Lindsey's Musings

The metaverse of Second Life is not new to me. In fact, according to my avatar’s profile, I have been a resident since October 26, 2005 making it almost four years and six months since the first time I set foot in the virtual world. I’ll admit, I haven’t plugged in regularly since then, but everytime I come back I find something new and interesting to explore.

Picture of Nyviara Benavente

In my second life, I am known as Nyviara Benavente. Personality-wise I am no different than I am in my real life, but I think it’s safe to say that I dress a tad bit edgier. In fact, while participating in the meeting night, my mother happened to walk in and asked me why I would have my avatar dress in such a way.  Maybe because I wish I could rock rollerblades on a daily basis…? (haha).

In any event, even my mother has grown to accept the existence of such a thing as what Second Life has created. This is because I’ve shown her a couple of the places that I have discovered in my travels. It’s not all red light or casino…there are some genuinely awesome and creative sims. I will give a word of warning that often times the more original or thought-provoking locations will be like a ghost town. Finding the popular hangouts is sometimes a bit of work.

So what are three interesting places?

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Although I’ve actually taken a whole course on Internet and mobile marketing that covered search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), I honestly wasn’t thinking about it too much when it came to this course blog.  I have been thinking about it when it comes to my branding project though (like when we came up with our descriptions) so I’m glad that I was introduced to tools like All-In-One SEO which will be a handy plugin to have when I eventually setup the project blog in my own hosting space.  I’m also glad that there is more emphasis on writing for humans (aka- writing natural) than focusing on seeing how high of a keyword density you can achieve because it is very obvious when sites do this, I hate reading sites that are like this, and more importantly, I hate writing this way.  I had an exercise where I was asked to do this once and I honestly couldn’t do it.  What’s the point of being more loved by search engines if your readers can’t stand the content?

I understand the importance of the SEO concept of the long tail of content though, especially when it comes to blogs which are a great way of accomplishing it.  I really don’t think I fully understood the long tail concept as described in my previous course.  I now look at it like this:  each of my blog posts are potential entry points to my website as a whole.  By optimizing each for their own keywords based on their unique, specific content,  I am adding to the potential search phrases that my audience can use to find me.  Ideally, they’ll search for something specific that I’ve optimized for (after all, less competition for less broad keyword phrases), they’ll find a specific blog post of mine and enjoy the relevant content and go on to explore the rest of the site which probably has something else to offer them.  So,  how does one go about optimizing a blog post with the long tail in mind?  There are a couple of elements to pay attention to although you’ll have to direct your attention to the actual source page of the post to see some of them.

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This will probably come as no surprise, but I chose to create a social network with Ning for my Sprout Change project introduced a couple weeks ago.  Although I can see benefits for having a presence on LinkedIn and Myspace, a main focus of this project is to get my neighbors involved with me on this.  Ning provides a great toolset and platform for real sharing and participation.  Originally I was going to test it against just having a Facebook group or page for the project but I think a good point was made by Gorza in the article on why you should Consider Ning to Broaden Social Networking Strategy-

If you’re on Facebook and Twitter, they’re really noisy these days…there’s a lot of what I call absentee activism. But on this thing, you have people who are truly interested.

Also, Ning offers many capabilities that add flexibility that would otherwise be absent on Facebook or even Myspace.  This isn’t to say that I won’t be making a presence on both of these networks.  Although I personally detest Myspace (I foresee a future blog post on this subject), I am willing to make a presence on there if it will connect me with more people.  It helps that Hootsuite just integrated with Myspace also making it easier to keep track of activity on there.  The real goal is to direct people who don’t know about the project to my website/blog, help get the news out of new content for those that support the project and are friends, and hopefully, if they are serious about it, get them to participate and actually share and teach other on the Ning network.  In my opinion, Myspace is far too spammy to really facilitate any real type of consistent conversation on the page outside of the blog discussions and Facebook news streams are filled with news from a hundred other different people and it’s easy to miss things.  The Ning network on the other hand is dedicated to just this project.  LinkedIn will be useful when connecting with professionals that could actually help me out with the project along with other professional ventures in my life but for this assignment I really focused on Ning.

