jeremyvaught

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.

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.

I’m forgetting SXSW faster than I want to, so I’m capturing my memories here before they are gone forever. And admittedly, this could be a lengthy process because things happen that remind me of a moment at SXSW… and that’s when you will see it here. (hopefully)

So first. Might as well talk about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. You have likely heard of the exciting interview of Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy. I was there, but left about half way, the interview was exceedingly boring up until that point I left. In hindsight, my exit must have sparked the revolt. :) I was sitting along the wall, near the door where Mark walked in. Here is a pic I took.

So later that day I was running around with my friend Brent Spore from iboughtamac.com and Justine from TastyBlogSnack.com. We were talking around deciding what to do, and Justine informs us we need to go see AJ and leads the way. When we get where we are going, we walk in the back of this crazy bar that looks like a former rock quarry, and sure enough, there is AJ. (who I later learned is @garyvee’s brother, who I also learned that @garyvee is kind of a big deal, even though I had never heard of him). So sorry to say this AJ, but more importantly, there was Kevin Rose and Mark Zuckerberg chatting. We were there all of 30 seconds or so and Kevin wanted out of there, (I later learned, nothing to do with us, they had plans) and was waiting for Mark to follow. But, we held him up. :) First, I took this pic…
And then we watched as Justine tried to ask Mark what his favorite snack is. Mark first refused to be filmed on video, which was pretty odd, since earlier in the day Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com had no problem with it. And I may be naieve, but at this point, Bezos is a tower of internet power, and Zuckerberg has to still bend his head way back to see Jeff way up there. Regardless, Zuckerberg refused the video, highly doubting that people actually answer Justine’s question about what their favorite snack is, I took this pic, and we were off.

So you read I have a new N95… so as long as my batter holds up, I’ll be taking pictures and posting videos of what is happening. You can follow the action at these file destinations on the internet…

Seesmic - video
Flickr - pictures
Qik - live video
Twitter - micro blog (you know what Twitter is, it’s Twitter)

If you want to get a hold of me, dm me on Twitter, or txt me at 623.670.2365. You can call too I suppose, but I let numbers I don’t recognize to go voicemail.

I originally wrote this to post on blog.seesmic.com, but it was pointed out to me that the mobile client cannot be pushed on the corporate blog. So I’m putting it here. I’m getting questions from people about purchasing an N95 and once there, how to set up the Seesmic client. So this is not Seesmic official, but it’s a little informative post from me. (also, there is a comment I make about Loic, and it’s full intention is to just be funny. Nothing negative about Loic) Here goes…

I’ve recently purchased a Nokia N95, primarily for the purposes of Seesmicing on the move.  I don’t Seesmic as much as I would like to since I haven’t yet found a webcam that is compatible with Flash for my Linux laptop.  When I suggested on Twitter that I need to buy a webcam that works, Loic helpfully suggested that a Mac comes with one preinstalled, however he failed to point out the price difference between a webcam and the Macbook.  I looked it up, the price difference is significant.  As I have pointed out previously, I have been using my digital camera to do all my Seesmicing, a daunting process after a while. 

So I bought this phone.  The first thing I did was check out the new mobile Seesmic application at m.seesmic.com.  It’s in an even more alpha stage than the pre-Alpha Seesmic web app, but I can Seesmic on the move, and straight to Seesmic.  In all honestly, one of the things I have enjoyed pre-N95 is Seesmicing on the move with my digital camera in video mode, but now the rest of the steps are cut out.  Easy peasy.

