$85.000,000 was spent on the ‘Net Nanny Filter’ used by fewer than 35,000 people. Then Prime Minister Rudd introduced his clean feed filter proposal – compulsory internet censorship for all; his Communications Minister, Conroy has not faced the media about internet filters for over six months.

In addition to proposals to filter pornography, there are suggestions that gambling, euthenasia, anorexia sites and other ‘unwanted and inappropriate material’ could also be banned and subject to a secret blacklist – that is not subject to Freedom of Information laws.

There is plenty of opposition to these censorship proposals. Technically, there are concerns about slowing down our already slow broadband connections to the net. Others share concerns about civil rights issues, about issues that are already covered by legislation.

Bloggers around Australia are voicing their opposition – Why Internet Filtering Won’t Work, is Wrong and Dangerous by Margaret Simons, is one such example. Margaret begins her blog “It won’t work. There it is. Flat out. It won’t work.” Nor should it be allowed to work, because it’s dangerous. and quotes (her friend) David Wright who says:

It does not stop FTP, where one machine holds the files and sends them to individuals on request.

IT does not stop SMTP (good old email).

IT does not stop P2P (Sending directly from one machine to the other).

It does not stop IM (sending over instant messaging like AOL, ICQ, AIM, etc),

IT does not stop IRC (Inter-relay Chat). Think massive chat rooms which can be created for free instantly.

And that list doesn’t include all the options.

Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald, in its blog, on February 26Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end reported:

The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator’s decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started.

The Opposition’s communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime “legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required”.

Twitery is digital poetry, posted to twitter in 140-character chunks, via computer and web browser, or from my mobile phone. I have just produced my second work of twitery, entitled Wind. My first piece – Perigee Moon @ Black Point – was produced a week or two ago and I have just begun a third example of twitery – Pixelated – due any day.

So that the real world does not distract me too much, I have emmersed myself into a few interesting little projects. Well, I think that they are interesting, this doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone else will. I have just published, some twittery, a friendfeed/twitter feed and a page for some lolcats who keep threatening to scratch my eyes out if I don’t write code for them.
Some other pages have been added recently –

Twitery home page – coming
Perigee Moon @ Black Point
Twitery Wind
Pixelated – coming
Curly Artworks
Twitter Archive
Twitter FriendFeed Feed
Lolcats CatChat
Lolcats Blog
Lolcats Archive

Chris Loft 1 February 2009

Look Mum! – Now I’m an artist!

The Radio Curly Collective are renowned for their creativity, both musically and visually. you have seen all of their video clips – haven’t you? lately we have been mixing with a strange breed of people – artists. To prove that we have what it takes we have launched another new web page to display some of our artistic endeavour from the Radio Curly Collective.

My recent foray into the world of twiterature, Perigee Moon @ Black Point has inspired me to produce more twitery. A new work will be forthcoming, it has just about been completed. In order to not fill my regular @chrisloft stream on twitter with inane rantings, rhyme and rhythm – I am now tweeting twitery on a new twitter account. You can follow me on Twitter at @christwitery and see the progress we have made. Once completed we shall ad this new piece of twitery to our site.

Chris Loft 31 January 2009

Three new web pages

So that the real world does not distract me too much, I have emmersed myself into a few interesting little projects. Well, I think that they are interesting, this doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone else will. I have just published, some twittery, a friendfeed/twitter feed and a page for some lolcats who keep threatening to scratch my eyes out if I don’t write code for them.

Paul Burcheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed, recently released some code that you can incorporate into your own web pages to receive a stream of FriendFeed items. FriendFeed UI – CLICK HERE. I’ve had a lot of fun trying to merge it into one of my pages, but in the end I had to set up a separate page, but I added some feeds from Twitter to it as well.

