Love Blogging?

As far as a hobby goes, blogging is quite therapeutic. As far as an assignment goes, blogging is quite refreshing. As far as a job goes, you could do a lot worse.

For those of you who see yourselves as having found your mojo in the blogosphere, you might consider looking around for a few opportunities to be compensated for your time and thoughts.

Here is a possibility I have come across in the last couple of days:

Company: Confidential

Location: Anywhere

Posted on: Apr 26, 2008

Freelance copywriter for web content

Ghost-write three blog posts each weekday, and post to hosted Wordpress blog.

We need ongoing blog entries to help build content launching our new blog. Granted the "recruitment industry" traditionally may not sound like the most exciting topic to write about, though our voice has never been traditional. That said, we are seeking humor, personality, charm and wit coupled with a Trump-like business sensibility.

Desired topics: Design/Web Development industry, Graphic design industry, Advertising/Marketing industry, other creative industries, Freelance vs. Full-time designers, Advantages/disadvantages to working with Recruiters, etc.

• Compensation: Each blog entry published $50.00 - $75.00
• Blog entries: 3 per week.

For further details see the Creative Hub Job Board

The more you look, the more you find companies and corporates scrambling to pick up the pieces and jump on the new media bandwagon. It seems that businesses big and small see these portals of social networking and participatory culture as somehow intrinsically providing a foolproof link to engaging the youth demographic in today's society.

The company listed above obviously feels the need to expand their 'traditional' markets and employ some 'out of the box' communication thinking. And they are not alone. Global management and consulting technology services company, Accenture, now holds many recruitment events and even job interviews in a designated space in Second Life. In a recent post, James of Ladies Love Cool James highlighted the example of FaithTrip, an Australian Catholic social networking site, trying to raise up a new generation of evangelical Christians. And possibly one of the most scrutinized, and, to be fair, ridiculed, moves into the crazy world of online interactive media stuff was made by the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party of Australia during the last election. Their assault on the untamed territories of MySpace, FaceBook and You Tube were, well, noble and well meant, but they highlight the problem faced by many organisations attempting the transition to Web 2.0 - they simply do not understand the technology, nor the people who use it.

As I watched videos of Kevin Rudd, struggling to crack a smile, presenting speeches on the challenges faced by Australia economy (yes, I am a name behind one the 300 people who viewed this video) and John Howard imploring voters to embrace a fear of change and vote for him at the polls, this lack of understanding became abundantly clear. There were flashes of golden understanding of the world of You Tube, such as this classic:



But these were few and far between.

However, this problem also presents a beautiful, shiny, gleaming opportunity. This opportunity was realised to me only yesterday as I was writing a CV and cover letter to a leading engineering firm regarding a communications position. When writing a cover letter, the challenge is set. How are you going to make sure that you present to the company the key reasons why you can do this job better than anyone else? As I was drafting my response I found myself writing

I also believe that my knowledge and experience in areas of new media will provide a valuable fresh approach

We need to appreciate that the skills that we see as basic survival habits are seen by others as the way forward in this technology driven world. Just as learning to use a typewriter was seen as a career securing move for our grandparents, the ability to blog and engage in a discussion thread may well be our competitive edge in this crazy world.

Is it worth it?

Have a look at these:



These are a handful of the photos I have floating around my house, and a snapshot of the CDs and books that I keep handy. I see them everyday. But are these the sort of things I should be keeping for my grandkids because such antiques like photographs and CDs make for a fantastic glimpse into the ‘good old days’?

Now have a read of this.

Point. Shoot. Kiss it Goodbye.

David Weinberger has obviously done a lot of thinking. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking too – about his thinking. I imagine that his thinking has been done while sitting in a room. Most probably his office. Considering the organisation he is writing for, most likely an office at home. He is probably sitting just to the left of a bookcase filled with reference books, encyclopedias, novels and magazines. On the bottom shelf of that bookcase may be a few photo albums containing fading copies of all those priceless family happy snaps, accompanied by a stack of CD with all the photos he’s taken in the last few years on his digital camera and doesn’t have room for on his hard drive. To his right may be an old cupboard, upon whose shelves may be a box with a few old records and maybe a few stray cassettes, remnants of a distant youth. In contrast, on top of the cupboard could be a rack sporting a sizable collection of CDs, most of which are just new copies of the old records in the cupboard. On his desk may sit yesterday’s paper, under which sits a dusty referdex and a few old train timetables.

