[editors note, this was started yesterday] 

I’m not doing real good on my effort to write short blog entries today..  I’ve written parts of two really long ones.. for some reason these never seem to want to get published.. oh the pain and suffering of it all!

As we speak, I’m preparing food.. just chicken, I’m starving.. 

Today I watched some internet TV which has me thinking a little differently about what I’m doing. I’m thinking I might want to think more seriously about Qik. Qik is a website that allows you to stream video live, via a cell phone, out to the internet, where anyone could watch. Of course you need a special sort of Nokia smart phone sort of cell phone, and a special sorta internet connection.. to make it happen… but the more I think about it, the more I find myself thinking “wow, this could be cool.”

The question, of course, is how much it costs. You need a phone.. they seem to be more then $500… you need an unlimited data plan.. I have no idea how much these are going for.. Apple’s is what, $60 a month for the basic plan? So basically, I have to look at my budget and fiscal situation, and try and figure out just what my priorities ought be..  

So here’s sorta what I’m thinking: Pseudo Life Casting. What I mean is that it’s a means by which you can bring an audience into your world…….

I haven’t quite figured this all out yet.. But the way I see it is.. I’m creating a story.. between the blogs and podcasts and media work. There’s what we might consider “a total story” and then there’s “particular narrative threads.” This is perhaps terrible terminology, but bare with me.. Any particular consumer of my story may only be interested in particular threads.. For instance.. perhaps you’re interested in music production.. so only the blog entries in the music production subject of this blog are of interest to you.. you really don’t care what my cat had for lunch! But then there are other people.. perhaps friends, who might actually be interested in what my cat had for lunch… or at least they are interested in pretending to be interested…

So.. can you create a granularity… where someone can tune into a grain.. and only get that grain’s content.. and not have to suffer the rest of it? I doubt it.. or.. I’m sure there’s ways of achieving this..  but I don’t think the technological ecosystem of the moment is capable of doing this out of the box, put it that way.

It might make sense to not go a qik route.. as I think of it.  What is the meaning of Live? How important is live content? As I ask this question multiple thoughts come to me. For one thing… Live can mean user interactivity.. where you can comment on the live feed, and the person in the video can in someway react to what your saying..

Also.. imagine Live as one part of a larger whole. Lets say you’re life is the narrative. You have twitter, which is pretty close to real time.. lets call them grains of thought. You have a blog which is.. well ideally I’d like to think of it as a daily thing.. A podcast, which ideally is probably a weekly thing.. In someways, doesn’t it sorta seem like.. the closer to real time you go, the closer to the person you go?

I’m almost thinking.. forget about the audience.. in terms of thinking what might be interesting. I mean who knows, right? Lets just do our thing and see if anyone tunes into it..  Imagine you’re just constantly creating content.. almost like breathing. Would the constant flow of content, almost on it’s own, generate an audience? Sorta like.. I could type out anything here… and Google, and other search engines.. will see this text, and it’ll show up in searches.. so that it probably doesn’t even matter what I say.. if I just keep talking, an audience will develop.

Well no, not really.. who wants to read crap, right? Sure, you’ll see it, you’ll read a couple lines.. and then you’ll go “wow, this is stupid” and run away… so sure.. I can get zillions of people to take that first look, maybe.. just as an effect of creating lots of content.. but that’s not really what we want to do.. what we really want to do is to have folks who actively follow us.

I suppose we could look at these followers in terms of various segments.. There are people who might know who you are and casually follow you.. say if you connect with someone in a particular context.. they might be curious enough to sorta visit your stream…  That person is a consumer.. but you know.. not a big consumer.. Then you have someone who’s.. lets say a fan.. or better yet, we are talking about a hard core fan! The hard core fan, depending on how hard the core is.. that person is likely to consume a lot more content then the person who’s only occasionally bumping into things.

