it's amazing how fast you can get behind when you allow things to slide -- funny how it took someone in my social grid to motivate me to get back on the ball! november so far has been rapid and continues to be so.

i missed my daughter so much this weekend that just had to go over to burton today to see her, really any longer than 7-10 days and i'm literally aching to go and see her -- she fills me with so much happiness and gives me a much needed grounding as to why i do the chasing about i do.

exploring new horizons and possibilities to make a concatenated effort to be who am i yet bend around her wants and needs as much as possible as a father.

i'm not prepared to duplicate and replicate any more text book examples of failed relationships and one person family ideals. i aimed for the life reboot and i'm getting it. once the ship has sailed you have to just keep maintaining that life tiller.

sorted out my doctors this morning, got an appointment next monday to get a health check out and so i have a better place to get prescriptions and inhalers more easily - seems the head cold is shifting away from my head and moving to my chest a bit.

i'd rather have it there then causing me to be vacant in the thinking department. as for workload, i'm stacked - lots of video all of a sudden needs doing and it's right in the middle of my fibrecamp redesign and client work is increasing.

was good to sneak in a video testimonial with don turner yesterday -- we will be improving the message a lot on fibrecamp over the course of november and december.

managed to get my backpack all ready to go in the studio for tomorrows earlier train out to exeter - i'm going over to formalise things with lab media, a bunch of guys who have graduated and are out there in the 'real world' of web design and coding websites.

we both have similar needs -- they want to get their name out there and work on some cool stuff and i need coding pieces done with a variety of different apis so we are getting together to discuss the elements and blocks of work that we might do together.

it's also a really good excuse to go to oddfellows again for the #tweetfellows exeter twitterati meetup and film some of the game as it's being played on a better camera so we can make a proper little video out of it.

back on friday evening, then over to get bella again on saturday morning and play day until lunchtime on sunday and back to the studio after that.

it might be constant but at least it's progress and not mulling over what could be. i've also got a smattering of other projects, requests and mini tasks in the pipeline for next week already.

one big project in december and then i can start to kick back a little bit.

promise.

i'm working too hard. need beer.

quicklink | ian dearman media and photographs

i had a taste today of how it might feel at the ark today.

i recorded some audio but without a wind guard on the zoom h1 it literally picked up everything - i should know better.  looking at guards now.  it's also made me realise how much money is a factor for making things happen at a pace that you want to run at.  i'm literally pulling together money for transport, flights, places, people, connections at a rate of knots recently.

i'm doing more and more media work than before, the verisign work is brilliant and the local bbc radio nottingham shows are always fun, being able to eat and do things again is fantastic - having so much support and meeting great people to co-work with.  it's just been very hectic but really encourgaging.  i'm always forcing myself to balance everything out.

but today, today i felt a grounding at the site.  i sat down with my ipad and zoom h1 and felt for the first time what sitting outside might be like with the sounds of the mini forest all around me as ian did some wide shots.

let me tell you it felt. amazing.  we should have some video edited tomorrow that i can post on my ulule campaign - i'll be putting out a link in the newsletter and i hope you can find a bit of spare change to chip in towards it.  i'm gonna be straight talking here - the sxsw eco event is a want not a need, if you support me in going thou it will amplify the project x100 more than i ever could with some my network as it will allow me to have those face to face connections 'ontheground' in austin in early october.  

it's a bit of a rush about but i feel the project deserves it.  heck, the national forest deserve it for the determination they are showing to get this off the ground.  it's given me a sense of place, purpose and renewed order to my day to day that i was missing i guess.

stability, place and rounding the purpose of being a dad by providing an interim space for me and ella to talk, play and be learning together.  these visual moments together will leave a huge legacy for her that she can look back on.  i'll no longer be chasing purpose and will feel complete in the achievement of laying a foundation i can be proud of.

signing my digital signature into the unknown future.

how do i get thousands more followers, how do i sell more stuff, how do i get more growth. what do you have as revenue streams (ok maybe the last one i'm into at the moment) but these feel like such fixed ideas, concepts that connect with a comfortable idea of how doing social media marketing can make you look bigger, create more money and blast things at people and hope they take the hook.

are you not bored of that 'spray and pray' approach to business - the idea that if you have more of what you have then your doing well - what are you going to do with those thousand new potential clients anyway. do you have the capacity to undertake engaging with them regularly and in a manner that makes it personal.

are you currently social or are you a b2c business that needs to move product. everyone around you is engaging in making videos and creating little social media buttons on your website. is that for you? - are you social in your business already or does that open a potential can of worms within your business? one of the struggles for myself of being a creative that thinks about things creative and creates and tests out iterative ideas on the go is that i live quite lightweight.

my main driver is not money - i believe that if i'm doing something good if people can identify with that they may see me as an operative for their business as an advocate or ambassador - but i don't work with just anybody - for me, i'm looking for that spark. that business, idea, concept owner that lights up at the thought of their vision and can communicate it on many levels.