If you have the N95, and you haven’t tried the mobile Seesmic app, you are so 2007.  So in the interest of sharing knowledge, I’m going to lay down some info about what I have done because I’m getting asked that question regularly on teh interwebs.  Keep in mind I am in the U.S. and I have little idea about how they do these things in Europe and other parts of the world.  If you do, please leave a comment :)

1. First thing I did was go get an AT&T account.  I’ve been a Verizon customer for too many 2 year contracts, so I have just decided to bite the bullet and pay the fee to drop them.  (I could go on about how they canceled my EVDO card because I used my unlimited connection too much, or every time I make a change, it starts my 2 years over, or their phones are lame, and on and on, but I won’t)  I wanted to get the account first in the off chance they wouldn’t let me after I paid for my phone.  They let me have my account.
   1. A point about why AT&T.  They are currently the only provider in North America with 3G for data.  You want 3G.  T-mobile promised 3G, but they don’t have it yet, and it is said that it will be a different band than what the N95 supports.  So sign up for AT&T, and get the unlimited data plan.  My plan, unlimited Data, Txt, & Email (meh, I use gmail) with 900 minutes of talk a month, is US$94.  It was pointed out to me that AT&T has a video plan as well for phones that stream video.  But since the N95 uses the data plan, it doesn’t use the video specific plan.  However, the AT&T clerk pointed out that AT&T may one day take a dim view of all that bandwidth for video being used without paying for a video plan.  FYI.
2. I purchased the phone.  First I purchased it through TigerDirect from a link I found somewhere on Mahalo.  That’s also a long story in that they refused to send it to my mailing address so I canceled the order and they still charged me 4 days later and I had to spend hours on the phone resolving that.  So I ended up ultimately purchasing my phone at Amazon.  But the actual supplier for the phone is DavaVision.  The reason I make this point is that I can’t find the phone on Amazon right now, it says it is not available.
   1. BE VERY CAREFUL ABOUT WHICH N95 YOU GET.  There a several on Amazon that are labeled as the N95-3 (which is the North American Version) but are in fact N95s and N95-2, both of which are the European versions, the dash 2 being 8Gb version.  The N95-3 currently doesn’t come in red, plum or anything else other than black.  Don’t be deceived.  I paid US$610 for my phone, if you are paying only US$300 or US$400, is it probably not the N95-3.  Now the N95-4 is coming out soon, and that will be the 8Gb North American version, but personally, I don’t see the point.  It won’t have a microSD slot like the dash 3, and the 12Gb microSD card was just released, and the 16Gb microSD card was just announced.  Stick with the microSD card IMHO.
3. Now I’m rockin’ and rollin’ on my N95-3 on the AT&T unlimited data plan.  This really is a superior phone that I’ve been amazed with constantly.  The video quality is amazing, even through a live connection on the data network and not wifi (which of course it has also, and is also awesome)

If you have any questions, please comment on this post or email me at vaught@seesmic.com.  I’m here to help :)

I was just emailing with my friend Grace Buford. She is an independent musician. I gave her some advice about LinkedIn, and thought you might not be aware of how beneficial LinkenIn is. So I’m sharing the advice with you too. You’re welcome :)

From my email to Grace:

Yes indeed, LinkedIn is a fantastic place to make connections. And they happen randomly for me more then anything else. Right now I’m doing a months worth of Freelance web development from someone who found me on LinkedIn. I also had a job interview recently from someone that randomly found me on LinkedIn.

People are on here fore all sorts of reasons. So I’m SURE you can find purpose in it as well. The first step is make a connection with everyone you know. LinkedIn will search your gmail and other mail webmail clients. You can also go through people’s contact lists that you already know. I’m sure my list has a lot of people you already know. And it just spiders out from there. A bit tedious in the beginning, but once it is set up, it is just maintaining it and keeping the information up to date.

As for as real concrete opportunities. LinkedIn is the best social network on the internet. It is for, and used by, professionals. Not just high schoolers and college students and the New Media regulars.

And now, just like Grace, you know too!

I’m on to you istwitterdown.com :) I have wondered, and have seen others wonder, if in fact IsTwitterDown.com actually checking. So now that it Twitter is most definitely down for maintenance, istwitterdown.com is still showing no.

So I looked at the HTML for istwitterdown.com, and it all made sense. If you click the “No” it takes you to a CD on Amazon. However, you will likely not buy that CD, but when you go back to Amazon and buy things, the person that owns the affiliate account for istwitterdown.com will get credit for sending you there and get a percentage of the profit.

Clever, I must admit. Not your standard search engine spam website. However, even more clever and without the hidden agenda, IsItChristmas.com. To make the joke complete, it even comes with an RSS feed.