Welcome to my home page. I am promoting a dozen bands from the Radio Curly Collective - (who have their own MySpace pages and video channels.) I am a media student at the University of Adelaide - using, abusing and confusing the social networking experience.
This is my ever-evolving home page version #248539 - Social networking is here and this is my presence on the internet. Find me and follow me, be my friend, listen to my music, watch my video clips and join me as I try to understand and find my place in this dynamic new social medium.
A short selected video from the Brickworks Markets:
Weather widget will want to wax and wane wierd wonderful wriggles to udder tings . . . doh
View our latest video clips from Daily Motion - Featuring Dot Comma Dash, the Bottles and Cyborg Trance
Latest examples of Twitery - We have set up a new blog to archive our collection of twitery, and to archive the daily traffic from @christwitery. You can find this archive at - Our most recent example features the unwitting collaboration of @Twitcops - who manage to produce their own style of twitery.
Some other pages have been added recently -
Twitery is digital poetry, posted to twitter in 140-character chunks, via computer and web browser, or from my mobile phone. I have just produced my second work of twitery, entitled Wind. My first piece - Perigee Moon @ Black Point - was produced a week or two ago and I have just begun a third example of twitery - Pixelated - due any day.
Some other pages have been added recently -
The Radio Curly Collective are renowned for their creativity, both musically and visually. you have seen all of their video clips - haven't you? lately we have been mixing with a strange breed of people - artists. To prove that we have what it takes we have launched another new web page to display some of our artistic endeavour from the Radio Curly Collective.
My recent foray into the world of twiterature, Perigee Moon @ Black Point has inspired me to produce more twitery. A new work will be forthcoming, it has just about been completed. In order to not fill my regular @chrisloft stream on Twitter with inane rantings, rhyme and rhythm - I am now tweeting twitery on a new Twitter account. You can follow me on Twitter at @christwitery and see the progress we have made. Once completed we shall ad this new piece of twitery to our site.
So that the real world does not distract me too much, I have emmersed myself into a few interesting little projects. Well, I think that they are interesting, this doesn't necessarily mean that anyone else will. I have just published, some twittery, a friendfeed/twitter feed and a page for some lolcats who keep threatening to scratch my eyes out if I don't write code for them.
Paul Burcheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed, recently released some code that you can incorporate into your own web pages to receive a stream of FriendFeed items. FriendFeed UI - CLICK HERE. I've had a lot of fun trying to merge it into one of my pages, but in the end I had to set up a separate page, but I added some feeds from Twitter to it as well.
I went away for a few days the other week for a relaxing stay at the beach up at Black Point, just past Ardrossan. No computer. No internet. Well, I did have my mobile phone - as I walked along lonely beaches in the early hours before dawn I found myself coming up with strange lines of 'poetry' - that I twittered on my phone. When I got back to town I compiled them into a dark and sombre stream of verse. Please let me know what you think, you can have a look at Perigee Moon @ Black Point by @chrisloft
Just to keep me on my toes, and in good spirits I have been building a site for some friends of mine. Very strange, because I am not normally into cute pictures of cats, kittens and puppies. My friend, Ceiling Kat, inspired by the Lolcat Bible Translation Project has set up his own internet site. He has some ambitious plans, but at this stage the features that he wants to implement are held by placeholders. If you like cute cats take a look at CatChat CatChat - the home of Ceiling Kat and check out the link to the Lolcat Bible Translation Project - it is a scream (rofl) - thanks to Kay Walker for finding and sharing this - now I love Lolcats too.
This experimental message-oriented FriendFeed UI is written with brower-side JS using JSON API. The source is available from Paul Buchheit at FriendFeed. I have had a little bit of fun trying to integrate the code into my own page, but have decided just to call up a link to a separate page.
The past few months have been a disaster for my life and state of mind. Sequences of events have left me drained, confused and struggling to keep up with the real world. My own world has just about disintegrated and all I can do now is try to pick up the pieces and keep going. Exactly where I am going is uncertain: I can only head in the general direction of where I want to be.
READ MORE at my Blog
Lately my life has been an absolute disaster. One thing after an other after another. And then when I least expected something else to change, well it did. Then there was something else and my life has just been turned completely upside down.
Nothing is there that was there before; well very little. I'm trying to pick up the pieces and see if there is anything of me left. This home page has been 'broken' for the past few months and I have only now found the patience to fix it. There are still plenty of other things to fix here too; but I have to fix myself, before I lose the plot.
There is probably no point in describing the tribulation and trauma of the past few months, at least, not here. There are some various strands that have appeared here and there, but a lot of this is far too personal to go on at length. I am gradually making some progress, returning to some sort of 'normality'.
I was using this page to outline a research project for uni about social networking and my interaction and links with friends, subscribers, followers or whatever they get called on one specific social networking site or another.
As a media research project for uni, I am trying to understand my own presence on the internet and to map this presence into some visual and graphic format.
