Wow, so having the last few days off has afforded me the time to figure out what I need to be doing to move forward with my blogging, my exploration into social media, and what I need to do to start creating content.

I haven’t touched my brand spanking new video camera. I purchased - with birthday cash from my Moms (thank you for your support) - a Canon HV20. I shopped around a lot and went with this camera because I knew I wanted to be able to create HD content, manually focus (even if the little control is sort of cloogey), have control over shutter speed, iris, and white balance, and be able to shoot in 24p to get video that looked like it was shot on film. This was the only real package that offered all of this and well within my price range. I was looking for something under a grand - and with my corporate discounts ended up sneaking in around $750 with tax. Thank you, CNN.

I have on the other hand been digging into this blog. It may not be apparent. It may look worse than it did before - and that is because I decided that hosting my site through wordpress.com limited my control over how the site looked, behaved, and felt. So I bit the bullet, shopped around and ended up hosting www.scottstead.com at Dreamhost. It was affordable, I found great coupons that made it something like $60 for a year of hosting with the word “unlimited” appended to every feature, and it was a really painless - one-click - install of WordPress. This was important to me at the time - and I think I could have gotten through it on my own - but like I just recently said in a post to the SIAB (ShowInABox) group on google - I don’t know how much time I want to take to learn the web coding side of WordPress - I just want to create content. Which leads me to…

I want to learn the web coding side of WordPress. Au contraire mon frère. But really - I want to know it enough so that I can stylize my website to reflect the content, a tone, a style - but not to the point where I’m spending ALL of my time trying to enter pages of PHP and HTML and JAVA - and while I’ve got a scripting masterpiece - my blog sits empty.

There are a lot of really good resouces out there if you’re trying to figure out how to work your WordPress - perhaps when I’m done I’ll go back and try to put together a list of all of the sites that helped me - you just need to look. There are answers for everything - and sometimes even just dropping a question into Twitter can yield an answer in minutes.

And that’s the beauty of all of this social networking stuff. I’ve built a community around myself that without knowing in the beginning that they would be such a wealth of knowledge for other things that I’ve gotten into. We all influence each other and from what I’ve experienced in really good ways. We influence each other to be more creative, to post more, be more supportive…and here’s where I really need to mention…

PEAvatars. Wow. What a phenomenon. I was really glad to have payed witness to so many people from so many places with such disparate lives supporting a friend that most of them had never even met. From the jokey banter back and forth trying to keep what could have been a grim situation - light, to adopting said PeAvatars, to donating to a fund supporting her cause - Susan Reynolds highlighted for me for the second time where the true values lie in social media.

The first was the Virginia Tech shootings. I don’t want to wax over this again because I spoke about it in a previous post (and this thing is getting long winded) but in both instances a community was formed around the support of a cause. Everyone cared about what was going on down there, and everyone cared about what was going on with Susan. The difference this time was instead of it being centered around a tragedy, it was centered around a person. Our twitter follows and followers became a working relationship, not just a meaningless social networking medium.
In my experience the best relationships are the ones that inspire us to be better people, do more things, be more Awesome. And that’s what participating in social media does for me - and in my experience does for us all. So yeah - I’m making the headlines for my last post a sort of mantra for 2008. Be more Awesome! Thanks for all of your support in my media making, your comments are always helpful and thanks to all of you for being an inspiration. A special thanks to Jonny Goldstein for letting me be a part of the Par-tay. I hope that working with him is my first in many projects of giving back, helping out, and learning a lot in the process.

Cheers.