Thursday, May 17, 2007

My Blog Journey - MediaMensch.com and Leatherheads

May 17, 2007 In the beginning of the year I made a determination that I wanted to set upon a journey to become a world class blogger. As in all my journeys, I work hard to find the top people in this area to advise and mentor me. I found blogging to be someone tedious when just having to write about technology. Although it was my interest. My passion was about the creative side also where I had worked in radio, television and movie distribution.

I was tracking the movies being produced in North Carolina (where I live) for my daughter who has a strong interest in singing and acting. I noticed late last year that a film called Leatherheads, written and directed by George Clooney would be coming to the Carolinas and my home town Charlotte.

I ended up at an casting call at a large regional mall and submitted a profile and headshot. A few weeks later, I received a call to be an extra for 7 days on the film.
I decided that this would be a great opportunity to blog my experiences as a "first timer" on the film set of a major motion picture. At the same time, I also had decided that it was time to learn how to upgrade the technology within my blog to work toward making it as professional as possible.

Through this journey, I connected with a very talented blogger community from around the world mostly from the social network called www.linkedin.com. Many of these bloggers all started the same way, working to build an audience and produce interesting content on a consistent basis.

A few of the areas or sites they told me about were Feedburner, MyBlogLogs, Google Analytics, Picasa, and a few others.

Over the past month, I have worked hard to keep up with my goal to blog daily (reality is probably more like 3 to 4 times a week). Most of the work was on the mediamensch side on my experiences on the film, plus other projects. As I begain to write an interesting thing began to occur. As much as I wrote, (just like this posting), 3 or 4 related story ideas would pop into my head.

The next phase of my blogging will be to build an audience. The best advice was to find a way to post on popular blog sites related to your own content wth a link back. It also occurred to me to seek out other media such as radio and magazines to promote the blog.

This journey is only about 6 week old to become a top blogger. I will detail as much as I can some of the tips and tricks and people and companies I meet along the way.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Social Networking - LinktoCharlotte

This area of social networking is now accelerating. As of this week we are in a test and beta phase of a new social network called "LinktoCharlotte"

This site is really to complement the work we do on LinkedIn and on the LinkedinCharlotte Yahoo Group.

This is day 10 of the setup of that site and there are some really outstanding features including the ability to list your own events and charge for them, moderate your own special groups and to use RSS (really simple syndication) to link news to and from this website.

We are starting out with a few different levels of users. General Member, Contributor, Sponsor and Group.

We are growing by invitation only in this private beta test. Social networking on a local level seems to have powerful implications not only for those that live here, but for those who are planning to relocate. About 20% of our members are not living in Charlotte currently. About 10% of these plan to relocate here.

We expect to accelerate the growth of this site as we make a plan for a major announcment in June.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

LinkedIn Group for Dickinson College Alumni



Over the past three years, I have been actively involved with my college's alumni area both as chair of the Dickinson Club of Charlotte and also with helping or suggesting some eWarrior technologies that the college might be interested in to help organize alumni who are spread out around the world.

In May 2007, we are officially launching a group on LinkedIn for Dickinson College alumni. The purpose of the group is to allow better connections for getting back in touch, for jobs/career, and for finding alums you can collaborate on projects with.

For this project, I will be the adminstrator. The Link to join will be the following.

To Join: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/3018/3E5F7A0E97F6