David could just as easily be sitting in my study (if you add a couple of half drunk cups of tea, wallpaper samples on a pin board, a couple of fish bowls and my old graphics drafting board that I have stuck googly eyes all over).

This simple picture of the humble study highlights to me the basic conundrum with new media. It is a conundrum that is also touched upon by David in his blog.

Where does old media fit in the new media world?

All the reference books we have on our shelves, CDs we lovingly collect and photos we dutifully file in albums– the information can now quickly and easily be found on the web, we can subscribe to magazines and buy eBooks, we can buy our music through iTunes, store our photos on Flickr, look up whereis.com for our street directions and have the QR timetable streamed to our mobile.

So where does old media fit in the new media world?

What do we do with it? Where do we put it? Do we get rid of it? Do we use it at the expense of its new media counterparts? Do we attempt to convert it? Do we simply replace it? Can everything in our old media world be simply and comprehensively replaced by a computer and an Internet connection?

David uses the case of the Bettmann Archive in the Iron Mountain National Storage Facility. The archive is a collection of 11 million photographs, richly detailing small pieces of the tapestry of our world’s history. In 1995, the archive was sold to Corbis, a digital stock photography firm, who are now undertaking the arduous task of scanning all the negatives to make the photos available in digital form.

Corbis has taken the view that the intrinsic value of these photographs justifies the time and expense of conversion. In this case, there is also the advantage that the resources become more widely accessible and easier to search and access.

But is that always the case? Does the shift to the ‘new media way’ always equate to a better way of doing things?

Most of us seem to be caught in this awkward balance between our old media belongings and our new media habits. And working out whether to convert, replace or ignore is always a tricky question. Back in my study, you could pick up any number of books and find sticky tags with notes marking pages and leaving reminders. In my recipe books these reminders are globs of melted chocolate and light oil stains from melted butter that remind me that, yes, these brownies are delicious. In my textbooks, my little stars and arrows remind me of what is important and what I found interesting. Unlike my referdex, the directions I get from whereis.com forget to tell me when going to my friend’s place down the coast, it may be quicker to take exit 57, but if I take 58, I avoid the roadworks.

To my way of thinking there are some things that are simply lost when dealing in new media.

Is this valuable?

This is the second time I have begun to write this post.

The first time I had a clear series of ideas and points I was going to discuss. The concept of value was my theme; our understanding of value in real world transactions and our augmented perspective of value in online contexts. I had interesting and unusual examples and even a cute little story about sore knees and my brother’s moneybox.

But none of that matters now, for my concept of value has abruptly changed.

As I was toiling away on my post, my computer froze and started making odd little cries and clicking noises.

[NOTE: to anyone else who finds themselves in this situation, your computer has not adopted a Wookiee inspired communication system and is not trying to make friends with you. There is impending doom and you need to turn off your computer and immediately transport it by ambulance to your nearest computer health facility].

I was later to learn that my hard drive had crashed. I had lost every photograph, song, document, design, font, stock photo and dumb little dancing animation that I had collected over the last 10 years. It was all gone.

I now had a clearer understanding of value.

I admitted myself into therapy to deal with the sudden shock and trauma. During deep meditation, it occurred to me how the members of our so-called digital native generation are increasingly shifting our investments into virtual assets. We are investing our money; not into paintings, shares or houses, but the files that we buy from iTunes, the online services we subscribe to and the rights to access social networks, such as World of Warcraft. We are investing our time into Facebook and MySpace pages and establishing our positions within online communities. From an initial glance, it may appear as though these virtual investments are not returning the same financial rewards as comparable investments in traditional markets. However, increasingly, this is not the case.

The relationship between actions, time and money is being explored in creative ways in the virtual world, with two such examples centring on the ‘ripple’ effect.

Ripple.org
This site allows you to use time you spend daily searching the web for the powers of good!

This is how the ripple effect is explained in the site’s FAQs:

"Every time you conduct a search from the ripple homepage or the
ripple toolbar, our search sponsor pays a small amount to ripple.
ripple passes this onto our charities to help them fight poverty."

Effectively, advertisers are donating to charity for the privilege of having you exposed to their ads. Your daily, online actions are translated into a function that provides value to others. It’s a win win situation, really.