Ok.. so look at that.. Isn’t that interesting! What I mean is… the hard core and the casual consumer want different things. The way I would look at it is like this.. the casual consumer hears your music on the radio, the hard core consumer buys your CD. When you only know a band by there TV and Radio appearances.. that you happen into by chance.. versus someone who actively seeks this band out.. you have qualitatively different experiences..  When communicating with the casual consumer… you speak in sound bites, when speaking to the hard core fellow, you speak in paragraphs.

I guess my point is.. you can see why a social media strategy would want both.. and perhaps the full spectrum in between. 

In marketing, the subject of “conversion” is not insignificant.. of how to convert someone from a casual consumer, lets say, and a hard core consumer.. or even from a non consumer to a hard core consumer. 

Next day:

Good enough, lets post 

I’ve been thinking a bit about this blog, this site, projects, strategy, and blah blah blah… about where thing’s be at, and where I should like to take them…  Seems worthy of a little blogging, don’t cha think?

You know, social media.. a big part of it is “you should be your self:” Success in personal branding has something to do with authenticity. Mitch Joel talks about “the snow flake theory” in relationship to personal branding.. that we are all snow flakes, each individual, and thus we differentiate our selves via nature, as a pose to via consciouses will.. Ok, maybe Mitch doesn’t use anything like those words, but if he had my background he’d say it like that!

Yeah… so like.. I’ve been thinking about this sorta thing and thinking.. hmm.. sometimes I go into this super duper intellectual mode.. which is something I dig, to be sure..  but folks who have a different sort of insanity from my own… I think that kinda talk can produce certain digestive challenges. And it occurs to me, I have a whole lot of what we call in the biz “personality.” And that personality ain’t coming through so much… Or maybe it’s not that… maybe it’s just like.. I want to speak more freely.. or I want to do something.. I’m not even sure what it is.. It’s just that I feel it in my bones, do you know what I mean?

Anyway, I figure I need to blog more..  I’m thinking I’d like to have more blog entries.. probably shorter.. just like snippets of thoughts… Just little things. I also think there are certain “blog strategery” reasons for doing this.. 

I suppose a lot of what I’ve been doing with this blog is.. just getting my feet wet a bit. I mean I haven’t even been keeping this blog for that long.. since sometime around Boston Podcamp 2… so in so many ways I still feel the need to find my voice…

I mean.. how much of this should just be my personal voice? “And this is what I had for lunch today.” Can what a person had for lunch today be interesting? I tend to believe anything “could” be interesting.. depending where the beholder is coming from.. and I’m fascinated by consciousness.. as well as streams there of.. and I don’t mean to go so far as to talk about life casting.. but… there’s something in there of value to me.

A few latter:

So would you like to hear some thoughts about new things on the drawing boards? I’m thinking about creating some new podcasts…  The master podcast feed, for these, which would include them all, you can subscribe through iTunes by clicking here. Right now that’s a somewhat faded podcast.. But one idea I had was to have several things you subscribe to.. that would all be sorta “they come out when they come out,” which is to say producing regular content wouldn’t be on the agenda but…  One idea is to show works in progress.. as we speak I’m working on some new Reason content, and I’d love to be able to take you into the studio with me.. lets check this out.. Where I’d share these projects I’m working on.. and sorta talk about what they are all about..  

A whole lot latter:

In keeping with the notion of posting more often, and making them short, how about I post this now? 

[Editors note, this entry was started last Sunday]

As we speak, I’m just groggily awakening from my post Media Makers nap. You see Boston Media makers is a group that meets the first Sunday, of every month, from 10AM (roughly) to 12 (roughly) in Jamaica Plain Mass (think Boston). Making it for me often involves mass sleep deprivation.. which then takes some time to recover from.  But, it’s generally worth it.

I wouldn’t know the best way to describe the group. On a basic level, do to modern computing and the internet, all digital media comes down to ones and zeros.. so photography, sound, video, whatever.. its kinda all the same at some point. So the group is filled with folks whom, one way or another, make media and put it on the net. Some of what’s so exciting about our times is the new kind of democracy technology is bringing us, where literally anyone can become a content producer, where you can do something not that dissimilar from becoming your own TV station on the net… only for a lot less money and without having to worry about distribution. So it’s a pretty groovy revolution.

