetized.  And as businesses are finding out by using trending Twitter hashtags in the ads, the line between “clever stunt” and “spammy crap” can be razor fine and not easily un-crossed.
4. Don’t overexert – It’s not overstatement to say that one could easily spend a lifetime doing nothing more than eating, sleeping, excreting, and updating progress on those processes via a wide enough array of social media.  Use the tools for their strengths, use external tools to “multiplex” updates, and leave it at that.

I guess I’m just old school… I still say the best way to go is grow your own website to completely control your content, and announce or excerpt updates through the social media.

Structural Tweaks

If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been much activity here lately, it’s because everything is happening at jjewell.com 6.1, or, as it’s now called, jeffjewell.net.  I’m having a lot of fun seeing what WordPress can do at the same time as I work out some details before things go live here at jjewell.com.

A quick note about a small milestone, I can officially add WordPress Support to my resume, the South Carolina Family Gathering site went live on WordPress under my care this past weekend.  Long time friend and South Carolina Family Gatherer Paul Webb is currently soliciting photos from anyone who attended past events and would like to take part in the site.

Presenting jjewell.com 6.1

Turns out I’m really liking WordPress.  So much so, in fact, that I have installed my very own copy on my very own server, now available here.  There’s not currently much content, and there might not be, for a while, as that installation is more for my own training and experimentation than for publishing updates.  I’ve already thought of a project I want to start pushing with WP, and jjewell.com 6.1 is where I’m building the foundation to be used in that project.

Welcome to jjewell.com 6.0

And, just that quickly, I’m happy with the WordPress weblog as the jjewell.com frontpage.  I’ve got a useable first draft of an About page and the usually suspect jj set of links: I believe everything’s pointing the right direction, I’ll be doing a bunch of link-checking tonight.

So welcome to jjewell.com 6.0, born 06/01/09.

For God’s sake, WHY… a new answer

The WordPress weblog will take over for the Blogger weblog at weblog.jeffjewell.net, and will also be moved to the jjewell.com domain.  This cuts things down to two weblogs to maintain, one each on Blogger and WordPress, one for the more commercial side of life and one for the more social side of life.

The iWeb/dotMac/MobileMe websites won’t be around long, although the front page of jjewell.com may temporarily move back there until I’m happy with a new frontpage elsewhere.  MySpace, for all practical purposes, has been eaten by Facebook, and it’s actually going to be awhile before there’s enough traffic on the Google domains to bother with accessing them individually, rather than just forwarding/POPing everything into one inbox.  I now use TwitterGadget to get my Twitter on right from my main Gmail page, and the root domain jeffjewell.net now points to the canonical list of my webly tentacles.

That leaves Gmail, Facebook, Google Reader, and the jeffjewell.net menu as my four Firefox tabs.  I also cleared out a bunch of Add-Ons I wasn’t using, determined to give myself one month to either make use of or delete a few others (ScribeFire and Ubiquity, for two), and even shut off AdBlock, just to see what would happen.  So Firefox is noticeably faster than it was, and seeing ads is usually only weird when it comes to placement on the page: I didn’t used to have to scroll so far down to see certain things on pages where large top banners weren’t being loaded, before.  So far, that hasn’t bothered me as much as I’ve enjoyed the speed.

Back to my roots

Even with so many web “faces” that I used my last post to complain about this addition, I’m going back to the old days and setting up my own website.

While I like certain things about many of the social networking / personal web presence sites, I’ve never felt as in control as I did back in the days when “adding capabilities” meant installing php code.  An actual old school discussion board will be the first install, methinks.  Or MediaWiki.

For God’s Sake, WHY?

As I start this wordpress blog, and add it’s Dashboard as yet another tab in my “master” Firefox window, the question that pops immediately to mind is, well, that title question, there.  jeffjewell @ wordpress joins two Blogger-based weblogs, my dot-mac, or dot-me, or dot-made-myelf-superfluous, or whatever Apple’s calling their service now, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and two separate Google Apps hosted domains as “things I must have immediate access to.”

For now, the answer is part novelty, part coverage.  Even if I only repost the contents of one of my other weblogs here, there are a certain number of new users it will be exposed to.  And it’s a popular platform I know little about, so I’m learning.

We’ll see if, like the other weblogs and social presences and sites, this place finds a purpose organically.