Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

In the past 4-5 years there has been an increase in online consumption like never before. Mostly what we see are people consuming old media products through new media services. There are the old media’s website like the 4 big US networks where TV shows can be seen as well as services like Hulu.

The most difficult thing to stream has always been live content. There are services for it that work quite well like uSream and others but for a major event things have been difficult to keep up.

You can really appreciate in the case how far we have come with these services when you look at world cup coverage. In Canada our coverage is given by the CBC. Amazingly enough they have broadcast all the games on the internet as well. The quality is quite simply amazing. If you have a good enough internet connection you will get an HD stream!

Perhaps this is a tip off to the CBC but to be honest it just makes me happy that we live in a time that you can see a game even if you are not in front of a TV.

I also caught someone watching the game on their cell phone but I think that was a Rogers service. When that can come for free as well then we have really turned a leaf!

Geek on!

I am sure this is not the first video of it’s kind but I stumbled across the video of the Beastie Boys who have recently canceled some shows in their tour and will have to push back their newest album release due to Adam Yauch finding out he has cancer.

There has always seemed to be a barrier between old media and the internet in my eyes but things like this start to blur the lines and really connect the artists with their fans. Well done on the part of Adam and his group mates.

I hope that Adam is up and running around soon. Kudos to them and all the others who are starting to reach out from the curtain of “stardom” and who are making the effort to connect with the masses on a personal level.

Geek on!

I am finding it increasingly difficult to find direction in the 2.0 or Social Media world. I have been working on a blog for quite some time and still have a quite low readership, or a least much lower than I would like. My question remains “Where do I spend my time and how much time is needed to make an impact?”. There are parts of me that think it will be impossible to make inroads in the social media world without being laid off from my 9-5 job.

I do work hard at my day job but I have never let it spill over into my personal life unless there is some sort of special project that needs tending to. I have a wonderful family and after doing all the normal family things after getting home from work it is already 9:00pm. If I don’t want to get sick due to a lack of sleep, the most I can spend is a couple of hours a night in my home office writing articles or working on my site’s back end.

It simply doesn’t feel like enough! My main goal is to have enough readers and viewers to sustain quality content through their interaction. I would simply like to be available for people who need guidance or support with their technology needs. The problem is when you have a small amount of time available to invest in your own branding, building up an audience is very difficult.

So the original question remains. How much time is enough and where is that time best spent? Up until now I thought it best to concentrate on my blog posts or updating my website. I am not sure that is the best way to spend time anymore. There are hoards of people that are moving away from their personal blogs and spending time on Twitter or Friendfeed, most notably Robert Scoble. This definitely will get you noticed but it seems that you need to spend 10 hours a day for real recognition. If your main career is not fed through social media then you won’t have 10 hours a day, you might not even have 2.

As I write this article I continue to come up with new strategies for myself and then find ways to break them. The video/stream portion of my website is really what interests me because it is what gives me the instant feedback that I like. I wonder if you can really support a video stream and gain viewers simply by being active on twitter. For some reason I don’t think so.

I am starting to believe that there is no way to obtain my true goals by only spending 10-12 hours a week on my blog/stream.

I would really like to spark a discussion with this article, please comment away!

I have been waiting for Chris to release his new social media theme called WicketPixie for a couple of weeks and it looks like he might have to put that off for a bit while he helps out his folks. So try and get something working that looks a little nicer than the plain one I had installed, I went searching :)

I came across a theme called CorporateID and the basic colours made me look twice. So I have taken that and made a few minor changes to make it something more me. I have put back the TheSleepyGeek picture at the top, a shot from the balcony at the cottage. Then I removed some images that are the background of the sidebar titles. They were too flashy for me.

So there you have it. Until Chris has the time to work on the final versions of his theme, I think we are sticking with this.

Comments?

Now that I have the comments working (the problem was caused by the theme I was using) I now have installed a really cool little plugin. It allows you to login to the site with an OpenID to post a comment. Many of us have an OpenID thought a service that we already are a member of. Most notably are Yahoo, AOL and Flicker however there are many more on the list.

I encourage you to register locally on the site if you wish. That feature is working and even preferred so that I have a more complete profile of you. That’s nice when looking at comment posts.

If you decide to use the OpenID approach, please have a look at your profile before posting. Some OpenId providers such as Yahoo will give you a name about 3 characters long full of gibberish. It doesn’t look nice and I can’t credit you with comments if I need to.

Now the next step in this process is to get the theme fixed. I am really torn because I love the theme I was using but don’t really want to invest much time in repairing it. I plan to use Chris’ social media theme that he is working on for his site. At this time he has said that he plans to make it free for everyone’s use.

I am always looking for good plug-ins for WordPress. I have been using WP for a long time to blog and have tried to keep it simple because I am of the opinion that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. I have been talking with some colleagues and fellow bloggers and one of the things that people are looking for is a way to share the content of a site with friends.

I have been looking for something simple yet still very powerful to perform updates to social networks and also allow article emailing. I think I have found it in ShareThis.

An excerpt from their site:
ShareThis makes a WordPress plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.

You will notice on my website a new link at the bottom of my posts that has a rotating icon and link called “ShareThis”. That will link my article to their service and then allow you to share it by means of a number of avenues.

If you have a personal blog and are able to install your own plug-ins, I would suggest giving this one a try.