After a long break from blogging because of project and client commitments (I was Twittering and Facebooking and Friendfeeding and posting to del.icio.us all the time; does that count…?), I have now decided to get a name domain and do a bit of the personal branding type stuff that everyone is talking about

The first step of course was to register my own name as a top level domain (TLD). This starts your journey on the way to projecting a serious, professional image to prospective clients and business partners or just friends on the internet who now can see you’re not just goofing around on the internet the whole time, but that it can actually be used for more serious business and professional networking purposes

So this is the start of my attempt to bring all my different blogs and profiles together under one roof and namespace. The obvious benefit is that it will go a long way towards focusing my attention on only the one major repository of stuff that is scattered all over the web at the moment.

All the different blogs hosted elsewhere and all the different profiles on the different social networks are becoming a bit unwieldy and the trend is nowadays towards aggregated lifestreaming and building your personal brand online.

Doing that will be much easier if there is one place to rule them all, one place to consolidate them, one place to aggregate them all and in lifestreamlining bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien). Hey, did I just make up a new word: lifestreamlining…? Hmmm… So, what exactly is it that I do online that it now deserves a dedicated namespace and aggregation effort…? Web development, mainly on the WordPress content management system platform and everything related to that: registering domain names, hosting those accounts on CentOS Linux servers, setting up and configuring the WordPress CMS, maintaining it and augmenting it with the multitude of plugins and themes available. Of course it’s never that simple, and I shall dedicate a future post to a detailed outline of what all goes into setting up and maintaining blogs for clients. Especially with the advent of Social Media and the myriad services out there, it has become a regular cottage industry. Consultant services to marketing and PR professionals who want to enter the Social Media phenomenon but who do not necessarily have access to a geeky nephew or brother who can set it up and maintain it for them.

Also with the creation of new roles of Social Media Strategists, more and more businesses and big corporations are committing budget to individual who can set up, configure and maintain social media profiles and services for them in the new media landscape where they have to necessarily go where the conversation is happening and the cool kids hang out, otherwise they will just become irrelevant and fall out of everyone’s attention sphere and lose clients and thus business and profit. So, without rambling on too much, that is what I do all the time, getting paid to goof off on the internet all day and put up Facebook and del.icio.us and Friendfeed accounts and profiles for paying clients. Geez, I’ve done it for myself and I’m having a fabulous time, if someone else also want in on the action, they can bloody well pay me for my time and trouble, can’t they…?

Some bright sparks (software engineers) who worked at Google before, came up with a brilliant new lifestream aggregating service called Friendfeed. I am testing the brand spanking new WordPress Friendfeed widget in the sidebar of my blog. What it does is integrate into one service all the disparate profiles and accounts and pull them together, and now with the WordPress widget you can plug it in to your blog sidebar. People who are interested in seeing what you’re up to need only go to one place to see where you’ve done what. For example if you’ve watched videos over at YouTube and marked it as a favourite, if you’ve posted a new blog post at another domain, uploaded Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items from your RSS collection of feeds, listened to favourite last.fm tracks, scheduled an event at upcoming.org or updated your Twitter status with a Tweet or ten, whether you dugg stories on digg or saved del.icio.us bookmarks, it will all show up in one place: your Friendfeed profile.

The main Friendfeed site and web interface also has the ability to let you like things and comment on your stream of events and those of friends whom you have subscribed to. This has led to Friendfeed becoming the destination of choice for many of the more prominent Twitter personalities when Twitter experiences one of it’s notorious hiccups, which is frequent and unexpected and many times it’s a case of guess which functional aspect is gonna be crippled this week while they (hopefully) are hard at work in the background getting things up and running smoothly.

Twitter, Google, Facebook -Social Networks Join Hands to Help Make the World a Better Place | The Daily Galaxy | News from Planet Earth and Beyond

The Daily Galaxy, one of my all-time favourite websites, has a story about three big web giants, who has started an initiative where their powerful worldwide and instantaneous communications technology are going to be used to do some good. It looks like it will mostly focus on co-ordinating amongst rescue workers in the case of a humanitarian relief effort, and also as an instant news updating source about conditions and circumstances at a certain location; anywhere in the world.

This certainly is very encouraging to see, one reads in the media only of the sensationalist headline grabbing bylines; Facebook productivity drain blah blah blah; Twitter ego-boosting mundane chattering. It is unfortunate that those who lend themselves to insincere sensation does not stop and realize that there is more to life than running up hits and clicks on your website.

The majority of users of these services also will realize at some point that it can be used as more than just a toy to poke and zombie bite your buddies or letting everyone know what you just threw at the lecturer. It can be used to let everyone in a certain region know what is happening where and where to go to find help and resources. Relief workers also can stay in instant communication with each other and mission control and so be more effective and timely in cases of natural and other diasters.

One of the applications that this project will focus around is the ability that Twitter has to work between the internet and mobile phones.

Using a location detection feature, a message sent from a phone from the middle of Africa, will tie in with a layer on Google Earth, pinpointing the senders location, with the text message requesting help. Aid workers from UNICEFF or the InSTEDD’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, could then read the message, and provide assistance.

“We can send an SMS message onto Google Earth in an emergency center, and it sees a dot with a color-coded response, with my name and date. Right underneath that, there’s a button that says reply, and (aid workers can send a note that says) we have the resources you need 2 miles north…Suddenly there’s a two-way conversation using nothing but a cell phone with one bar,” said Rasmussen, adding: “We’ve done this.

Lastly, I want to touch on the intention of users of tools. It is really a fundamental principle of the intention of any user of a tool, how that tool will be utilized and how such utilitarian use are viewed by others affected by your use of said tool.