i'm comfortable with turning down certain industries that don't personally excite me because i would be lying about how much i like a product. i only work with clients that have an ethic, an innovation or vision of how they can transform peoples lives with the things they do. i firmly believe that sometimes, social media is not for every business. so i urge you first before starting any social media activity with anyone ask yourself this.

are you bolting on social media as a way of 'doing what everyone is doing' - when people as you do social media are the words you say - 'yeah we have twitter and facebook' without checking in them regular or staring at the following numbers hoping that you can look like you know what your doing. it's not about numbers, it's about giving people what they came to find.

do you communicate what you do well for lots of people rather than that PR press release that you just got. what does that look like to you. what is success in your social media campaign and are you getting that from your social media advocate in your meetings? - if not, it's time to find out. monitoring your twitter stream for conversations is not enough, being informed about your industry well after 5pm is how you need to be wired. the internet is 24/7 - someone in the world may be looking into your services.

being comfortable in your digital online skin should not feel like you've become someone else and your simply doing it because everyone else is. you could damage your brand if done incorrectly. every member of your business is a potential social media advocate but they need to be on the same social mission as you - have you put that together instead of just putting social media icons on your website? you don't break into a conversation with strangers in a pub to start hanging out with them and start random conversations so why do it online? - you do not need to be attractive, well spoken and popular to have something to say with passion and belief - for me social media is about being comfortable in our skin before we take the leap of faith of presenting our digital equivalent to the world.

*addition*

this was written on the 6:53am train out of nottingham station to lincoln for lincuplive.  platform two at nottingham station is shoehorned at the end of the station like some kind of secret harry potter scene where the train only appears between a certain time.  i had my wireless keyboard and my ipad.  i've only just copied the text off and sent to my email from notes till now.  it's interesting to me that the things i wrote meant that the things i was expecting to hear from linkuplive were absolutely spot on.  for me, the talk and session of the day was the delivery from joanna jacobs.  i LOVED that she talked about the follower count for things - it's such the wrong focus for people to take.  looking forward to the next linkuplive in feb 2012.

seriously, about ten times this month i've been wondering why i'm still using posterous and that is hard for me to say because i love the guys a lot - i've put everything i do on the platform because of the way they think about people and media.  i love the ethics of thought around email posting.

but we have problems.  problems that could be sorted quickly and i'm uncertain why they have to be road mapped into the coding cycle when they are super easy to implement and would give posterous a much needed social media boost anyway.

so, posterous - in the hope that you actually read some of the babble on my blog i've put together a group of functions that i would love to see happen on posterous quickly so that i can utilise my blog in the way it was meant to be used.  i realise that posterous was never probably deemed to be a fully fledged content management system but it really has taken off in that way and i love that everything out of the box works like it does.  

my suggestions for social engine tlc are as following.

ROBOTS.TXT
desperate for the ability to manage our own robots.txt file in our posterous admin for all our blogs.  i use wistia a lot for video and i could be using their amazing video seo features but i have no way that i can set my robots.txt file to reflect that the videos are on my blog.  this is causing me some pain.

RSS.XML
seriously how long is this going to take, i've been using posterous well over a year now and i cannot believe we still do not have sitemaps that we can submit to google webmaster tools.  i've got stacks of blog posts from my old blog that are not getting searched.

RESTRICTIVE RSS FEED
my rss feed from my posterous blogs is only pulling in the last twenty or so links, i'd love a bigger rss feed from my blog that has all of my blog posts within in it so i can submit that.  so much so that i got my coder friend to build me an rss feed by pulling back all of my posts from the posterous api into a file that i host on my me.dm domain (not my blog is at blog.me.dm a direct link to the posterous site) which is on mediatemple.

THE APPS NEED A REFRESH
seriously, i cannot get the iphone application to even load all my blogs on the ipad and it's so frustrating that you cannot work on the same draft everywhere.  if you start a draft on the web you simply cannot pickup where you started when you go mobile again.  they made some great progress on the adding of media elements but that draft thing is a killer! - i'm actually considering getting someone to build a web application for me that does what i need it to do via the new posterous api.  it's probably going to be faster in the long run at this rate! :)

oh and another thing that would be useful. ..

AUTOLINKS
i had this feature on my old blog system, moveabletype and i loved it that it made blogging a dream when i was mobile.  it basically allowed me to set keywords that auto linked to the url of the site i was talking about just by typing the name.  it made linking back to people i wanted to talk about regular super easy.  for instance, if i wanted to talk about a new wistia feature i was using on the road if i put the keyword 'wistia' and the url to the site into the plugin every time i mentioned wistia it would automatically link that word.  having the ability to add these keywords/urls easy (when mobile) would be useful as well.  maybe a mobile manager in the application?