Talking heads

I haven’t blogged much recently (just one blog post this month) but it’s the usual reason – I’ve been on holiday!

While I was lounging on the French Riviera, my colleague Alasdair Rutherford was working hard on a number of projects we planned for my absence, not least of which is the launch of the Airthrey Ltd YouTube channel.

This has proved much tougher than we anticipated.  Despite my experience of creating video content for e-learning, and less relevantly, my pre-digital video production experience, I expected it to be quite easy to create short video clips for YouTube, and yet the time we’ve invested in trying out various formats and software tools has proved disproportionate to what we’ve managed to publish so far.  Our introductory piece doesn’t even include any live action video, not even a “talking head”.

I’d be interested in any tips and advice on the best tools to use to make the most of YouTube.

What sort of sad sicko am I?

Still not on Facebook.

According to Catherine Bennett in yesterday’s Observer, “avoiders could soon, if they are not already, be regarded as eccentric "ghosts", loners or privacy fetishists” - to be fair, she specifies “young” avoiders, and I can’t claim to be in that category, although she does use her/my title as a generalisation for all.  But I can’t see the point of Facebook.

I use social media, just not Facebook.  I can’t delete it from my smartphone (HTC, using Google Android apps) because it appears to be built-in, which means I’m constantly deleting offers of updates; oddly, it’s not built-in to my iPad3, nor, of course, my Microsoft laptop – see how ecumenical my technology choices are?  I take part in online discussions on sites like YouTube and IMDB.  I’ve been posting on football fan sites for a decade, and the best days of that are over, IMHO (see, I’ve got all the jargon – “In My Humble Opinion”, if you didn’t know), essentially because every terracing lout now has a laptop and broadband.  I was an early adopter of Friends Reunited, over a decade ago, but I haven’t bought into any social media craze since then.

I’ve blogged before that the arcs of Friend Reunited, MySpace, and BEBO are there for all to see, and to foresee the inevitable eclipse of Facebook.

I use LinkedIn and Twitter for work, and this also comes under scrutiny in Bennett’s article, as the loathsomely smug Marc Zuckerberg opines that “The days of you having a different image for your work friends and co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly”.  Not only do I maintain different images, I am resolute in keeping those identities apart – why on earth would my clients for learning evaluation be interested in my opinions on films, football and music?  And why on earth should my fellow football fans be bored, as they certainly would be, by my work stuff?

I understand B2C businesses using Facebook, but mine is B2B, and LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger and YouTube give us (the corporate plural, not more schizophrenia) everything we need.

I hope this blog post demonstrates that my facing away from Facebook is not through any lack of authenticity, nor lack of social media/communication skills.  I remain fascinated by what’s coming next, because the replacement for Facebook is surely just around the corner.