I went away for a few days the other week for a relaxing stay at the beach up at Black Point, just past Ardrossan. No computer. No internet. Well, I did have my mobile phone – as I walked along lonely beaches in the early hours before dawn I found myself coming up with strange lines of ‘poetry’ – that I twittered on my phone. When I got back to town I compiled them into a dark and sombre stream of verse. Please let me know what you think, you can have a look at Perigee Moon @ Black Point by @chrisloft

Just to keep me on my toes, and in good spirits I have been building a site for some friends of mine. Very strange, because I am not normally into cute pictures of cats, kittens and puppies. My friend, Ceiling Kat, inspired by the Lolcat Bible Translation Project has set up his own internet site. He has some ambitious plans, but at this stage the features that he wants to implement are held by placeholders. If you like cute cats take a look at CatChat CatChat – the home of Ceiling Kat and check out the link to the Lolcat Bible Translation Project – it is a scream (rofl) – thanks to Kay Walker for finding and sharing this – now I love Lolcats too.

Chris Loft 25 January 2009

Experimental FriendFeed UI

This experimental message-oriented FriendFeed UI is written with brower-side JS using JSON API. The source is available from Paul Buchheit at FriendFeed. I have had a little bit of fun trying to integrate the code into my own page, but have decided just to call up a link to a separate page.

FriendFeed UI – CLICK HERE

Chris Loft 23 January 2009

Recently one of my FaceBook friends, a girl I have know for over thirty years, on hearing of my current dire, financial position – came around with a big bag of groceries, including some coffee and cigarettes. I would have been climbing the wall by now otherwise. [More big hugs.] This came about because one FaceBook friend talked to another, who came over to feed me. I’m glad I have friends in the real world.

Imagine if you had, say, a Twitter account, but you had no friends to subscribe to; or if you had a FaceBook account and had no friends. There would hardly be any point to using these services: there would be no one in your Twitter stream, and your FaceBook experiences would be very limited. Friends who do not go online often can be quite dispriging about the value of sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed etc and often have viewpoints that are not always correct.

Take FaceBook. I resisted joining FaceBook for quite while, thinking it was mainly a site for younger people, I soon found people that I knew in real life and began adding a network of real friends, most of them living in Adelaide. Gradually I sought out people I knew, and some people I knew sought me out as well. I began to interact with a group of Adelaide bloggers and added this group, then added a large group of mainly American bloggers and social networkers that I follow on other services. These are real people, and even though I am unlikely to meet many of them, my own interactions have resulted in firm online friendships, as well as many new developing ones.

Often people are added as friends according to various interests, old school friends, musician friends and people in the entertainment industry, people I have worked with in the past, people I have met through university, social networkers interested in this new social phenomen. On FaceBook I would generally add people that I know or have interacted with online; to me it is pointless to add people whom I don’t know, or don’t share similar interests with. It is not just about the numbers, I don’t think having thousands of friends on FaceBook will really make me any more or less popular.

Twitter is an entirely different case. Twitter displays a stream of short, 140-character messages, or status updates. There is a public stream, that displays a continuous stream of updates on all sorts of subjects, from users all over the world. You can choose to follow people you know or share interests with, who will be displayed in your stream. The more people you ‘follow’, the more updates will flow. People who find you interesting can ‘follow’ you. On Twitter I find it more likely to follow people I don’t know, than on FaceBook. Sometimes I will follow people just because they have an interesting profile icon. It seems more appropriate to follow people you don’t know on Twitter than it does on FaceBook.

At some stage there will be a limit to how much information you can digest, or how many people you choose to follow. For some this may only be a few people, others have suggested that once you are following more than 300 people – you reach a ‘critical mass’ where there is too much information to digest. Others follow thousands of people, for instance, Robert Scoble and Louis Gray have a prolific following and they both generally ‘follow back’. They will often interact with their followers and are both quite approachable.

At the moment I follow about 800 people and have nearly 400 followers. I broadcast all sorts of information and trivia; generally I try to ‘shout out’ about my music or videos; I repost or draw attention to interesting articles regarding media and social networking. Often I, and many others, will talk about food, coffee, television programs, art or any trivial subject.

Twitter is a very useful platform to distribute information. If you have a message to deliver you need a large number of people following you, in order for them to recieve it. In turn, some of your followers will rebroadcast (retweet) your message to their followers who may then spread it to other followers; this is a viral distribution system. Each time I post an update it is received by my 400 followers, who may or may not pass that information onto their own followers. (In some ways, this is similar to having your own newspaper circulation.)

