dot W

To keep things more organised and easier for people to find, I've now moved the dotw blog to a new home.

You can now find it at www.dotwmedia.com

These pages will still stay here as part of www.kevinwhiteimages.com but all future posts will be at the new address.

www.dotwmedia.com/dotw/index.php

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to tidy up and reorganise my profiles on various social networking sites. A lot of my profiles have been deleted due to my over zealous creation of profiles on everything I could find and accepting every invitation that had been sent to me over the last 18 months.
In some ways it was a bit like the ‘how many friends’can I get on MySpace, my attitude had been how many profiles can I have?
The problem, was that having so many I couldn’t keep them updated and most of them were just duplicates of other networks.
Total waste of time and energy.
It’s fine reading reports and blogs about the need to use ‘social’ networks to promote business and products, but I know people who don’t use them at all and do perfectly well, the same as I know people who use them who are struggling.
Like anything with business, it is how you use the tools that matters, just because they are there doesn’t mean you ‘have’ to use them.

I’ve been watching some videos and reading reports about social networking and how to use them effectively for your business and the one thing that is very obvious to me is that they seem to be aimed at an American audience. Some of it just doesn’t make any sense or is totally irrelevant to me, being based in the UK. We do things differently and mostly have a different business mindset.
Virtually every video I’ve seen about social networking has mentioned Facebook. I know it’s popular but a quick look at this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
and you will see some other social networks that are big in Europe and other parts of the world outside of the USA.
If you’re not in the USA and have a business or some music to promote, try something different.
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The one thing that has been a common thread on everything I’ve read and seen about social networking is the recommended time that it is suggested you spend each day on developing your networks. It has always been one hour a day. Either one hour in the evenings or 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at the end of the day. Sometimes it takes me more than an hour just to respond to the emails that need dealing with from the sites I’m on.
So I’m either on too many or I shouldn’t be responding to them all, but it would be rude to ignore them and that isn’t very social is it?

Starting from May 1st, there will be an ongoing monthly competition over at www.somojo.net
Each month we will be giving away cds, t-shirts or whatever else we have in the goody bag, to the member who has made the most 'comments'.
Only registered members are eligible, but it's free to join and only takes a few minutes.
Good luck and happy commenting!

I don’t like Twitter very much.
I use it some times and these mutterings are ‘tweeted’ in case someone has nothing better to do and wants to read one.

The problem I find with it, is not the technology or the idea, but the way in which most people use ‘Twitter’.

I don’t follow many people. I normally follow someone for a while, see what they ‘tweet’ and stop following when it feels like I’ve become an old woman gossiping over the garden fence.

I really have no interest in what someone had for lunch, what they had for dinner or if they are bored at work.

Some times I might follow a link that has an interesting article at the end of it, but I have yet to find a way, if it exists, to filter out the noise and only get the information I want. It might be possible to do, but if it is, it really shouldn’t be so difficult to put in place. That’s why I don’t like it.

When I use any service on the internet I want to see what I want to see, not have to sort through tons of rubbish to find the good bits.

Another thing I’ve noticed about ‘Twitter’ is that you occasionally get the same group of people promoting each other. In some ways that is a good thing, but I often wonder if they are only promoting to each other or if it actually brings any new followers, customers or fans to what they are promoting.

Take for example if a musician or band I’m following promotes their friends music on Bandcamp. I know lots of artists like Bandcamp and want that to be the place they sell their music, but as a consumer, I don’t like Bandcamp, ( I’m not telling you on here the reasons, Bandcamp might read it and change things!) so as soon as I see that in the link I don’t bother.

On the other hand, if instead of promoting each others Bandcamp, Reverbnation or CDBaby pages via ‘Twitter’ they got together and put their collective works on an e-commerce enabled web page or even a simple page with all the music listed and links of to were they can be purchased, they could promote their own music at the same time as promoting their friends.

It would never happen, someone would have to maintain it and musicians are artists not businessmen!

While working on ideas and developing www.somojo.net it’s always a challenge to know what will work, what people will like and what people might use.

There isn’t a big team of developers working on the latest ‘widget’or web ‘plugin’, it’s just me listening to the bands and users and their suggestions and seeing what I can do with my limited ‘skill’ set.
I read a lot about ‘mobile’internet and this being the way forward, but will it happen?

When I first started getting interested in the internet and web design, back in the days when graphics were animated .gifs and flash was a ‘new’ technology from Macromedia and we had dial-up connections, there was a big ‘buzz’ about the future of the internet.
Every one would have a broadband connection, all watching movies online and everything being interactive. These were the days before ‘Flash’ became a standard way to do things and one of the options at the time was ‘SMIL’ (pronounced ‘smile’)
I put in the hours learning ‘SMIL’ and loved what it can do. I admit I don’t know much about ‘flash’ but I think some things that can be done with ‘SMIL’ that you can’t do with ‘flash’.
'SMIL’ for the moment seems to have been relegated to the world of mobile phones.
The problem is that what people thought would happen, didn’t.

We now have the new audio/multimedia formats MusicDNA and Apples iTunes Lp, although the later isn’t aimed at mobile devices.
It will be interesting to see if either of these formats or another new format CMX or the format being developed by MXP4 will rise to the top.

More importantly for the independent and unsigned artists, is how ‘usable’ will these formats be?
It’s relatively easy to record a track and convert to any of the existing formats generally in use today.
If any these new formats mean specialist hardware, software or new skills to produce them, will this put independent and unsigned artists at a disadvantage?
With the added multimedia content that these new formats can include, will consumers begin to expect this also from independent and unsigned artists?
With the iTunes Lp format, will Apple only accept these from the major record labels, leaving the independent artists out in the cold?

Many people complain about the audio quality of the mp3 file and although there are better options from a quality point of view, they haven’t caught on.

Will any of the other new formats displace the mp3?