What's Going on in that Head of Mine?

Currently, there are a lot of things on my mind.  Most of it has to do with video editing.  Right now I'm editing for the AVW show "Life in Adams" and have 4 episodes to finish by May 11th, which is stressing me out. I love editing though, so I know I'll be a happy camper as soon as I get some free time to sit down and crank out these episodes.

This is just a little teaser I made for the upcoming season of "Life in Adams"

Along with that, every weekend I've been on set for the 419 production, "Here Lies Luther." I'm the assistant editor and DIT for this short film and have been sooo incredibly busy with it. I absolutely love working on it and I especially love being around the crew, because they are fabulous. It's kind of sad that I have to miss out on all of the fests that everyone else is getting to go to, but working on these films is totally worth it.  Plus, I want to be a professional editor someday...not a professional partier. The funny thing about working on films is you never know what crazy things you're going to have to do. For "Here Lies Luther" we literally had to dig our own grave and make our own head stone, which is pretty out there. As someone who gets an inside look at the footage, it looks incredibly professional and I cannot wait until it's finished.

Grave diggin'

Lastly, summer is one of the big things on my mind lately! I am completely excited to be in LA for 3 months working at an amazing company and being in a beautiful place! It's going to be one of the coolest experiences, especially since I got to meet a few producers out there over spring break. We've been keeping in touch and I can't wait to meet up with them and learn as much as I can about the industry. It's really going to be an incredible experience.

What I've Learned

So far I have been able to learn a lot about social media from this course.  Mostly, I am learning how to be more active and also professional with the use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  The most interesting concept to me has been blogs.  I tried making a blog in the past, but I had a really hard time finding something to write about and also keeping up with it.  The purpose I tried using it for was mainly to just talk about my life. From this class, however, I have realized you can use blogs in professional way to get noticed throughout a company you may work for or just write about your opinion on something you find important. I've also learned how to get your blog seen by more people by making its appearance more appealing and adding different tools people can use to connect to your blog or post it on other sites.

The most boring topic that we've discussed in class is probably the Tag Clouds and Cloud Computing. I understand that it can be a way of storing useful documents and other things online so that you can access it anywhere from any device, but it's not very interesting of a topic to have a discussion on.  It's also a little bit difficult to understand if you have never had a Dropbox or used Mediafire before. It's definitely a neat thing to have available, but definitely not much fun to talk about.

There's a lot of ways I can take what I'm learning and apply it to the real world. First of all, I can use blogging for a professional reason instead of a personal journal type use.  It will allow me to write my opinions and also research other people's opinions on different media topics.  Also, many of the things I'm learning in this class are teaching me how to connect to other people via the internet, which is really a great thing and can teach me a lot in itself.  As I've said in earlier posts, I really want to blog about my summer internship at a film company and I will know how to add interesting photos and make my blog look professional for that.

This is a picture of the city of Santa Monica. I decided to post this because this is where I'll be blogging from this summer!

Commenting

In Chapter 73, Brogan makes a lot of really good points about commenting on people's blogs.  There are a  ton of blog posts being read everyday and people rarely leave very many comments. It can be especially sad if you have a really great blog and get no recognition.  However, Brogan points out that lack of time is a reason for this and that if you really enjoyed a blog post you read you can still bookmark the post or pass it along to others through other social media sites in order to help that blogger out and get notice for something great that he/she has written.

It's definitely something I want to keep in mind, therefore, I decided to comment on a few of my classmates' wonderful posts. Here they are:

Meg Owens
Adrian Andrade
Doug Trein

What the BLOG?!

As I was looking at other people's blogs today I came to a few different conclusions. First of all, people are super creepy and second of all, people really need lives! I say this because the first 3 blogs I came across were all about cats. Yes, cats. People like to make blogs and pretend it's their cat's blog and write their posts as if the cat is writing them. Odd. The 4th blog that I came across was not much better. The first 5 posts or so were videos and pictures of Hitler. 

Finally, the 5th blog that I came across when I pressed "next blog" was actually really neat.  This blog is called Frances Castles' Illustration Blog. If you couldn't tell by the name it's a blog about her illustrations. I'd put it in the category of an Art blog. After looking through it for a while, I was really intrigued with how neat her work is. I even found out that she's won some awards. 

Her blog is very neat and she's got a really nice layout and image at the top of her page that really encapsulates what her work is all about. The one thing that she's really missing is an About Me. She has a link to her website, which I went to and checked to see if she had an About Me there, but she did not. I think it's really important, especially in her case, for people to know who she is. Her blog is all about her work and it is hard to connect to her as person without knowing anything about her. 