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I’ve had a Facebook account since the days it was a college-only hangout.  At the time though, I was still infatuated with Myspace and didn’t spend much time with it.  Then Myspace took a turn for the worst and it seemed there was a mass move and I eventually followed suit.  What convinced me, was the fact that my family members had all signed up there and I thought it’d be nice to know what was going on with my relatives in faraway places like Alabama who I never hear or see from.  I’m glad I did it and despite everyone being too busy to have our regular monthly family parties (I swear it’s always someone’s birthday), we all know what’s going on with each other still.  It was a little weird to find out about my cousin’s engagement through a status message though…

In any event, my Facebook profile (facebook.com/lindsey.t) has always been personal.  If my friends aren’t family members, they are old school classmates, international friends, or social game friends I have never ever done professional networking or handled any business-related communication on the network which is evident when you take a gander at my current friend lists:

Facebook Friend Lists

In fact, I felt a little uneasy as I read through Mashable’s HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook.  While I can certainly understand why one should probably be mindful of their audience, when it started talking about personal branding I started to frown.

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Twitter is a microblogging service that I’ve had a personal account on for awhile but I’ve never really utilized it all that well.  None of my offline friends use it so I felt as if I was constantly talking to no one.  Briefly last semester, I used it for some class-related conversation but still my Twitter page is somewhat sad.  I’ve started to look at it another way though and don’t consider it only a tool for communicating with those I already know.  Now it’s also serving the purposes of listening device, news deliverer, and a means of easily talking to (and discovering) people I don’t know.

As of the last couple of days, I now have three Twitter accounts:

• @Linzers- personal (this is the one I’ll be using for my Twire and #mat149 tweets)
• @SproutChange- pet project (this is where I’m focusing my branding efforts)
• @nyviara- Second Life avatar

Already I’ve gotten a little mixed up on which one I was logged into on Twitter.com since it doesn’t say the username at the top all the pages (really wish it would), but posting to some or all of them has been made simple with the web-based Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.  Of course, there are positives and negatives associated with all the options I tried when it came to managing my Twitter existence and its goals and usage needs.

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I decided to stop banging my head against the wall to muster up a post on my current status with my branding project.  Since a week is a very short amount of time to decide on a name, image, biography, etc. for a pet project that hasn’t seen the light of day until now, I’ve resided to the fact that what I produce this week will be rough, raw, and subject to change and polish.  Overall, I feel like I’ve nailed down a lot of ambitious ideas and a concept story/vision to help tie all my future social media elements together to form an overall branded package, but there was one major downfall: the project name.

What’s in a name?

Don’t get me wrong…I made a valiant, mindmap-crazed effort to come up with something great, but all my ideas were crushed under the boots of greedy domain squatters.  Since the usernames were generally completely free when it came to social networks and other locations on the Internet, I’ve decided to ponder maybe having a more creative URL until I can grab the one I really want when it expires (some within this year).  I could then just forward the old URL to the the new.  I need to research the SEO repercussions for such a thing though (if there are any).  In the end, the name I give my project is very important so I’ll be giving it some more thought.  I do know that I want my usernames to be that of the project’s name.  As I’ve been coming up with options I’ve not only checked GoDaddy.com for the URL availability but namechk (for a quick check of major sites) and knowem (for a more indepth search). [Tip: If the domain name is taken, you can click on the get more info link to see when the current owner's hold on it will expire assuming they don't renew.  There are services that you can sign up for at GoDaddy that will also grab a name for you if it becomes available or, if you don't want to wait, try and negotiate and deal and transfer with the current holder.  Of course there's fees to deal with though.]