Twitter is a recent phenomenon, but it has spawned hundreds of applications and sites devoted to it, enhancing or extending the services offered by twitter.com

FriendFeed is a service that lets you aggregate RSS ‘feeds’ from other services into a FriendFeed stream. You can direct you feeds from Twitter, FaceBook and many other services; FriendFeed will log your activity on services such as YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm and more. Where Twitter provides an almost random stream of information and conversations, FriendFeed provides threaded conversation as well as commenting and ‘liking’ (similar to favoriting). A recent post by Robert Scoble resulted in a conversation with well over 300 comments. This post was about 50 ways to make friends on Twitter; the post was often hijacked, added to, derided or applauded by others, such is the interactive nature of FriendFeed.

In my opinion, users are much more visible on FriendFeed than they are on Twitter; and it is not hard to find people with similar interests to your own. There is quite a friendly community at FriendFeed who will engage and interact with other users. Engagement is the name of the game; whilst you can stay in the background and never post anything, by participating and interacting with other users, you will become more visible and attract more followers.

FriendFeed provides a service that lets you keep track of your activity on other social networking sites; there are other websites such as, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) and Plaxo-Pulse that provide similar services.

OpenID, Yahoo Connect, FaceBook Connect and Google Connect allow you to log into some sites by using your OpenID, Yahoo, FaceBook or Google ID. You can join various communities of users and participate in their activities.

So . . . as the song goes . . . “You got to have friends . . . ” Whether in real life or online – friends are an enriching asset that will enhance your day-to-day life in the real world, as well as contributing to a more positive online experience. As I make my progress through a maze of social networking sites I often run into the same people, the usual cast of characters, the usual suspects. Robert Scoble is everywhere; so are many other active networkers. It is quite common to befriend the same people on dozens of different sites or to look for them on other sites after you have initially added them on Twitter, or FaceBook.

I don’t really hate the real world, or any of the people in it. I have just been overwhelmed by events and been feeling a little sorry for myself. Things will get better – as long as I interact with myself, and keep myself engaged. If you want to cheer me up you could always watch one of our videos and leave a comment.

I wonder if I am a candidate for intervention?

adioso
Chris Loft

The past few months have been a disaster for my life and state of mind. Sequences of events have left me drained, confused and struggling to keep up with the real world. My own world has just about disintegrated and all I can do now is try to pick up the pieces and keep going. Exactly where I am going is uncertain: I can only head in the general direction of where I want to be.

Two years ago I rented a four-bed-room house, with all the trimmings of a small, single-parent family. I had my own sound studio, that I was turning into a video studio. I was producing music and video clips and enjoying my life. One day I found myself at the end of a lease – broke and with nowhere to go, and nowhere to store a truckload of furniture. I managed to stay at my sister’s for a while, in comparative luxury; but this was only short term. A friend offered me a room at his house, and life looked to be back on track. I barely realised what a feral house I had moved into, but settled down and tried to get on with day-to-day-life. I began a course in media at university, which I found stimulating and relevant to my music, and video work on the internet.

I don’t know when things started to go wrong, but gradually I was overwhelmed by one thing after another. My mother died, my son needed somewhere to live, (several times); I was constantly poor and hungry. My car wouldn’t go. I argued with my housemate and had to find somewhere else to live; find storage for my funiture. Work fell through or got cancelled at short notice. I started to get behind at uni.

Then something happened that completely devastated me: the last thing that I ever thought would happen – I lost a friend. Not just any friend, but a girl who I considered to be a special friend, almost my best friend, who had been part of my life for six years. We had once been lovers, but now we were just friends, good friends.

Probably I was far more in love with my friend than I ever realised. She found herself a boyfriend and just cut me off. I was shattered. But she had actually done nothing to me, everything that resulted was due to my own emotions and imagination. For a few weeks I ran around in a confused state waiting for a phone call. I managed to make some sort of contact, but only through sms. Half a dozen conversations resulted over a period of about two months. I felt abandoned. But I had to deal with it, and do so without blame, or anger, or bitterness – I just had to get on with it and get on with my own life.

