Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Gabe Lee

More and more our lives are being played out on blogs, microblogs and social media communities such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace.  What people apparently want to read about is our everyday lives, what we are doing in the morning before we go off to work or something interesting we encounter at the supermarket. The idea is that these little snippets of our lives are being recorded for everyone to see. Anyone with an Internet connection can pick and choose what information they want to know about anyone else.  My advice to you when you are ready to share your life with others is to choose appropriately. Choose the medium that works for you, such as Microblogging with Twitter or a vlog with YouTube, and choose the appropriate content to include in that particular post. I prefer to post videos on YouTube and promote them via my personal blog by simply imbedding them into a blog post.

I was recently asked to give advice to a father that was going to set up a vlog for his son.  He liked the set-up of my blog and was really interested in having something similar.  He said he was comfortable with basic coding and he really wanted to create something unique.  He wanted to host his son’s videos and create a blogging platform from scratch. I thought it was great that he wanted to help his son with this project and liked the whole vlogging idea, but I thought creating it all from scratch was a very bad idea.

The point of having an online presence is to communicate easily and effectively to your Internet audience, and, more importantly, to be found by people who are interested in what you have to say.  My advice to the father that contacted me was not to reinvent the wheel; your videos should be hosted with YouTube. There are other great video blogging/hosting sites, such as Vimeo, Blip.tv, etc., but the idea is to have a powerful site that has a long standing Web presence and, in YouTube’s case, the largest following and user friendly platform.  Hosting my videos on YouTube has allowed me to easily track and monitor my individual video views as well as my YouTube channel subscribers. Having an account with YouTube allows me to simply upload my video, add some keywords, a description, a link to my blog and I’m done! Then, I embed the video on my blog to allow a better platform for some actual blogging, or in my case a few short paragraphs that build up the video, and I again add some keywords and a link back to my YouTube account. Having a YouTube page lets “them” worry about bandwidth usage and any inevitable video player problems that are associated with self hosting, and it expands my online presence a little more by cross promoting my blog and YouTube account.

Creating your own blogging platform is never a good idea, trust me, I tried.  With platforms like Ning and WordPress, you can stay basic or get as detailed as your heart desires.  I chose WordPress because I was able to use an amazingly interactive blogging platform and customize it to my specifications.  I was able to do slight changes and drastic modifications all the while being able to Google search any issues I encountered. The fact is that thousands of people are creating or editing their WordPress blogs and participating in help forums and actually reaching out to newcomers to the WordPress world. My response to the dad was to go with a WordPress theme that he liked and then start modifying it. I told him that the hardest part to creating your own blogging platform would also be the most important, but that WordPress already has a great comment/moderation/database integrated system. Trying to create one from scratch would waste time and could just end up causing problems down the road. I told the dad to start small and expand as he and his son created content and gained followers.

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