Talking to myself . . . why do I blog?

Inside that dusty ol' piano

How are you going today? I’m trying to reorganise all of my other blogs and try and keep track of what I’m blogging about, why I’m blogging at all, and who it is that I think I’m blogging to anyway.

I think I’ve been blogging for a couple of years. Not really seriously, but little bursts here and there. I am mainly interested in promoting music and video clips from the Radio Curly Collective. But I am also interested in designing, coding, building and maintaining websites and pages; I’m interested in techy, geeky things, like science, history, electronics, programming, hosting, macs, and making things easier to use on my pc. Lately I’ve enrolled in a Media degree at the University of Adelaide so I can learn a bit about media, broadcasting, advertising, news and ratchet up my skill level a notch or two. I would really like to make better film clips and publish them on the web. These are the things I tend to blog about.  (Note to self: try and notch your grammar up a notch too; pay attention.)

I have three or four blogs around the place somewhere. I tend to get something started and quickly move onto something else. I’m gradually organising the content of my blogs so that each one can be a little more specific, about a particular subject; instead of scattered all over the place. Ha – no I’m not. My blogs are scattered all over the place in a very undisciplined manner. I’m working on fixing that.

This blog, in particular was meant for me to write about my media studies at uni. It doesn’t get earth-shattering volumes of traffic; but that is not its purpose. I’m trying to be a bit more disciplined. I had another blog at WordPress at www.chrisloft.wordpress.com that strangely enough, stopped when I started this one. I tried for a while to host my own WordPress blogs on my own server, but without success. I need some help to get my SQL database configured properly.

I have another blog at www.chrisloft.bloglines.com that has been very neglected. I’m sure I have one or two other blogs around the place too. As well as subscribing to some of these blogging services, I have a heap of videos distributed through www.tubemogul.com who send our videos out to YouTube, MySpace-TV, Google video, MetaCafe, Revver, Veoh, Crackle, Brightcove and a few other video-sharing services. One or two of these have blogging facilities, which it is useful to use to participate in online communites, spread our message and gets lots of traffic and positive feedback. Negative feedback even. (Yes, we even get a bit of that).

In the next week or two I might link all of these previous blogs together – and then try to split them up into more specific categories; but everthing is often very inter-related. This is just a suggestion to myself, though. Besides you and I, there probably aren’t any other readers. Bit like talking to myself really. Life gets like that some days.

I have also been building up a presence for our bands on MySpace, where we have a few  hundred ’friends’ and also on FaceBook, where I am just beginning to establish some interest for Radio Curly and build a network there. To ‘assist’ in our blogging, information-gathering and promotion we have been using www.twitter.com as well as www.digsby.com and www.ping.fm – Recently we also added www.friendfeed.com and www.netvibes.com

Where is this all going? Am I making things more complicated or are things getting easier? Is this achieving my desired results? What is it that I want anyway? (Traffic – lots of traffic). Am I turning from a music producer to a webmaster to a social networker?

I have been building networks, making friends, subscribers, fans, interacting with people, joining online communities, forums, joining social networking sites – gradually I have begun to notice a slight increase in traffic, at our video sites and web pages. Keeping track and maintaining all of this is a nightmare, well a bad dream sometimes; with the additional workload from uni, and the demands of a couple of children it can be hard to find a few hours to veg out at the computer to create yet another profile,create another MySpace page, update another status bar, log in, register, verify, despam, devirus . . . and constantly . . . ‘Windows Internet Explorer is not repsonding’. I seriously need a proper computer.

S’nuff – adios dudes
be back soon
Chris Loft