I found myself neglecting my studies, neglecting my websites – I didn’t care about anything else; nothing else was important. I could barely function. Suddenly nothing mattered to me except trying to re-establish our friendship, on whatever basis I could salvage. I jammed a finger into a stapling machine, I nearly walked in front of a truck, nearly sideswiped my car. I was a distracted mess.

Christmas was a disaster; the worst one I had ever had. Apart from an hour I spent with my daughter, there was nothing else. I have never spent Christmas day and had nothing to eat. I missed my mother, and I missed my friend. The next day I was much relieved by a half hour conversation – by phone for a change. Since then I’ve basically been told to “go away”. Three weeks after Christmas there is still no resolution in sight. It will take time and I must be patient.

Existence for me had degenerated into a cycle of Twitter, FriendFeed and gMail, with occasional forays into FaceBook, MySpace, MacJams and a few other places that I ‘haunt’. I would wake at six each day, turn on my computer and spend days and days scanning Titter and FriendFeed. I needed a life I still was not keeping up with my websites and had barely kept up with my obligations at uni. Gradually I have worked my way back to a level of sanity that is not driving me crazy. For the whole of December I put myself into some hellish place that I could not escape from.

I am setting myself tasks, and goals, and trying to keep myself busy and occupied. Now I can at least laugh at myself, and smile. What a silly fool I have been – acting like a lovesick schoolboy – at my age.

Fortunately, I have a good network of friends, who tried to support me, distract me and do the sort of things that friends do. These real-life friends probably saved my life and my sanity – I am sure that I could easily have destroyed myself. I have also been helped by some of my online friends, both locally here in Adelaide, or from places around the world through the internet. I made contact with a group of people that I ‘knew’ online, mainly through FaceBook and Plurk, and met some of them on New Year’s Eve. It is a good feeling to be made welcome by ‘friends’ that you have never met.

adioso
Chris Loft (friend of a friend)

WorldTV have added a new widget that allows you to embed your WorldTV channels to your web page or blog. I have been waiting for this widget for a while, I was pleased to see it last time I logged on to check some of my stats. WorldTV reaches an international audience, I have been surprised to see that our videos are reaching as far away as Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Algeria, France, Indonesia, India, the Sudan, Brazil and Switzerland – and that is just for one of our six channels at WorldTV!

WorldTV have also added more video platforms to choose your video content from. Difficulties with files from MetaCafe and DailyMotion have been resolved and support has been added for Vimeo, LeechVideo and Dada.net as well as existing support for YouTube, Google, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, QIK, Break, Blip.tv, StreetFire, TU.tv and TeacherTube – that’s sixteen video sharing sites that you can download from.

New Presidential Candidate
I have a few interesting links that should be relevant to our course in Media. I’ll start with Paris Hilton. We were shown a short 29 second clip at a lecture today; here is a longer version that shows a little introduction, as well as a minute more footage that I think shows Paris in a better light. She can have my vote.

Beppe Grillo
Beppe is a force to be reckoned with. I saw a documentay on the ABC on Tuesday night, George Negus, I think. He featured a story on Beppo Grillo, a comedian and political activist in Italy. He is using social networking to mobilise opposition to the Italian government; and Beppo pulls no punches. He is hard hitting and direct. Have a look at his blog and find out more about this man who is changing people’s perceptions and influencing their opinions – but not their voting habits. Not just yet; but he is using social networking to mobilise a very large following throughout Italy. He has a very large Meet Up network. Have you heard about Meet Up? They have a few Adelaide groups of online people with common interests. Here is a link to Beppe Grillo’s blog:

Beppe Grillo’s blog

and here is a link to an article in The New Yorker by Tom Mueller where you can read about V Day.

Here is a YouTube clip of Beppe, it’s in Italian, but you can easily find other clips and stories about him. I think he should come to Australia and shake up our government.

Beppe Grillo on Italian television.

