jeremyvaught

I have been so busy here, I have neglected to tell you I am blogging and doing whatever else I can for Seesmic here at Techcrunch 50.

I’ve got to run because I am that busy, but check out our coverage of course on the Seesmic blog at blog.seesmic.com, and and TC50 specific blog at tc50.seesmic.com.

I’ll be posting more when I get back.

I had a fantastic time at the New Media Expo this previous weekend. It was a great time connecting with old friends, fellow Seesmic employees, Seesmic users, and introducing new friends to Seesmic.

Tim and Emile Bourquin, the guys that put on this conference, are always the most professional and friendly of anyone. So it was nice to see them again and chat with them, if even for a few minutes.

I ran into a lot of old friends of course, ran into new friends from SXSW and online, and met new friends. I’ll probably forget a few, but I’m going to give it my best shot. Tim and Emile Bourquin, CC Chapman, iJustine, CJ and Dan, Jason Tucker, Natalie Gellman, Brent Spore, Brian Shaler, Victor Cajiao, Steve, LeeAnn, and Tim Webb, James Archer, Britney Mason, Documentally, Evo Terra, Sheila Dee, TheDiva Rockin, Steve Garfield, Adam Christianson, Dan Klass, Rob Walsh, Nicole and Mark Spag, Molly Berry, Tim Street, Michael Goehagen, Gary Vaynerchuk, AJ Vaynerchuk, Kelly Sutton, and more I’m sure. Sorry if I missed you!

Now that that is out of the way, I went to the NME to represent Seesmic in our first booth ever. Seesmic of course is the company that was started by Loic Le Meur that is enabling video conversation where you want it.

I think we had a good conference. There weren’t as many people at the conference as I had hoped, but of those that were there, which was plenty, all came through our booth and received Seesmic very well. An advantage we have, is that Seesmic gets a lot of buzz, so most people have heard of it, even if they have never used it, which made them curious as to what we actually do.

It was so much fun to talk to everyone about Seesmic and introduce them, or fill them in on some of the other things we do. In a nutshell, we have Seesmic.com, the embedded player, and we power video comments for most bogging platforms. It was fun to describe these three features, and different people were attracted to different aspects. For those following along, we also have Twhirl, a microblogging client, but we didn’t discuss that at the expo unless is specifically came up. I also got a lot of feedback about what current users want, and what prospective users would like to see, and the common denominator was mobile. iPhone and Nokia’s Symbian. To answer that question, I don’t know when these are coming out, but they are in the works.

At the conference, I was there representing with Thomas Knoll, the Seesmic Community Manager, Joan Lockwood, the PR Manager for Seesmic and Vinvin, the Vice President of Seesmic. I have met Thomas and Vinvin before, but Joan I met for the first time. Seesmic employees are so fantastic and I have not met any that I do not like. Joan is no different. She is awesome.

Melissa summed up pretty well what it is like to meet the people that use Seesmic. “… [Seesmicers] are nicer than really nice orphans…” People like Langley, Miss Something, Kevin Spidel, Molly Berry, Gary Vaynerchuk, iJustine, Faboomama, Mayjah, Rachel, and a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

Finally, a topic that was often discussed at this years NME, was the future of the NME. It was discussed that a lot of people didn’t come because of the economy. Also, Vegas was a hard place because it is expensive to put on a party, and there are no great places that were really central to the convention center. Ontario had the Marriot, which was nice, but that was it. I had a chance to talk to Tim Bourquin while he was checking out of his hotel, but he wouldn’t bite on where the next NME will be held. We should have an announcement it two weeks is the word from Tim. Speculation is San Francisco, you heard it hear first. :)

Also, check out my Flickr pics here.

I just went to StartupSchwag.com, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself on the home page. And even more exciting! I’m right next to the star of one of my favorite videos. I posted it a while back, but I’m posting it again below the screenshot.

Can’t get the video? Direct link is here:

Hosted on Orange Island in Second Life, the panel was moderated by John Swords, run technically by Jade Lilly, and on the panel with me were, Torrid Midnight, CC Chapman, Stuart Warf & Mackenzie McArdle.

If you interested in what we had to say about Podcasting, Podcasting in SL, the future of podcasting, as well as answering questions from the capacity crowd, check it out at orange-island.com, a Metaversatility project.

Sheila Dee, Evo Terra’s wife, contacted me the other day and talked me into speaking at the upcoming Podcamp Arizona in November. Here is my page :)

We agreed my two topics will be “How I Use Social Media to Make Real Money” and “Is video conversation going to thrive, or fade away?” So I guess I’ll be speaking twice, once each day.

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.