I am going to try and retrace my steps and trace my internet network from its first, faltering stages to the disorganised state that it is in today - and try to make some sense out of it all. Once I have assembled a map of internet services that I have used and a historical context of their use and discovery, I propose to take out my own data and replace it with some generic data, and then try to quantify this new content, by measuring traffic flow, interaction, number and locations of friends, and other demographic data.
This will entail mapping my outward online presence, particularly on video-sharing and social networks - but this will also be an attempt to graphically represent links between friends, subscribers, listeners and fans that I encounter on these networks.
First I had one computer. Then another; and then one more. For many years I had about six computers running on a network, mainly Macs, which were used for desktop publishing and design. In the past few years I have been embracing a much smaller, Mac and PC network, connected through a slow ethernet connection.
This is my network, my intranet - not as yet connected to the internet. I have a number of peripherals and accessories, such as some printers, an audio/MIDI devices and MIDI keyboards; as well as USB connections to MP3 players, mobile phones and memory sticks. After being away from the internet for several years, I finally obtained a broadband connection about two years ago. [Find out date of our first emails]:
My first contact with the net was through my internet service provider (ISP) - this allowed me to connect to the internet and also provided a very small amount of space that I could use for a home page. One of my first actions was to sign up for an email account with Google, and to sign up to some of Google's other internet services.
One solitary computer - a small intranet - and connection to the internet through an ISP
My prime reason to get onto the net was to promote music and video clips that I produce on behalf of the Radio Curly Collective, a diverse bunch of artists and musicians from the northern suburbs of Adelaide, sunny South Australia. We registered our first domain radiocurly.com in August 2006 and found some 'really cheap' hosting and began uploading mp3 files and video clips. [check this date]
After a few months our site was hacked by some nasty hackers and radiocurly.com disappeared from sight. We quickly arranged a new hosting package and put up another site, chrisloft.com and moved radiocurly there - now we had two domains and a growing bunch of web pages. We added a WordPress blog, and a Blogger (Google) blog. We began to create some MySpace pages for some of our artists and uploaded some videos to YouTube. They were lost amongst the hundreds of thousdands of clips uploaded to YouTube each day.
Now we have two domains (radiocurly.com and chrisloft.com) as well as a web page through our ISP. Additionally we have a video channel at YouTube (YT) a half-dozen MySpace (MS) pages and a blog at WordPress (WP). We have signed up for a PayPal account (PP) in order to send and receive funds and signed up for some Google (G) services; particularly GMail, Analytics, Adsense, iGoogle, Blogger. Similarly we have signed up for some of the Yahoo services (Y) including Geocities.
After losing our first website we became a little concerned about keeping all of our data in only one place. We investigated 'free' web hosting services and began to construct a network of web sites on hosted sub.domains -
A great number of services can be found on the internet for 'free' - however 'free' often comes at a price. Different hosting sites offered different plans with a range of services, and limitations.
In no time at all we had signed up to about 100 different hosting plans. Some were much better than others, some were terrible; we learnt a lot about designing, writing and publishing web pages using html and css code. We were also introduced to an intimidating swathe of other programing languages and formats such as shtml, javascript, XLM, xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx.
We signed up for free hosting sites at: (Click here for a link or get code to put this into an iFrame)
We seemed to be getting further and further away from our prime directive - to make music and video clips - but slowly we were establishing a tiny presence on the internet. We created some more MySpace pages for some of our artists and concentrated on putting some content into the new sites that we had published.
Soon, as well as our own domains and other pages, we had a network of 'free' sub.domains spread throughout the internet.
Around this time we were coming into contact with more and more web sites offering a diverse range of services, for activities. This is just a small selection of some of the services that are available; most of these are free, some offer premium services.
Initially, our first activities on the internet were looking at web pages: surfing, browsing, googling, researching and looking at some of the content available. Gradually our activities developed from browsing and searching to bookmarking (favouriting), linking, commenting, sharing, recommending, aggregating, blogging, publishing and eventually to lifestreaming.
There is a proliferation of web sites offering a very broad selection of resources that can enrich your interaction on the internet: social networking sites, photo-sharing, video-sharing and music-sharing sites as well as sites for blogging, micro-blogging, bookmarking, sharing, recommending, voting, commenting, aggregating, tracking, analysing, tagging, geotagging . . . and much more.
In fact, there are so many sites it is barely possible to keep up with them all; let alone work out what does what, and why they do whatever it is that they do. And whether you need it or not? In addition to every thing else that you need to sign up for?
Many web services offer hosting of web pages that will allow you to publish your own pages or blogs. Often there are limitations and restrictions on what you can put on your page. We soon set up our own hosting company so that we can now host our own web pages - and to offer hosting services to our friends and clients. We also began to assemble a collection of domain names; currently we are hosting six of our own domains. (No we are not. Two of them have lapsed and once is in some sort of limbo somewhere whilst I try to make order out of this chaos).
