options and attempts

an excerpt from the most recent thing I wrote for ISSUE Magazine:

Enough people are now aware of the quick-trigger nature of the bigger sites and have started to create options for cutting through the noise.
It was in this vein that here in our own part of the world a website was set up to focus on Southeast Asian short films.
Viddsee, a video-sharing site, founded by Derek Tan and Ho Jia Jian in Singapore, offers an outlet for filmmakers within the region to showcase their content to an audience interested in stories from around the region, in the different languages that are spoken in these areas.
Recounting the site’s origins, Derek explained that it all began with a short film.
“The pain that we saw as filmmakers was that we had a film that was going round festivals, and right after the festival we were thinking, how can we distribute it out to a larger audience apart from just the festival circuits?”
“What we realised is if we put it on Youtube or Vimeo, there are billions of videos out there, so how does a film stand out among the rest? We were put alongside cat videos and Harlem Shakes, which are entertaining in itself but ultimately a different type of content altogether.”

Has the internet really helped cats?

Social media is highly overrated. At least that’s my opinion of it. Just sayin’ 

Look I’m not saying it’s of no use at all, but as a tool, for marketing and reaching new audiences, I personally haven’t seen it give good results in the campaigns I’ve been involved in. 

It’s a very good vehicle for listening to people’s thoughts and feedback, and loyalty-building, which definitely makes it very handy, but it doesn’t greatly amplify one’s voice beyond one’s organic networks or the paid reach one can afford. 

The Harlem Shake was just another example of how corporations can engineer a massive fad. It’s almost like the built-in networks possessed by major corporations and traditional media companies help memes like this (and yes Bieber and Gangnam Style too) reach the critical point that makes a video go insanely viral faster, and from that point onwards everything just snowballs. 

So now that suddenly YouTube has become the campaign platform du jour for this coming election, and along with it the terabytes of bandwidth that has been spent producing, watching, and commenting on it, I still can’t say I am completely convinced that it is an effective conversion tool for the amount of money spent on it. 

My good friend (and former employer), Dr Gomez, disagrees with me on this (and has written an article on it for Sudahlabro.com) and believes the YouTube is THE platform for this elections, but as you can read in his article, even he says that social video’s effectiveness is predicated upon interpersonal political communication that happens one-on-one, not over electronic mediums.

The People's Poison

If these search graphs indicate a party's relevance, Mic better start churning out better videos stat. The internet really does seem to be where a lot of campaigning, via the media, is being done. Links are being shared immediately and sometimes unthinkingly. The appeal to emotions and the use of emotive symbols/language would then be the conversion factors that make a reader want to share out a link to her networks. If these numbers are, again, indicative of prevailing trends, then it seems that race is no longer the most attractive issue in today's political discussions.

Read list

I have a daily routine: I open up google reader and skim through sites and blogs to get an idea of what's going on today.
It used to be that there were only news sites, blogs, and nasihat hal-ehwal ugama in my feed. That was thenlah.

As you can see someone's wading into the deep end of the hipster pool.Thanks ddreamer.

Drama fits aside, google reader and my pretentious subscription list actually help a lot in giving ideas for projects.

Arty blogs show you new way of doing things.
Entertainment blogs keep you on the pulse of what's popular at the moment, and a good guide to how to package ideas.
Topical blogs (politics, religion, science, etc.) gives you angles and stories that you can ponder on.

And of course, friends' blogs. Those really save me time.
The more updated they are the less I need to spend time with them to find out what's going on in their lives.

Joke joke.

What sites help your thinking process?