The Social Network Conversation Prism
Brian Solis has been developing a graphic representation of his social network on the internet. I have found this to be quite fascinating, as well as similar to my own; although very different. I am still digesting some of the information it contains and applying this methodology to my own web presence. The Social Network Conversation Prism -

FriendFeed
The links I found above were discovered through FriendFeed, a service that gathers together information from my web activities and logs them so that I can find them later. I can ‘follow’ people with similar interest to mine, and find interesting web pages that they have published or found. It is a great way to find new resources and sources of information on specialist subjects. You can have a look at my FriendFeed stream here.

Another site that is a good resource for material on social networking is SocialMedian. It specialises in news about Social Networking, Web 2, Social Media Philosophy, Twitter and related topics.

Twitter is a very broad channel of short snippets of information and gossip. Plurk is similar to Twitter, but has layers of conversation and chat within each post. I find it more chatty, not a source of hard news. But it does have a good local Adelaide presence. FriendFeed allows you to filter the type of information that you want to gather and has a wide variety of topics. You can add comments to items you find interesting; which allows you to hold conversations and pass on feedback and commentary. This is similar to the newsfeed in FaceBook, but more effective. Yahoo have a similar service at www.mybloglog.com but I don’t think it is as good as FriendFeed. SocialMedian is much more specific to social media as a source of information.

Brian Solis’ PR.20 blog is a very good resource if you have a look at his links, online friends and the free e-books that you can download.

Digital Story Technology
As part of this course we are going to make a short, digital story. If you need some original music to use as background music, or to inspire you to create your own imagery – I would like to offer some of my own for students of this course to use. Here are a couple of links to pages where you can listen to some of my music, in a variety of genres, techno, hip hop, hippity hop, dancy, trancy stuff; as well as some classical, jazz, reggae and world music. The Button Project at www.chrisloft.com/portfolio/button.htmlis an addition I made to my portfolio earlier in the year. It uses the Yahoo Music Player, hidden in the left hand corner of the page. Click on the little ‘play’ symbol (>) or click on the player, then click on the playlist and you can select from over 300 tunes. Most of them are instrumental, no vocals. Feel free to add your own, or use the music in any way you want for your digital story project.

If you cannot load the Yahoo Music Player (because it might not display in some browsers) – there is a flash player at http://www.chrisloft.com/portfolio/button.html – this might not work properly in Internet Exlorer though; it was written a while ago and uses frames. IE7 doesn’t like frames; so you may need to drag the vertical frame over to the right.

You can also hear some music on my MySpace pages. I’m not going to list them here. You can find them at www.radiocurly.com

Well, I’m sure that must be enough for now. I reached a little milestone last week when this blog registered one thousand visitors – over about four months. Thank you for sharing some of my scattered thoughts and ramblings. I wonder what time it is. I’d better not look; better not have any more coffee, I’ll just finish off this bar of chocolate.
adios
Chris Loft in the BlogLoft

 
Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification
 

Here is a link to our profile at mybloglog

We are alread signed up to a few yahoo services, as well as a few google services – so what’s one more? After all, we don’t need to sign up for pownce, tumblr, trulia, zillow, linkedin, identica  or anything else yet, do we?

Tangled web

I know, I should be sleeping. But isn’t that always the best time to write?

I’m a relatively new and naive blogger, becoming rapidly overwhelmed by the diversity of services and platforms that are available to perform all manner of blogging and social networking tasks. I can remember, a year or so ago, lamenting the fact that there where so many services and websites that posted, bookmarked, favorited, dugg, ranked, commented, tagged, aggregated, distributed (all of these things and more) your data from your website or blog – to make your information more visible and reach more people.

You have barely worked out how to use and utilise one service, when another one appears that does a slightly different thing, a slightly different way. All of these services require that you sign up, have a user name and a password, and maintain a profile, and status updates; they have their own message, chat or email system; you can add friends, pals, subscribers, fans, crew, collaborators, customers, clients, pets – the works. Where will it all end? How can we keep track of everything? Do we need all or any of these services? What works and what doesn’t? How can we integrate all of these services together; so that we can make some sense out of them?