Frances' blog is pretty simple and doesn't have too many extra things added.  She does have her Twitter  off to the side as well as a way for people to follow her. She has a lot of pictures of her work, which is the best part.  That's what everyone wants to look at anyway when she's writing about it in her posts.

So many tools!

There's so many different tools that are available to use when it comes to social media. There are listening tools which are for the purpose of making searches on different topics, brands, companies, etc. easy for you. An example of this would be Google Reader. There is blogging, of course, such as home base blogs like WordPress and scratch blogs like Tumblr. These can be used to communicate all sorts of different information whether it's news, responding to something, or just feel like posting a short video or text. There are a lot of other tools out there as well like Facebook, which we use for just about everything and LinkedIn for business purposes.

Another very popular tool that is used is the Wiki. Wikis seem to be made for collaboration. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about wikis, because I've never had to use them...except for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is actually an extremely useful site, because you can get all the information you need as well as post information yourself. When it comes to uses wikis for business to be used as a collaborative tool I'm not so sure if they're worth using.  The thought of communicating to business partners through a wiki is kind of unappealing to me. I'm sure that it is a tool that works, but I just prefer phone calls or face-to-face communication.  I think that you are able to grow more as a business team if you get to know each other in person rather than through a wiki. However, one of the really great things about the ideas of wikis are that you get credit for what you're doing. Sometimes people don't get credit where it is due when your work can't be tagged to you like it can in a wiki.

As I was just saying, I don't think I've ever really used wikis. Therefore, I decided to check out Healthy Recipes Wiki from Wikia.  This wiki is actually really great if you're into finding recipes for healthier dishes to eat.  You are able to upload your own recipes as well as use the search box to search the wiki for different recipes.  It has a section for Featured Recipe, Ingredient Spotlight, Food Poll, The Weekly Dish from Eat Life Whole and Healthy News.  The wiki is really lighthearted and simple.  It doesn't really talk about anything other than good recipes for Spring and has articles in the Healthy News section.  I think this wiki is really useful if you are like me and try to eat healthy and also try out new recipes!  Maybe I'll change my mind about wikis after all. 

ah, social networking

So, social networking is a pretty big deal these days. Quite frankly, I can't get enough of Facebook. This is probably the social networking site that I tend to use the most often because it literally has pretty much everything on it.  You can talk to your friends, post things, look at pictures, videos, etc. Not only that, but you can link your other social networking sites to it as well such as Pinterest and Twitter. It's extremely convenient to share information and conversation. The reason I use Facebook so much is because it has everything and it's incredibly addicting. I don't think that they need to add anything else to it to make it any more functional. The weird thing about my habit of using Facebook is just that; it's a habit. I would love to stop using it, but it's almost impossible for me. If I stopped using it I wouldn't get group notifications about different films I'm working on, I wouldn't hear from a lot of friends anymore, and I would lose all of the photos I have with friends that I don't want to save on my own computer. Overall, I have an intense love-hate relationship with Facebook.

Another social networking site that I use somewhat often is Twitter. The thing about Twitter is that I go on it often, but I rarely ever post anything. I kind of made my Twitter because my friends told me to, but really didn't understand the purpose. The reason I do go on it at all is because I like to follow people who post funny or positive things. It's nice to go on my Twitter and have a nice laugh once or twice a day or read something positive.  Sometimes I think that is where Facebook is going wrong. From my experience, people tend to complain a lot in their status posts on Facebook, but for some reason everyone likes to say really positive and fun things on Twitter. Who knows. As I already said, however, I don't really USE Twitter. I don't think I've ever posted anything of use on there. In fact, I think the only things I have posted on there are just quotes I enjoyed. I still don't know if I get the point of Twitter. I don't think anything really needs to change on the site, though. I think it just is what it is and if you enjoy it, you probably use it.

Goals 'n Gadgets

The goal of my blog, as touched on in my first post, is to kind of get to know how blogging works. I want to get a good grasp on how to get people to read what I have to say. One of the main reasons is because I want to consistently blog over the summer about all about my experience interning in LA. Along with that, I want to know what is appropriate for me to say regarding that internship and not get myself into trouble. Not only that, but I want to explore social networking and how what others and myself write can affect people's ways of thinking about the subject. Basically, I want to have fun writing this blog and jot down my own personal experiences and thoughts on different things! :)


I added two gadgets to my blog.  The first being the Share It gadget, which I've added to the right side of my page. This allows people to share something I post onto their Facebook or Twitters.  I thought this would be a neat addition, especially because I want to blog about my experience in LA and I know my friends and family might get a little excited for me and want to share some things I post! In addition to that, I added the Followers gadget. This allows people to follow my blog, which I thought might be useful because I'd love to have followers first of all. Second of all, It's always cool to see who is following you, because they might be following you because they blog about similar things and I might end up enjoying their blog as well.