It’s taken me absolutely ages but I have gone through and updated all my social networking pages and set up fan pages where appropriate. As a youtube partner I have several branding options available to me which has taken me a month to utilise. My banners still look simple but I like the bold touch. Some more complexity and additions are required in order to maximise my cross network promotions but the next thing for my youtube page is to produce great quality innovative content. It’s a little bit like my kwaichi.com site – it needs to draw an audience for anyone to be interested in the first place. Having been out of almost all social networks for over a year I’ve lost the momentum and following I once had which I am fine with, but now I have the time I am committed to reaching out again and gaining an audience. I have about 1k subscribers on youtube which to some sounds like a lot but I’ve had that number since I turned my back on social networks. In that time I’ve seen newcomers reach out to an audience 10 times as big on a regular basis. I am also content with that. In fact I am happy with the progress of other filmmakers and vbloggers as it shows that there is definitely a future in the medium. With the seemingly exponential growth it gives me confidence that I can gain rewards for putting in some time now in my creative work. One massive complaint from youtube partners in the past was the lack of monitisation from people who embed their work outside of youtube but that has been fixed lately with ads now appearing on the actual videos themselves. Also recently youtube has gone high def at 720p I think. This gives partners great motivation to make high quality vlogs and clips.
In my social networking exercise I upgraded my myspace site to the new 2.0 version which does look way better although some html coding is still required if you want nicer fonts etc. I made a new fan page on facebook to keep it separate from my personal account. I set up a new bebo account and a fan page there too. I have a plugin for myspace and twitter from this blog and a feed from twitter to my facebook and bebo. Running so many sites and RSS feeds at once can get a little confusing especially with all the different interfaces available. I’ve even updated my old stickam account although I wonder if I will have much time to even go live anytime soon.
I have wondered if anything new is coming over the horizon and I have seen that youtube will be introducing a live element much like stickam but because of the sheer amount of traffic they get I imagine it will take a long time to implement. With the downturn in the economy I think it will be especially tough on the smaller tech companies trying to make a mark on the web and with the big guns like google and yahoo buying everything decent up I think it will now be a long time before we see anything really fresh come to market. I even worry for sites like twitter during these turbulent times as I can not see any money making avenue for them as they refuse to show adverts. As hard as it is to maintain so many sites, they are still all important and rank highly at alexa. For me it is going to be my only form of syndication and advertising outside of the youtube partnership program. I have to be careful though as I got my first warning for spamming on facebook for posting 2 similar posts in succession – before you pass judgement I had just joined the youtube group and accidentally posted kwaichi.com instead of my youtube.com/kwaichi site. I hardly call that spamming! From now on I will tiptoe around facebook and just leave an RSS feed running. I am contemplating reusing my old flickr account to host my photos in the future instead of facebook too. I would host the photos myself but I like the flexibility of linking.
I’ve changed wordpress theme a few time the last few days on kwaichi.com and run into countless bugs and headaches. There is still a bug in this Carrington theme if you try to click on a category it will show you a correct summary page but then when you click on it again it goes blank! I am banking for a solution soon rather than experiment with yet another theme though.