blogging in the blogloft: Media Studies

Welcome to my new Media Studies Blog at blogloft. This will be the place for me to write down my experiences, and gather my thoughts about the blogoshere, social networking and the implications that these rapidly rising phenomena are having within our society.

I am a mature-aged student at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. I feel like a fish out of water – I’m over thirty years older than most of the students here. I haven’t seen many students my own age (yes, that would be 55) around the uni yet; hopefully I will find a few companions to while away any vacant hours.

As an older person you will have to forgive me if I fall into lapses of memory loss, if I can’t focus on different objects at the same time, or if I cry out in pain whilst another tooth disintegrates. I will try to avoid too much digression from topics at a tangent – that is, I want to stick to the syllabus of the course in Media Studies that I am pursuing. I won’t mention techno music or video clips except in an objective manner – this blog is not to promote other internet activities I am involved in – moreso to learn how to promote those activities more effectively.

I should say then, from the outset, that I have a small presence on the web already; but it it is very scattered and undisciplined. One objective of this three-year course is to polish up my websites and notch them up to a much more professional level.

I represent a collective of artists and musicians who produce a diverse range of original, alternative, experimental music and video clips. We so far amount to more than twenty groups and artists with about thirty cds and ten dvds. We have an internet radio station (of sorts) at http://www.radiocurly.com – though stricly speaking, it is not a true ‘radio station’. Yet. We have about 100 video clips distributed all over the net in a viral fashion. We participate in a dozen video-sharing sites; in the past four months we have had almost 60,000 video hits, as measured by tubemogul.com

We have been experimenting with video channels that play pre-recorded material, as well as live video channels that allow a combination of pre-recorded and live video streams. Last month we used all of our available bandwidth and spent the last week at a ’shaped’ upload/download restriction – slightly better than dial-up. The broadband that we do receive is not particularly fast.

We also have lots and lots of web sites and web pages spread in a very disorganised fashion. Lately we have been putting a bit of effort into building a presence at MySpace where we have about half a dozen accounts. It is slow going; but we are getting there and making some measurable progress.

I have a 24-year old son, who works as a sound engineer; and I have a seven-year old daughter who loves everything that seven-year olds do, particularly music and using the internet. She uses YouTube to practise her recorder, clarinet, piano or guitar. She operates her own email accounts, produces her own digital music and video clips and is not happy that she is not old enough to operate her own MySpace page.

That will do as an introduction. I will post more as frequently as I can. Hopefully on a daily basis. (Doh! Did I put that in writing?)

adios for now
Chris Loft