I was reading a blog post last night, about why your blog doesn’t get read, most of which i agreed with. Therefore with a spurt of energy, im going to throw myself at writing more frequently and openly. Apparently its the best way.

Whats been taking-up all my time ? well, Agent Lynch has a shiny new website, powered by WordPress, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. We had fun making that happen. It was the first Facebook Connect integration I’ve done and was nice to see it implemented and working. Ms Lynch is a good friend of a couple of friends – if that’s even a sentence – one of whom is Roxy Velvet. It was great to get her a sit up and running that she not only liked visually, but could attack from a content point of view and really enjoy working with.

AgentLynch.com

The Facebook Connect integration was done with relative ease, using a WordPress plugin that needed only a small amount of kicking and hacking to get working as I needed. I did in-fact use two plugins, one for the on-page login, and one for the admin/user prompt login. All the other Twitter/Flickr/Youtube bits and pieces are the standard ones ive used elsewhere.

If 6 Was 9 – its back ! – Randall has got new designs and a new movie. After filming on his trip to the Mentawai’s, he posted the video on the We are If 6 Was 9 blog. The flash site was produced by him, i just helped get the pre-loader, hosting and analytics sorted.

Slatehall Riding Centre

I did a superb little shoot last week to get some shots for a local tourism brochure and book. Slatehall Riding Centre met me on the beach along with Claire from Imapct PR and we had some fun in the shallows. Nice looking shots we all thought. The full Flickr set is here.

Bamburgh Castle

Holy Island Castle

Beach gallop

Farne Island Divers

Finally, over the bank holiday I spent the weekend with the Farne Island Divers crew diving with the seals around the Longstone. A great few days that I recorded with my little Canon compact, and the result was this small but fun video chopped together fro the video clips..

Farne Islands Divers – Diving with Seals – August 2009 from swinhoe on Vimeo.

More once Ive got something to say…

Working with Ben Southall on his new site has forced me to source answers to issues that I have left un-addressed on my own site.

With Ben leaving to Hamilton Island in 4 days, we had to get his whole new media platform up and running in advance allowing him to fly away, happy and content that he could post text blogs, audio blogs, video blogs and images all to his site and have them all aggregated and drawn together.

BestJobBen.com

So far we’ve been pretty successful, and have only a couple of small outstanding issues, but the run-down looks like this.

WordPress for publishing and standard blogging – you just cant beat it.

Twitter for micro-blogging – not really another alternative with the widespread usage and app development for all platforms.

Flickr for anything image based, utilising some handy hacks and plug-ins to get what we need.

Seesmic – for video-blogging and publishing via some more handy hacks and plug-ins.

Youtube for edited video content.

AudioBoo for audio-blogging and pod-casting.

With all this going on, we’ve had a lot to consider and its no surprise that Google and web searches are pretty intrinsic to the way things panned out. Also, of worthy mention are the rougish fellas I follow online who keep us all in the picture regarding Social Media and digital publishing, and they are (in no particular order…) Christian Payne (@Documentally) , Phil Campbell (@philcampbell) and Dan Thornton (@badgergravling).

Im going to start and get to grips with the best system for us with WordPress.

Seesmic

Seesmic allows you to post longer than clips than 12 Seconds. Integrates well with WordPress, allowing you to record and post from within the WP interface, this is then published in WP and posted to your Seesmic account and Twitter should you want it to.

12Seconds

Testing more vloging tools and methods on 12seconds.tv

This uses the 12seconds plugin and shortcode to grab my feed, but its not ;
[12suser username="swinhoe" size="fat"]

Youtube

As-yet no WP plugin to record direct from the admin UI.

Vimeo – does not allow recording and posting from webcam direct to the platform.

To summarise, and i may review this at any point, I think Seesmic is going to win here. Its built right into the WordPress UI, so you can blog from the admin of your site, and its pushed to the Seesmic site and Twitter automatically, and its not forced to be a mere 12 seconds.

Youtube is cool, and will have a greater level of exposure for the larger audience, but you can work with that to get them to your site or blog are negate the issue. But I’ll prefer to keep Youtube for edits and films.

12Seconds. Well, its ok, but its not very long, and the audio compression is awful as you’ll hear below…

NOOOOOO on 12seconds.tv

Addendum

The other way….
Test video blog – via the iSight and uploaded to WordPress.
This page http://support.wordpress.com/videos/, indicates that you can upload your own video into WordPress, these could easily be recorded from an iSight and posted straight to the server. However, this appears not to be working currently, if I find out more this post will be updated. (There is the drawback with this method that the video is only posted to the WP install and not to other social media platforms…).