When you find your self in the position of being an independent content producer, of the net making sort, it helps to find other folks whom are dealing with the same sorts of challenges as you are, enter the Boston Media Makers.

Should you be interested in this sorta thing, and in the general area, you might want to stop by.. here’s a link to the group’s blog were more information can be found. 

Our tradition is to go around the room and have people talking about what they are doing.. here’s some of that:

Steve Garfield 

Steve Garfield, a pretty famous video blogger, introduce a couple of things to the group:

• Qik: Software, that when paired with an apparently expensive phone with a video camera attached to it, allows you to stream live over the internet from anywhere.
• A Live In America, from the folks who brought us A Live In Baghdad, is coming soon, and is looking for contributers. I’m thinking about participating.
• There’s a tweet up at Boston Beer Works at 7PM this Tuesday (tomorrow as of my writing this) Which looks interesting. Steve will be live casting it via Qik…  I forget the other details.. which make it sound even more interesting.

I’m fascinated by technologies like Qik: You wonder “what could be some interesting applications for this?” Or you wonder how you might use this kind of technology as a part of whatever it is you’re doing. As I put my budgets together, I don’t see where a seven or eight hundred dollar cell phone could fit into my shtick, particularly as Qik is still in an early phase of development, which roughly translates into “integration is less then perfect.”

That said, I was on Twitter the other day when Steve put a link to a live cast he was doing, interviewing some folks from the Obama campaign whom where, I guess, doing door to door.. which proved fascinating. From the Qik site, you could type in questions, that Steve could then ask the people he was talking to. You can find Steve’s Qik page here, along with archives of past casts.

Another interesting application for Qik, and I’m not sure if this worked out or whatever, but Steve was talking about a group who would do a live show, not through Qik mind you, where different people at there computer web cams.. would be talking, and it would be like “and now to George in Austin Texas.” So sorta like a live news show.. where you could cover whatever.. and of course what Steve wanted to do was to have it passed to him.. not in front of a computer, but off in the field somewhere.. fascinating stuff! 

Rebecca Herman 

Rebecca, is involved in a documentary project, having some connection to Duke university. This project involves documenting undocumented migrants in the hispanic community. This would be a video project. The project is inspired by, or of a similar vain as, 6millionothers.org. (what a great Flash project.)

I messaged her a while back in response for a call for help… as far as getting her blog / web design / social media strategy stuff together. We were going to get together to talk a bit, at one of these Boston Media makers, but that didn’t come to pass.

Well now she’s looking to do a kind of instillation project, using video. Made me think of some classes I took with this guy:

 And check out this clip from one of his instillations:

Pretty groovy, ha? 

And then, why just a week or to ago, I went to a bfpug meeting on “Interactive Design and Physical Computing with Flash.” Basically, you plug a circuit board into your laptop.. the circuit board has “ins and outs.” You can set up various types of “switches” as inputs into the circuit board.. and you can plug these small “engines” / whatever into the board’s out puts, which the computer can then control. The “engines” can work like robotics.. or you could use the board to turn on and of lights, and what not.  

Here’s an example..  Here, if someone stands between the TV on the bed, and the other TV, a switch makes the TV on the bed play the clip where the bed person says “move it, common, move.”

Think “Tony Oursler does Warhol 2.0?”

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? So this isn’t about technology, this is about.. well other things..  that the technology makes sort of magical. From an artist’s process perspective.. well, in this case it’s a little conceptual.. they way it interacts with the audience.. you see those themes from the earlier clip of Tony talking about personal and impersonal.. etc, etc.. how this plays with personal space / gallery space, in a certain way… or..  well you get the idea.

