jeremyvaught

I started a group on Facebook last year called, “New Media.”  It has almost 11,000 members now and some very interesting things are discussed.  Recently a question was asked that I responded to, and I thought it interesting enough to post it here.  It applies to you if you ask yourself, “what should I do with my website to help me professionally” or more simply, “I have a website, now what?”  This is by no means an exhaustive answer, just some quick thoughts on how to get up and going quickly with a plan.  Please dispute anything.  I would love to hear your thoughts, either here or at the group on Facebook.

Terry Reith asked the question,

“I’m a television journalist in Canada and recently taught myself how to build a site. It’s clear to me that the future is online and these are the tools we’ll need to succeed. But aside from strictly being a vanity exercise how might people use their personal sites when they have nothing to sell? I do television and photography and quite happily give it away. My site is www.terryreith.tv. I’d be interested in seeing some examples of what other media people are doing as well.”

And my response:

“To easily update the content, I suggest setting up a blog. They are designed to update quickly, and are search engine friendly. There are many ways to go. My favorite is installing wordpress.org on my own site. But there are also hosted solutions like wordpress.com, blogger.com and typepad.com.

“Back to putting your content on your website. The advantages are displaying your work is to get credibility for it, become known outside of your initial influence, and then basically whatever you want it to do. :) There are many ways to raise the awareness of your blog. An effective one is to comment on blogs where your potential audience is reading. Don’t spam the comments with an advertisement for your site, but a valuable and useful response, with a simple link will bring visitors wanting to know more about you. Additionally, to bring trust to who you are and your message, it takes time. So don’t expect to drop in, make a comment or two, and magic will happen. Trust takes time. (this goes for your site as well, update as often as you can. No less than twice a month, but more than once every day or two can drive readers away)

“These are what I have for you just off the top of my head, hope this helps!
Jeremy Vaught
[A] King of New Media”

I keep forgetting to post this, but as you can see, I have finally done it. And I stuck the landing.

So this is me when I visited San Francisco and Loic (founder and CEO of Seesmic) interviewed me for the now defunct Seesmic Du Jour. Matt Galligan from SocialThing is in the first part, then I come on at about 2:20. Please ignore my gum chewing.

Early last year, when there was such a thing as an active secondlife.reuters.com I attended an event by Reuters with a lot of assistance by the company I worked for at the time, the Electric Sheep Company.

So the significance here is I was talking to Mel Mcbride and I was reminded of this, and that Reuters used the pictures I took of the event in-world for their story, and some pictures even made it to the main site at Reuters.com.

You can see the story here if you are even remotely interested.

Not so long ago I picked up an Asus eeepc 900. And so far, me likey. I’m not going to say a lot about it now, just to say that it is great when on the move, has great battery life, and is a wonderful addition to my full size laptop.

As a side note, you may notice I am at a Starbucks, and now that I have switched over from the T-mobile wifi to the AT&T wifi, I can have multiple devices online on the same login. It is handling my two laptops and my N95 being connected. Big ups to ATT for that.

My sister just asked me about iPods, so I gave her an answer, and after I read the email I sent her, I thought, “meh, that’s almost a blog post.” So I’m posting it here, just cuz I can. Her basic question is what is a good choice for her, so this is not an answer for everyone, so look at it as more of a review on how I see things, and let me know if you feel differently.

Well, of course it depends on what you want to spend. If I were to recommend one, I would recommend the Nano. In fact, if I were buying one today, I would get the nano. The 4gb nano looks like it is $105 while the 8gb is $136.. I would get the 8. When I ripped all of my CDs, that came to a total of 5gb. You guys probably have more Phish than just 5 gigs. The best feature of having an mp3 player is it can hold your entire music collection in one place, and also some room for podcasts.

The shuffle is the cheapest, but there is no ability to watch what music you want. With the new nano’s you can watch video, not very important IMHO(I do like having video, I must admit, I watched the first two seasons of LOST, but my sister has a super slow internet connection and video is a non-starter for her for now), but what is important, you can search for your songs, as well as putting your digital pics on there so you can show off your kids and garden wherever you go.

If you want serious space, then go with the larger ipods. I have the 60gb ipod, but I never needed anything near that. I could get by just fine with 8gb I’m pretty sure.

If you don’t need the space, but you want to be REALLY fancy, get an iPod touch. The touch is basically the iPhone with wifi, no phone, and no camera. But it will run any apps and play youtube and all that, and it still has 8gb of space for iPod type activities. This is less useful since you don’t have wifi yourself, but you can use it where you do at the library and such. The 8gb touch is $284. This is cool, but not worth the price. I would entertain the iPhone if I had the money, but I don’t, so I won’t.