But enough about the failures, let’s take a look at what I did manage to get done-

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The Internet is constantly being supplied with new content for us computer-dwellers to devour but sometimes it feels like a full time job to actually stay on top of it all.  I have a constant stream of “unread” number counts constantly begging for my attention at every turn, and the fact that I recently got an iPhone hasn’t helped the situation.  Now the numbers follow me everywhere.  While my favorite papercraft blog may forgive me if I don’t view it for a couple of days, my uncle on Facebook is less than happy when I’ve let his message sit in my inbox neglected for a week.  And it’s not like I didn’t know it was there.  I even received an email notification to let me know on top of having been told in Facebook, but I’ve reached the point where those numbers and notifications have lost their urgency.  With a Gmail inbox that lets me keep everything, I’m used to big numbers and lots of unread mail and I’ve simply become numb to it all.

Well not quite. I felt bad enough a couple weeks ago to pull an “archive all” move which is basically the cleaning equivalent of just shoving it to the back of the closet.  Out of sight, out of mind right?  I’m not sure when I started letting the Internet defeat me, but I do know it’s time to turn it around and start taking charge.  It’s time to declutter my Internet life.  I plan to do this in two ways:  consolidate my intake and output points and prioritize.

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There are countless social sites that exist that one can become a part of these days but when it comes to finding those I haven’t used before, it makes for an awkward post considering my obsession with trying out betas of new tools and websites.  I’ve sometimes gone to a website and tried to sign-up only to realize that my email is already in use because at one point or another I had already taken it for a test drive.  My lack of memory can sometimes stem from the fact that these sites and tools go through some massive functionality changes and face lifts between the time they first enter beta to when they actually become popular and I hear about them again.  It is also because I will fully admit that while I love to play around with them, sometimes my time spent with them is very shallow and I try to avoid putting myself into the dilemma of “now how do I personally use this” and the even more frightening “this is really cool but I still like x and y features of [insert competitor tool/site name here].”  What is a girl to do?  Sometimes I wish I could just mash two sites together and create the ultimate solution.

There’s also the problem of a newer tool being tagged by me as “awesome” but it relies on other people I know using it and they are already entrenched in the databases of other websites serving generally the same purpose.  The good news is that one can often find ways of doing something once, and having it propagated to all these different sites like Facebook and Twitter.  TweetDeck is a good example of this which lets you simultaneously post to both.  I think it’s important to remember though, that just because it has been made easy to reach out to the users of these different sites in one click, you may not want to use the sites in the same way and if you really want to take an interest, you’re also going to have to be able to monitor responses which is another whole different beast to tackle.

So what sites would I like to try, revisit or perhaps use better than what I currently am doing now?  Well I’m glad you asked…

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One of the issues that comes with Web 2.0-ish websites can sometimes be the manner in which they are updated on a consistent basis.  My issue today is with Facebook.  If you are a user of the website, you may or may not have received the new update to your homepage over the last couple of weeks.  This supposed upgrade that has been rolling out to different groups of users, once again, makes big changes and quite frankly a lot of users do not like it.  While I normally attribute most of the foaming at the mouth to simply a “change is bad” attitude, this time even I can’t ignore what appears to be backwards movement in a website that can’t seem to make up its mind.

My personal problem with the change is that they removed the ability to filter the news feeds by application.  The news feed has always been a source of major confusion for users, especially after a previous upgrade before this one brought the “live feed” into the equation, but its saving grace was that I could click “Farmville” as a feed filter and only see the relevant news updates from my friends.  That is no more and now the news feed is cluttered with the gaming updates that even I can’t wade through.  I’d like to hide them, but I can’t without ruining my gaming experiences.  Now I know a lot of you may have just rolled your eyes at even the mentioning of “Farmville” or let out your own mini-rant at your own frustrations with constantly being asked to help rescue the pink cow that wandered onto your friend’s farm, but it doesn’t have to be this way- why can’t the gamers and non-gamers live peacefully together?  Why does Facebook have to make it so hard?

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