Recently my neighbor who is a forestry engineer invited me to take a tour of his Japanese forest. Now it's not what you think. There really is a forest full of Japanese trees on the shores of Lake Geneva. You can find it here.
If you are ever totally bored out of your mind it is worth a walk through. Here is
a short video I posted on Vimeo which by the way rocks.
Of late I have not been spending much time maintaining my blog. Being short on time and choosing micro blogging over traditional blogging is the cause. It is clear that Micro blogging is an excellent form of communications for people on the go... and well this site like many others has become a victim of Twitter and of status updates on Facebook.
Now with that out of the way...I have also been busy exploring video...and the impact of Social Media on Darth Vader.
It seems that just like during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1800's many people and brands are turning to the frontier adventure of 3d party websites in hopes of reaching new eyeballs. This is not a new phenomena by any means but... what is new is the rapidly growing sentiment that simply by posting content on a video sharing site, social networking, or Whatever2.0 site is enough to deliver a meaningful web experience to end users. Well nothing is further from the truth.
Stay the course
What many people do not realize is that once you engage in third party websites you really do need to make it successful and stay the course. Resources must be put forward that are in sync with the effort.
Also the end destination website (usually your corporate site) must deliver similar experiences to what you have teased the end users with. If it does not...well...you will get backlash from your visitors and they may give you the finger.
Not your Community
The end game of community creation and community ownership has never been so critical as it it today. I am a big fan of major community sites such as Facebook or Myspace but what I realized some time ago is that in these sites you don't play by your rules you play by their rules. You can thus strike the words "community management" from any strategy because you don't own the community and you never will...after all it's their business model they are protecting.
I have been looking at various photo sharing sites and must say that Smugmug does on heck of a job. Although it is not a free service Smugmug's design does deliver to end users luscious galleries that can be exported into flash players which can be embedded into blogs and other platforms. There are various levels of membership and an excellent customer service. Smugmug is a small family business which was started in 2002 on a "Shoe string" budget. In 2007 revenue hit the 12 million dollar mark and they are making a profit according to the LA TIMES.
In a nutshell - SmugMug allows the upload of an unlimited number of photos for all account types. - Includes a published API which allows programmers to create new functionality.
XML-based RSS and Atom feeds. - An email upload interface to allow camera phones to upload images.
Keyword tagging for searching and categorization of photos. - Enables Google Maps integration for photos with GPS. - Viewers can 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' photos to select the most popular photos using PhotoRank. - Upload from Picasa, iPhoto and other software packages.
Here is a sample with pictures I took at the Great Wall.