In real life, if you use a screwdriver to fix an appliance, you’re called a technician or whatnot. Use that same screwdriver to stab someone seventeen times and society labels you a psychopathic killer and locks you up for life so you cannot be a danger and threat to people who don’t care for your issues…

In the same vein, I would like to challenge all the Facebook haters out there to actually start using the service optimally, for more serious business networking and information gathering. Use Twitter to follow the mindstreams of the pioneers in the tech business and watch and learn from them. Humble down and don’t run after the first nutcase conspiracy theory or sensationalist garbage in the media.

Use the grey matter you have been provided with and use the tools you criticize before using those same services for linkbait and SEO juice to run up the hits. That is EVIL!

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, but we are proud to announce our very own YouTube channel, specifically for Hogsback Media Networks related content.

In trying to build up features and content for this site, one of the obvious media modalities to consider is videos of things and subjects relevant to New Media 2.0, which is Hogsback Media Networks’ primary business focus. After considering all the options and doing the cost-benefit analysis thing, it was decided to rather go the YouTube route, than hosting videos on our own server infrastructure, which would cripple our servers and chow through the bandwidth, if and when a certain item or items or posts becomes popular.

So, the solution: Registering for a YouTube account, they are owned by Google, so they have the world’s biggest and best and fastest distributed data center architecture serving up streaming videos. And it is all free! Gravy!!!!

If you have a gmail account already or using any of Google’s other services (docs and spreadsheets, calendar, maps, reader, scholar, books, etc.) you can just log in with that and start creating your YouTube custom profile, channel, favourites, tags, etc.

Do a search for videos you’re interested in, say Web 2.0 or wordpress or blogging, and you are presented with an overwhelming selection to choose from. Set up a playlist and channels: playlists are really categories and you can set up how many you need for each subheading of videos you’re interested in, e.g web 2.0, startups, technology, venture capital, photoshop, linux, blogging, wordpress, etc. Click through to go to the video itself and you are presented with a menu to Share, Add to Favourites or add to Channel or Playlist.

In such a way I built up a selection of Web 2.0 and tech startup related videos in one place, created a channel for all of it and then used the Google code generated for this purpose to host on one’s own website or blog. The interface was a bit unsuited for the main blog to integrate with, so i created a subdomain on hogsback.net, appropriately named youtube.hogsback.net. Head over there now and see what I have loaded into the channel so far; videos range from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch interviewing many of the most well-known Silicon Valley startup founders on their understanding of the term Web 2.0 to a board room session where angel investors speak of what they need to see regarding your financial projections when trying to raise startup capital.

All that and more and new videos will be added after I have chosen more that is relevant to Hogsback Media Networks and it’s clients. This is of course also part of the portfolio of value added services we can incorporate into a client’s marketing strategy. Whether you choose videos on YouTube uploaded by others and sharing and commenting on them, or whether you have your own created videos illustrating your message or brand or poduct, this is a very valuable enhancement to any brand or product and it’s marketing and PR strategies in todays New Media world.

So please head over to youtube.hogsback.net and feast your eyes

NB. Fast broadband/ADSL  connection preferable. Click on Menu and each video with a short description underneath appear in the right sidebar, use the right arrow to scroll through the selection and read the captions, then click on which ever video you want to see, and that’s it.

The whole issue of getting all the different social networking/bookmarking sites’ profiles into one page has now become a sort of personal mission for me, both because it makes it easier to manage and also because of the potential it has of becoming a personal publishing platform.

Like your own personal media network, where you decide what content from which sources you want to share and how and when and where and why such sharing should be taking place at all.

I have been trying to do this for a while now with Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, digg and basically just testing out all the different capabilities and functions and special features of each service. I will post more detailed uses of each site after a bit more testing and using and research.

Then of course comes the part where all of this has to be linked and connected up together and I find that Facebook works best for that purpose. There are of course whole tech startups devoted to exactly this, but I find the idea of yet another social networking service to aggregate all the other social networking services on one page a bit silly. I have received my Beta Registration acknowledgment for Twine though, and if all the reviews and write-ups about it so far are true, it should be exactly the kind of thing that is needed to make sense of all the disparate and scattered SNP’s (social networking profiles) into one profile to bind them, one profile to rule them all and in an intelligent manner binding them into One profile to rule them all. (apologies to JRR Tolkien)

For all of this of course you need a good web browser and here, without any hesitation or dispute, i will recommend Firefox, and the stumbleupon, del.icio.us and facebook add-ons (toolbars). Unfortunately Firefox has become a bit bloated of late and freezes regularly and uses too much processing power, so I switched to Seamonkey, which is more lightweight and very fast.

It is easy to, from within Google Reader, click on a link of a news article you like or find interesting, photoblog it with stumbleUpon, bookmark it with del.icio.us, and all of it is updated and cross-updated on your Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and digg blogs all at the same time or however you have configured or set it up. Our company of course specializes in exactly this as a service to our clients.

Gmail is every web worker’s number one ally, then there is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Reader, Calendar and Maps etc to collaborate on projects with those that share your interests or guest posters/contributors etc. And if you log into secure encrypted SSL Google mail (https://mail.google.com), your Docs and Calendar and Maps are also automatically through encrypted SSL tunnel. And it is all free!!!

With Google Reader you keep track of the most important feeds from around the ‘blogosphere’, specifically those in your own field or sphere of interests and tastes.

What you highlight or bookmark or share depends entirely on your ability to pick newsworthy or interesting items that other people would be interested in seeing or if you have a certain story or project or slant, this can form the basis for the theme of ‘your own personal publishing empire’. With regular, quality content you build up regular and loyal visitors and with more and more regular visitors comes the ability to charge premium rates for ads (custom designed animated ad banners of advertising partners).

For more info on any of these strategies for your company or brand, feel free to mail mario [at] hogsback [dot] net