Thursday, November 03, 2011

Post Master's Orals

I gave my oral presentation of my master's project on Tuesday. I typically do not write about myself in this blog - but I think it's important that I capture some things.

I think it was very hard for me to cram in a world view in 30 minutes. I had 4 - 5 slides with just a single number on there - shades of my powerpoint preso on youtube.

I have to generate some sort of social networking connectedness for my project web site. Lots of work over the next few weeks. Need to think of ways to push youtube video searches.

In a way, I am excited by this. It's a challenge to build some sort of brand recognition - but to attempt it in the next 30 days - I think I have some plans for doing this.

Subscriptions to like feeds on youtube
building playlists and publishing them
tie into my .edu prescence
use twitter? I only have 32 followers. have to integrate that into my messages. I have mixed feelings on Twitter - part of me is concerned that it encouraged superficial understanding of complicated issues. It's the old "read the first two paragraphs of a news paper story" - the reader is left with the impression that that is all to know. Plus - I think twitter may eventually die. I think people want the convenience, but also something that is richer and more flexible. I think they might want more control over messaging - tiers of access - close friends versus professional contents versus co-workers.

Finally, it was suggested I start a wiki. I think wikis have inherent flaws (another article) - it is a good solution for those who don't want to learn anything about more powerful solutions - such as wordpress. I think that people who haven't thought about this don't know that wordpress supports multiple users for editing and submission - with much more control over how things look in the end. Presentation is often tied to content itself. Wikis simply do not offer that level of sophistication. They are heavily text centric - there is no ways to build in some of the stuff I have been adding to vistamix.net. If I do build something like that - it will be more of a masher of other services. Publishing with zero work is key. Even a wiki requires you to go to a specific place, type in stuff, add pictures. I often don't have time to do this stuff. If I had no other solution I might consider it - if I needed a community to build a document I might do it - but I am not sure of the value of an individual using it.

On the other hand - I need to explore it or a similar solution - or a combination of services glued together. Feed from my delicious bookmarks. Twitter stream.  etc.

So much to do.