The site also provides a ‘click’ mechanism, whereby each time you click to a view sponsor's ad, a designated amount is donated to the specified charity. You can take advantage of this simple mechanism by using the embedded 'click' functions on this blog as well.

Ripplepay
All those contacts that you have formed through your hours on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are now ready for exploitation!

As discussed by Sepp Hssslberger in his blog,

"You create a profile on the system and indicate who you know and how much you trust them by … giving them credit limits. Then whenever you want to make a payment to another Ripple user using only friendly obligations, the system finds a chain of intermediaries connecting you to the person you want to pay, and records the payment in each intermediary's account all the way down the chain. You end up owing one of your "neighbours" on the system, and the payment recipient ends up being owed by one of her neighbours."

Daily, people are finding new ways of extracting the hidden or unexplored value from online activities and communities. But right now, the potential value contained in this vast online world is, for me, overshadowed by the valuables that I have lost. So, at this time I don a face darkened by great woe and start to go about replacing my virtual valuables. I will trawl the Internet for those intangible objects that I hold so dear: a font called Horse Puke, the ‘helium’ version of Usher’s ‘Yeah!’ and the desktop background of a translucent seahorse eating a scuba diver.

However, in proof that our traditional tangible value system is still alive and well, I will also go out and make that necessary investment - an external hard drive to back up all my treasures of virtual value.

What is your address?

A simple question, but gone are the days of a simple answer.

An address directs you to a particular space - to meet a friend, colleague or rarely seen aunt, where you can have a cup of coffee and discuss the latest boyfriend or girlfriend, the crashing stock market or the exploits of strange Uncle Stan. But we are now seeing a trend where this address begins with a ‘www’, not 15, 24 or 2/317, and ends with ‘.com’ instead of Rd, St or Cres. We are not being directed to a coffee shop, boardroom or a kitchen with red checked curtains, but to a virtual space where we assume an identity and engage in discussion.

Participation and engagement in online communities is seen as nothing special to us so called ‘digital natives’. When we wake up we check our MySpace and Facebook, and when writing an assignment our first port of call (whether we admit it or not) is generally Wikipedia. Our peers are no longer just those we are studying with, play sport with or live in the same city as. They are those who post on the same blogs and forums as us and those who tag things that interest us on del.icio.us.

It is easy to identify how we, digital natives, are travelling around new media landscapes in our personal lives, but as we mature and begin to engage in our professional communities, how do our personal habits and experiences impact on practices in our professional lives?

In a recent edition of UK graphic design magazine, Computer Arts, there was strong debate on the issue of online collaboration. In the design community, the words ‘design collective’ were generally synonymous with vague, directionless projects mounted by artists who were lacking in motivation and commitment. However, we are now beginning to see a change. Commercially viable collectives are now beginning to form around, and be facilitated by, online communities. Consisting of between 3 to 300 designers from all around the world, these groups collaborate to share skills, techniques, ideas and expertise, produce material of outstanding quality and originality and make their efforts financially rewarding. For example, the recent success of some international collectives:

PSYOP - produced campaigns for Coca-Cola and MTV
Peepshow - artwork displayed in London office of Saatchi & Saatchi
Rinzen - recently exhibited at the Louvre

Progressively, more professionals, even those in careers traditionally unpressured by technological advances, cannot escape the need to engage on new platforms. Recently, Queensland Minister for Youth, Lindy Nelson-Carr, conducted a discussion forum with six Queensland youths as a part of National Youth Week. The forum was conducted not in her office or even around a boardroom table, but on an island purchased by the Queensland Government in virtual world, Second Life. This was not a typical day at work for Lindy Nelson- Carr, but it clearly demonstrates how professionals are either being forced to or are willingly exploring the potential applications for online communities.

So as I begin to explore the realms of my professional life, I rarely stop to ponder how my actions are different to those in my position five, ten or fifteen years before. In my first job, as a teaching assistant, I plan the daily discussion topic for my class, whose responses are presented on our online forum. I email them all their logins and passwords, assess them on their abilities to demonstrate a balanced view point when writing a blog entry and converse with my colleagues to organise video link-ups between our students. In my second job as a research assistant I sit in my office, talking with my boss over Skype about a document we are collaborating on through Google Documents regarding the best ways to format an interactive online survey. I don’t think twice when she asks me my address. It starts with a www and ends with a .com.