I’ve lost track of the number of places where I have developed a digital presence. As well as my own unique persona, I represent a number of musical groups that I am promoting, because I love their original, alternative creativity. In order to get them ‘on the net’ we maintain a lot of websites; social networking is a great way to spread our music and our video clips. We are not organised enough yet to actually sell anything; we are satisfied enough that people will listen and watch, become our friends, subscribe to some of our channels, give us encouraging comments – and share their own music with us. Slowy, we are reaching a global audience and building a global network.

The actual task of producing music and film clips is supposed to be our prime directive. Such creativity still goes on; but we have been sidetracked to some extent by the process of publishing, packaging and promoting our material. First we had to get our first web sites hosted and published, needing html and design skills, (not to mention myriads of programming languages and protocols). Then we needed to promote our simple little sites and make sure Google googled them and thousands of people would come and visit. Targetting audiences and markets for your site can become a full-time job, and has become an industry in itself.

As a musical commodity, it behoves us to have a presence on MySpace, where, indeed we have made a small toe-hold, as well as hosting our own web sites. We uploaded some videos to YouTube, but we did not experience many views; so we joined LiveVideowhere we established a small amount of traffic and friends. Later we signed up with TubeMogul, which distributes videos to a dozen video hosting sites.

From this point our traffic started to grow, and our dream of world domination began to take hold. We signed up for some more video channels, and some live channels and looked around for somewhere to spread our music. We signed up for more and more services. We started blogging about what we were doing, and what we wanted to do. We searched for sources of material to help us design, code, publish, promote, network and anything else that we couldn’t afford to neglect. We signed up for a new blog and stopped blogging at the other one. Then we signed up for another one; we tried to host our own blog, which we nearly did. In short, we struggled, blindly, alone; a gnat amongst the frenzy of furious fans and friends.

If signing with TubeMogul represented one breakthrough in our quest for traffic, the adaption of FaceBook and Twitter were also significant milestones in our propagation. I had resisted joining FaceBook for a long time – I didn’t think it would be useful and I surely didn’t need to sign up for something else and keep another profile and all that rigmarole. Did I? And Twitter? What a silly name. But then everything seems to have a silly name on the internet.

FaceBook is a very powerful social networking tool; I was really unaware of how pervasive it has become and how useful it really is. Twitter broadcasts short bursts of information from sources that you choose to listen to. These bursts of twittering might include chatty, domestic banter; or you can select breaking news, tech news, updates, gossip, informed commentary, uninformed commentary, Mars lander updates, hurricane and weather alerts, traffic reports, what music people are listening to, what videos and movies and tv shows . . . endless – but useful, up-to-date information, rich with links to more detail.

Twitter has spawned hundreds of sites, applications and services to enhance the publishing of 104-character messages. Blogging has deconstructed itself into micro-blogging; now we can microblog. I’m not sure if I ever intended to become a microblogger, or a blogger, or a web publisher – we just want to make music and dance. How can we make sense of all these websites and services with silly names that are now all part of our social network? How do we integrate all of these services together so that they work for us? How can we make sense out of all these silly names.

Google, (and all of the Google services: Adsense, gMail, Analytics, Reader, etc) Yahoo, GeoCities, MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, flickr, del.ioci.us, digg, furl, tubemogul, revver, metacafe, myspacetv, blip.tv, crackle, veoh, dailymotion, blinkx, uLinkx, mashable, beet.tv, mogulus, worldtv, livevideo, live.yahoo, magnify, videosearch, trueveo, ustream, qik, vodpod, bebo, oSkope, pixsy, mofuse, wordpress, drupal, blogger, bloglines, kickapps, tag.clipr, friendfeed, feedburner, RSS, twitter, plurk, thwirl, ping.fm, digsby, netvibes . . . and on and on and on – how do we see the big picture of all of this? How do we see how all of these pieces fit together? What can be discarded?

I know. I’ve raised more questions than I’ve answered. But I do have to think about getting some sleep, just at the moment. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. I will pick up this theme of integration . . . in a day or two.

adios amigos
Chris Loft from the blogloft

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