How this would translate to an instillation about immigrants is another question. Further, Flash is primarily a web app, so how might you take advantage of what Flash has to offer on that front? Would there be a way you could integrate that with a technology like Qik?

Rebecca has a blog at RegardingRebecca.Com.

Jason Stevens

Jason Stevens does Beyond Event Marketing and Advertising. He’s looking for people with media design type skills for work.. so I messaged him.

Jessica Burko 

Jessica Burko of JessickaBurko.com…. She’s an artist.. she does marketing and promotional type stuff for artists, and is just starting to explore some of this social media stuff. She’s associated with Boston Hand Made, a group of Boston area artists, who meet up on the first Thursday of every month. Ok, now here’s a group I need to explore!

Rick Burnes

I keep running into Rick..  He does 9neighbors.com. 9 Neighbors aggregates local news blog content, local to Boston, to one place. It uses a Digg like system, where in, community voting / ranking, impacts a stories prominence on the site.

Usually, when we think internet we think Global.. but.. perhaps particularly when your thinking mobile web, the importance of local is on the rise.

Tom Beach

This is where my notes gets a little shaky.. There’s supposed to be a blog, but I get an error message on the page. Anyway.. seems web design orientated.  Find out more at TRBDesign.com.

John Herman

Check out JohnHerman.org, he does great stuff. He’s an artist / writer / media maker / performer. He’s doing a web video series you can checkout at gravityland.com. This will involve user interaction, where users will effect elements of the series…  So you know, go participate. It’s still early, not officially.. well official yet.. so there may not be too much going on there at the moment.. indeed there’s not.. but stay tuned, or bookmarked / rss-ed if you will.

Jack Hodgson

Jack is clearly a very smart guy. I haven’t had to many opportunities to interact with him, but I’ve been seeing him around these circles since I started entering these circles. He’s doing a podcast called Uncontrolled Airspace. Uncontrolled Airspace is a podcast on general aviation.. in the “hanger flying tradition,” which is to say when pilots get together in the hanger, and talk flying.. in a colorful sort of way I understand, and I hear it’s a very good podcast.

Brain Christiansen

Brian works at User Interface Engineering. Jared Spool (his boss at UIE) was on episode 77 of Mitch Joel’s 6 Pixels of Separation a few months back. (a great episode on web strategy) I met Jared at PodCamp Boston 2, and he came, virtually, to a New England Podcaster meet up some time ago… Brian has a site at briandigital.com. He does the UIE podcast, and various other things.

Linda Shah

Linda’s involved with Beanywood.com, soon to be New Film Nation. Beanywood is a social networking site for people working in Film, and related stuff. This is some amazingly cool stuff.

BJ Hill 

BJ is doing a project called Walk Across America. During the Massachusetts gobernatorial race that elected Deval Patrick, BJ walked across Mass filling a note book with things people might want to say to whomever might win the election. This project had a social media component.  He won a lot of press attention for the project, which lead to an opportunity to meet Deval Patrick, and hand him the note book. Walk Across America is essentially the same idea, but on a national level.

Cool stuff.

Amanda Van Scoyoc

Amanda is an artist: photographer, documentarian, writer, and painter… Indeed she even has a BA in psychology. (you know me, how can I not bring a thing like that up?) She’s got some nice looking work, and a blog, that you can check out at Amandavs.com.

Steve Albanese

Steve runs Tutorial Depot, which provides video tutorials on how to use… well various sorts of technology. Currently he’s focused on music production tools like Pro Tools, Logic, Digital Performer, etc.. He’s looking for people to author tutorials. 

At Podcamp Boston, Steve asked me if I’d like to be a Reason Tutorial author. Can I get a Hell yea? I had planned to get right to work on it.. but life got a little crazy.

My mom was sick, and got really sick. I had to learn the new version of Reason, and as a part of this I worked on my Zar Matt A Thustra Deep Space Adventures project.  I’ve blogged about this here, you can find links to the actual music at mattsearles.com/music/. 

