What Has Been Happening

Currently, there has been a lot going on in my life. I'm definitely keeping very busy with editing Life in Adams. In fact, I have to get a complete rough cut of all four episodes by tomorrow and then the director is going to give me some corrections/feedback and I have a week to adjust some things before our premiere on May 30th. I'm a little bit stressed out about it, because the footage I was given and audio was very unorganized and was not slated very well.  That has been making it take about 3x longer to edit, because trying to sync audio and video and compress the footage takes forever in itself, but not being able to find the right audio for the video is making it a much longer process than it should be.  It's really important for the AC's to slate everything properly on set, because otherwise it's a disaster for the editors.  Besides the time consumption, the editing is going decently.  There's just so much to do and so little time.

On a more pleasant note, Here Lies Luther has its entire rough cut finished as well.  Alex and I still have to go in and make some adjustments and do color correction, but it's going really smoothly.  This project has been really fun to edit and be on set for.  I'm really confident that it's going to look really great when we finally premiere it!

If you're interested in checking out Here Lies Luther you can click on this LINK to see our webpage and read a little about the storyline :)

Social Media in Business

After reading a bit about how to implement social media in businesses in Brogan's book, social tools are essential.  With the use of these on several different networks, you can get your business positive notice from many many people.  He lists a lot of different things you can do to help your business  incorporate social media.

When blogging, Brogan suggests "being human" and write a human-sounding profile.  This is so important, because nobody is going to be interested in reading something that sounds overly formal that's hard to read.  If it sounds like a human is writing it, it also comes across as more relatable and personable, which is never a bad thing. This tip can go a really long way in helping a business, because more people are going to want to stay connected and see what's being said in a human-like way.

A second tip that Brogan suggests is to check your stats to see what people are searching for, and address it.  This is a great piece of advice for a business using social media. First of all, social media is allowing your business to get feedback in the first place, but now using a blog, Twitter, etc. allows you to do something with that feedback.  If there is information people want to know, what better way of showing good service to them than by answering to it.

A third piece of advice is to keep a clean theme for the design of your blog.  Some are free and some you can buy, but either way, it will make your page have a little bit more credibility.  When it looks clean and organized, people are more likely to read it since it is so easy to find things.  When a blog is cluttered, people aren't going to waste their time trying to find information on them.  

Another helpful tip that Brogan talks about is making sure it is easy for people to subscirbe to your blog.  That's the key with social media...EASY. You want to make it as simple and easy as possible for people to follow you and subscribe to you, or else they just aren't going to do it. If you put a tool on your blog that just has a nice obvious "Subscribe to this Page" kind of thing, people will click it. When you don't make it easy for people, you don't get the results you want.

Lastly, Brogan suggests picking three social networks to join based on where your customers might be. There's Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  There are so many place to reach an audience and not everyone uses every single one of these sites.  So, the more networks you have in different social media sites, the bigger your chance is of reaching people who your business is applicable to. 

New Technologies

After watching the TED video about all this new technology where you can use your mind to make things happen, I am not sure how I feel about it.  I really get a little weirded out with technology that is so invasive.  I guess it isn't too creepy, because it's only doing what you tell it to do with your mind, but it's still weird to me.  I can see how this would be helpful to to human connection, because it's allowing people to use their minds to do things versus creating robots that are programmed to do something we want it to do.  

There are both disadvantages and advantages to technology like this. However, I think with inventions like these it's just putting the world on the fast track to laziness.  I think it's a much better thing when people have to physically do work.  Everything is being made for the use of simplicity, including inventions like this which can be taken as an advantage and disadvantage.  With simplicity comes laziness, but sometimes simplicity is a good thing because then you are able to get things done faster and more effectively.  

In my personal opinion, I think that it is just another "isolating" feature of our technical world.  Don't get me wrong, it's really cool to be able to come up with technology that actually can connect to a human brain, but when does it go too far? When are we crossing a line with technology like this?

Cooperation and Collaboration

In class we watched Howard Rheingold's TED talks about cooperation and collaboration. He makes a lot of points about how in the coming years we are entering an entirely new form of getting economic success through technology that is very different from anything we have done previously.  With this, cooperation and collaboration are very important.  He uses the example of the prisoner's dilemma game and how people tend to lose, however, with this new open sourcing it kind of defeats the prisoner's dilemma because people are allowed to help with certain projects and software to make it better and this is a win-win situation for companies that have the open sourcing as well as for the people participating in making it better. The whole point of open-sourcing is collaboration.  It allows anyone the opportunity, if they so desire, to alter a project in a way that they think improves it.  It also requires cooperation from the company and the people, because the project is constantly changing, which can be frustrating.

I really don't know how I feel about this open-source movement. It doesn't seem like a very stable thing, because when so many people are going in and making changes to something is there ever a point where everyone agrees that it is the best it can be? I doubt it. In perspective, I suppose it could be successful.  It sounds like a great idea, because people get a say in the product they want to use.  However, the odds of its success don't seem to be very high. I don't think that I would personally trust it. I think that people may move towards it at first,  but will probably get way too frustrated with the constant changing of it and just want their proprietary software back.  I do think that proprietary software companies will always have bank on software development and distribution, because not everyone knows how to do coding and go in and alter software and products in open-sourcing.  I also think that some people, my dad for instance, don't want their programs constantly changing on them.  They want something stable that they know how to use and don't have to be bothered by learning new things.

Overall, open-sourcing could surprise me and turn out to be really successful and give everyone an opportunity to help make software the best it can be.  However, I don't think I'll buy into it.  I don't mind using proprietary software.