creative briefing

The one pitfall of all these social communities spawning every day is that it becomes somewhat of a chore to upkeep them. And because everything you do online seems to be publically available thanks to great tools like Google, managing your online identity, whether you blog, tweet, digg, stumble, link in, facebook, or all of the above, can get quite exhausting.

Despite this, my social curiosity (or is it ‘curiosity 2.0′?) continues to drag me hesitantly down these beaten paths, led by my ambition to stay ahead of the game, yet lagged by my lack of bandwidth to build up another social identity.

That having been said, I finally gave in to StumbleUpon and have been putting in a three-quarter-ass effort to be active in the SU community. And because it’s not cool to stumble alone in an environment that jives on social interaction, I thought I’d share my profile with everyone in hopes of finding new people to fan and possibly some new fans in return as well.

So if you’re on StumbleUpon, leave a link to your profile in the comments so I can check it out. Help support my social addiction by checking out mine here: verneho.stumbleupon.com. Add me as a friend if you like my taste.

I’m armed with the toolbar now so you can expect some good stumbles from my end. I look forward to seeing yours!

So they finally made a movie based on the YouTube phenomenon that triggers the voyeuristic individuals inside most of us that enjoy watching seemingly real and uncut footage of, well, just about anything.

And they called it Cloverfield.

User-generated content is not uncommon to websites today and its popularity has grown over the years with the public’s demand to have control and input over what they’re seeing on websites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and countless others will typically offer a form on the front-end of their website for users to submit content for immediate publishing, enhancing user interactivity and overall experience.

For WordPress users, this is usually a problem because the post and page-writing functionalities are hidden away in the back-end admin panel of WordPress. Not only that, but users are required to have a registered account before being able to access these functions. Add on the fact that logging into the admin panel exposes the user to a different interface and visual environment, and you’ve got yourself a bad user experience and little incentive for the user to want to submit content.

So how do you create a site that offers a usable front-end form that will allow users to publish content immediately onto your site while still taking advantage of the powerful publishing engine of WordPress?

This tutorial will break down one way of overcoming this obstacle using cantwaitforchristmas.com to illustrate examples.

Read the rest of this entry >

I know, quite a revelation. </sarcasm>

Brought to light by a close friend today, I’ve spent the last 30 minutes or so watching each of the videos from Marie Digby’s YouTube channel. I have no intention to add another post to the blogosphere that testifies to the power of the social media landscape, but I’m a sucker for acoustic music covers so I thought it warranted a mention. The videos not only portray Marie as a talented and beautiful musician, but also captivates me with the fact that you get to see a side of her that you rarely get to see in other “celebrities” - the human one. And I think this is really where musicians (and artists in any other shape or form) are benefiting most from mediums like YouTube.

People these days are more skeptical than ever about everything they consume - music included. But I think that making effective use of social media tools (whether it be Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube, in this case) helps to reassure us that these are real people and not just some staged and over-produced group of pretty faces (if Britney did an a capella YouTube video, she’d surely regain some positive PR). John Mayer’s blog does it, Bathroom Sessions does it, and Marie Digby’s YouTube channel does it (if you don’t believe me, check out her Halloween post).

Where it loses a bit of its magic is when we find out that it’s all part of an elaborate scheme derived by a marketing team’s attempt to leverage the phenomenon described above. But by then you’ve already gone out and bought the Marie Digby CD, told all your friends about it, and wrote about it on your blog.

So there you have it, another post that testifies to the power of YouTube and the social media landscape. (Oops.)

Now go and indulge in the goodness that is Marie Digby’s cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. Ela. Ela. Eh. Eh. Eh.