This was a part of NaSoAlMo, which was a challenge to make a solo album in the month of November. My participation was, at least in part, a tactic to hold myself together while my mom was as sick as she was.  Shortly after, in December, my mom died. 

More Links

After this, my notes break down a bit, but here are some more links:

• Project Think Different
• Left Ahead
• FloPrompter
• Boston Biker
• Bicycle Film Festival 

So you see, its sorta an amazing group. I mean it’s amazing what people are doing… what’s going on in this space.. and the potential of this space. It can be hard to go to one of these meetings without feeling inspired. 

I wouldn’t say I have writers block.. I couldn’t say that really: I write soooo much shit. Trouble is I don’t post.  Why?  Well, it seems like.. to write something worth while, I feel I need to push on it hard enough to get it some place interesting.  By the time I get there, it’s a long post, and with my writing as bad as it is, there’s a need for heavy editing. If a long post is poorly written, why in hell would you go to the trouble to read it?

This and there are certain subjects that are a little difficult, like lets say… race, politics, religion… subjects that…  I suppose could get you in trouble, depending on how you write on them. Well not trouble exactly but.. I mean I want to be respectful of wherever a reader might be coming from, and sometimes I wonder if my positions might inherently not be, somehow, depending on where you’re coming from. Well, I suppose that’s what comments are for, so feel free to bitch slap me, should it be necessary.

A component of this problem is.. I have some strange ideas about things. Some of these strange ideas, at least on the surface, might look a little crazy. In some cases I’m not sure if they’re crazy myself. In my toy chest of ideas, there’s a set of ideas that..  well they are old.. from another time in my life. Ideas I haven’t picked up since.. well whenever. The result is, whatever certainty I had of them, back in the day, today they hold certain question marks, at least for me. Yet, at the same time, these ideas are not without a certain weight in how I live my life.

It’s sorta like.. what we do with our lives today, that builds the foundation for who we are tomorrow. So I suppose there’s a need for some foundation inspections, ha?

One set of ideas I call “the God concept.” These are ideas that could be shelved under “mysticism.” At one point in my life, I was searching for something akin to “a scientific proof of the existence of God.” The “experience” surrounding this, shall we call it an intellectual journey?, was one that defined the future direction of my life. Where I’m standing today, comes out of that.

The ground I’m standing on is not a certain ground. There are deep questions surrounding where I’m standing. Are these questions the force of damage sustained at earlier points in my life, or is there something real in them?

There is this force of socialization in our lives: There is this way that the world tries to define us. Seems like a bad idea to let it. So many of my questions seem to stem from this sort of thing. Perhaps this is a monster I should slay?

I remember as a small child, having almost like imaginary friends. Somewhere in here the idea of imaginary bands, or armies, or whatever. And I remember one idea was something like “monster slayers.” What is the relationship between the consciousness of children, and adult consciousness? What I mean is, being so little, wanting to kill the monsters of humanity, are those monsters not the anxieties of adult life? Anxieties that drive collective evolution? Anxieties that steer the life of our times?

It’s funny to look at it this way: like a childhood fear of the dark, or a monster in the closet, or under your bed, is a monster that grows up as you grow up.

I remember my parents seeming rather odd to me. I think much of this must come from being adopted. I still don’t really understand my parents.

Since my mom died, I have a lot more experience of my dad. In someways my mom’s passing actually makes things easier: My mom had a certain need to control, and in that need to control was a certain amount of anxiety. Anxiety often keeps us from seeing things as they are, and adversely effects our abilities to adapt. It seems like this must be a cause of my early life’s trauma, after all so much of a child’s psychology is the product of there parents.

But the monster slayers: it seems like this childhood idea has evolved into an adult idea. The idea that I should do battle with our collective anxieties, try to pass through the shadow worlds, and come out the other side, with all our lost gold.

Perhaps my trouble, when it comes to blogging, has to do with speaking from inside the shadow’s dark wood?