What’s your fave t-shirt? What slogan would you put on a shirt?

The simple reality is that social media has way more to do with common sense than it does with rocket science. Let me make this as simple as I can…social media simply provides you with tools and channels that allow you to extend your reach and better engage those with whom you wish to communicate.

Some great stuff, and I highly recommend it. A while back I attempted to boil down social media with some internal presentations (handout) at my office.

One of the comments got me thinking:

A person can’t be best friends with 2,000 people. It’s just not possible to read & respond to the tweets of 2,000 followers.

While this may be a true statement on the face of it, in practice it’s not necessary to directly interact with each and every one to be engaging in the SM space.

The key is knowing when - and how deeply - to interact. Having advanced keyword search tools (knowing when someone’s talking about you or your product), identifying key influencers (say, on a Twitter list), and really looking at social media through a CRM lens (vv. using a dashboard tool like CoTweet or Hootsuite) can all address the “scale” challenges.

This is where much of the true complexity lies. The principles the Mike describes in this article are excellent and common-sense; these are good principles to apply to the overall philosophy and strategy of the organizations social media interactions.

The real SM experts, I predict, are going to be the ones that understand these fundamentals, and can also help businesses with the “plumbing” of tying these myriad channels together and welding them into a usable business tool.

If done right, the “users” (the people in your company who use SM channels to interact with customers) just have simple, elegant ways to get their jobs done; the complexity is hidden.

Update: if you’re seeing this page via an RSS reader, the link I’m trying to test is: http://allanwhite.net/blog/comments/video_player_test/

I’ve also added a 3GP mobile version - if you’re using a non-iPhone mobile handset, let me know if that works. It will look awful, that’s the mobile game we’re in.

Monle trailer from Ochen K. on Vimeo.

It had me at hello! More precisely, the first screenshot showed the “essence” of the app - the 4 tracks of audio on the timeline. As I waited for the video to load [slowly, at my in-laws’ house - the agony!], the first quick animation showed everything else I needed to know: the playhead sweeping across the tracks, showing envelope adjustments and generally smooth playback (low latency is critical for any time-based media editing).

I’m sure most of you reading this are like, “why do I care about an audio editing app?” - a valid comment! Here’s the point: when it comes to visual or online communication, getting the essence of your message across in the first two seconds is incredibly effective. It’s hard to distill down your message into the first flash of an image. However, if you can do that effectively – you’ve got ‘em hooked. They’ll watch the rest.

This app looks very cool, and perfectly illustrates why I’ve been so excited about multitouch interfaces: getting real work done will be more fun and more direct than ever. The iPad is going to take that to a whole new level.

If You Are Kidnapped

Don’t panic.
Tell them I’m fabulously wealthy -
   I’ll think of something.
If they’re Muslim, don’t say you’re a “crusader”.
Don’t forget - martyrdom is cool.
Drink lots of water.
Make friends with the bugs;
   try giving them names to pass the time.
Remember ”Last of the Mohecans”:
“I will find you! I will!”
“Cooooooorrrrrrraaaaahhhhhh!!!”

What media types (books, conversations, blogs, radio/podcasts, tv shows) are you drawn to for political information?

I don’t care what your politics are, I just want to know how you got the way you are! Chime in.

As part of my role at the Palau Association, we needed to find some ways to webcast content generated on a Mac. I found the excellent, free and deep CamTwist to excel at taking the output from one region of the screen or application and routing it into “fake webcam” (essentially a QuickTime component that acts like a DV/Firewire source). Heyyy… ProPresenter will take a Firewire DV input! Let’s make some music, then…

Here’s this concept put into practical use by the geniuses at WorshipVJ. If this stuff excites you, then consider joining the WorshipVJ Facebook group.

I still haven’t found the Holy Grail of being able visualize live audio with iTunes in a music setting. In a future post, I’d like to look at some of the practical problems that this approach creates (namely doing all that crazyness on one machine) and explore some alternatives. Got any other ideas?

I post this more as a photographic or cinematographic study than anything. One of the things on my shot list at a festival is to film the pre-event construction. I was drawn to the geometric lines, the huge cumulus in the background, the dark silhouettes deftly working at a steady pace. And then, enjoying the sunset!

Click through to see the video.