TubeMogul is a video distribution service that will upload your videos to twenty different video-sharing sites. Additionally, TubeMogul provides tracking and analysis of traffic and tools to promote your videos.
Now that we had replicated ourselves around the internet in a distributed, random fashion, perhaps now it was time to bring everything back into some sort of order and try to analyse what sort of sites had worked, why they did. We also needed to boost the traffic that we were receiving at our sites.
One significant step was made with the discovery of a video-upload and distribution service called TubeMogul. Initially TubeMogul allowed you to upload to a dozen video-hosting sites, such as YouTube, MySpace Video, Google Video, Yahoo Video, MetaCafe, Revver, Crackle, Blip.tv, AOL, StupidVideos - recently TubeMogul have added Vimeo, Viddler, xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx and xxxxx bringing the number of distribution sites to twenty. Not all of these sites are suitable for our content though; some of the sites are specifically for comedy, instructional or xxxxxxxx .
There are sites that accept videos that you have already uploaded to a video host. For example, World-TV - as well as Mogulus, Qik and other hosts - accept clips from YouTube, Google, MySpace and others - but now you can 'string' your clips together and program your own video channels.
Once you have uploaded your video to TubeMogul, and then to your chosen distribution platforms, you can further increase your audience reach. You can now add your uploaded videos to services such as worldtv.com mogulus.com qik.com (and other sites) where you can build video channels or programs.
A further viral feature comes into play when third parties take your video content, (especially from YouTube, Google and MySpace) and then add your videos to third-party, video-hosting sites. In particular, this will give your videos international distribution. TubeMogul still records this traffic, as long as the clips are contained in 'aauthorised' video players.
From TubeMogul to YouTube - and then to video-sharing sites such as xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
| Site | Features | Description |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube | Subscribers, comments, stats, sharing, favourites, | The most popular video sharing site. |
| Google Video | Google now own YouTube | |
| Yahoo Video | ||
| MySpace-TV | Upload your videos to MySpace | |
| MetaCafe | A very popular video site, we get a lot of traffic here | |
| Revver | Another popular site where we have received lots of traffic | |
| Crackle | video sharing site | |
| video sharing site | ||
| AOL | video sharing site | |
| Veoh | video sharing site | |
| Blip.tv | video sharing site | |
| StupidVideos | video sharing site | |
| Vimeo | video sharing site | |
| 5min | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
| xxx | video sharing site | |
Until recently I had avoided using some services, such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, as I had quite enough sites, serives, profiles, passwords etc to keep up with. However, eventually I succumbed to the allure of these 'social networking' sites. I had underestimated the power of FaceBook as I established networks of 'friends' - locally, nationally and internationally, with different groups of people with similar interests to my own.
Although many of these new friends were previously unknown to me, I was very pleased to re-establish contact with old friends that I have known for ten, twenty, even thirty years but lost contact with. FaceBook and other social networking sites are remarkable for this ability. On one site I found a bunch of sound engineers I had known and worked with during the seventies and eighties - this was like a family or a school reunion.
Similarly, I was able to establish contact with family and people sharing my surname in an attempt to research and trace some of my family history. It is an enjoyable feeling to make contact with someone from your past and to catch up with each other's lives and fortunes.
Twitter is a micro-blogging site that has been around for a couple of years. I had heard the 'buzz' about twitter and tweats - but I had not experienced the rich conversation, links and breaking stories that are streamed in a constant river of information. Twitter allows you to send short, 140-character messages (similar to SMS messages); you can 'follow' people you find interesting and share their conversation stream. Twitter is a great way to find new, up-to-date information on just about any subject - and to join a community of people that share your own interests.
Services such as, FriendFeed, PlaxoPulse, MyBlogLog, allow you to aggregate your streams from different social networking sites, and to share this aggregation with others. It was while looking at a map that someone had shared on FriendFeed that I realised that this 'map' was similar to my own, and this project had its genesis.
Graphic representations of social networks incorporating, youtube, facebook, myspace, and many other sites.
This is where I am up to at the moment . . . add some more text as soon as I take a breath. Standing by . . .
sGraphic representations of social networks incorporating, youtube, facebook, myspace, and many other sites.
This is where I am up to at the moment . . . add some more text as soon as I take a breath. Standing by . . .
Graphic representations of social networks incorporating, youtube, facebook, myspace, and many other sites.
This is where I am up to at the moment . . . add some more text as soon as I take a breath. Standing by . . .
I want to use material from, and acknowledge some of the work that has been done in this area: mapping of our social networks, by other authors, writers, social networkers.
Brian Solis
PRwarrior
Life under electronic conditions
orgnet.org
mindmeister.com
theory.isthereaseon
valleywag.com
Pajek: A Program for Large Network Analysis
Relationships are complicated - Factoryjoe.com
check one two
XXX end of FriendFeed XXX
XXX end of MyBlogLog XXX
check one two three
Gradually restoring some order into this chaos. Oh sometimes I just hate the real world. ;-]
