Bill Cammack

Frisbee / Drew’s – May 12, 2007, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Yaron, Charles, Mike, Sanford, Nathan, Dina, Grace, Sandra & Eric @ Drew’s after frisbee

ok… So that’s a wack title. :D

I decided not to let figuring out a title bog me down during my productive time, which is the morning. I just wanted to make a note to document facts and give some propers where they’re due.

I’ve been virtually lampin’ with Liz Burr for quite some time now. I believe “lamping”, which I first heard from Public Enemy‘s Flavor Flav has its origins in the fact that in NYC, we have a lot of lamp-posts, so if you’re hanging out, especially at night, you’re very likely to be near one, which would make you “posted up” at the lamp, and therefore “lamping”. If you’re doing something A LOT or to an extreme point, the term “cold” is added, which would mean if you’re chillin’ HARD, you’re “cold lampin’”.

Anyway…..

So I’ve been virtually lampin’ with Liz Burr for quite a while, and more recently, Tyme White. These ladies are both hardcode internetters, which I thought *I* was until now. :D

Now, there’s tons of stuff for me to learn and find out about on the net, and lots of people to interact with remotely, so that’s why I stay connected. However, I don’t give a damn how it actually works. I don’t care why my iChat can connect to your AIM. I don’t care if my website “knows” your website. Actually, I didn’t even know that it COULD know your website. :/ As long as I can do what I WANT to do, fine.

So here comes Tyme… All in the business [like she loves to be ;)] talkin’ ’bout “Why is your media all over the place?”. I went to explain it to her, not ‘defend’ my reasoning, just tell her about it… and I realized that I didn’t have an answer to that question. With a little more introspection, I realized that my internet strategy was based on how I used to think and not how I currently think. I was using a shotgun approach of being everywhere and on everyone else’s blog, whilst having nothing to say on my own blog. :) That was fine with me, because I DIDN’T have anything to say on my own blog. It’s a cycle…..

Without viewers/readers, you’re tossing media into the air by posting it to the internet. You’re talking to nobody, or you’re talking to everybody or anybody. Putting something on your blog assumes other people are going to read it, unless it’s a collection for yourself, so you can go back and read about and watch the stuff you’ve been doing over the years. Some people blog that way, like putting their diaries online. Since that’s not interesting to me, I was rather cool with posting on other people’s sites and being a part of THEIR conversations with THEIR readers/viewers instead of posting things for MY viewers that don’t necessarily care what I have to say about somebody else.

Now, that’s all well and good until someone wants to know about Bill, BillCammack or Bill Cammack. What I was doing with *my* site was giving people the information I wanted them to have, instead of congregating information about myself and letting THEM choose what they wanted to check out. At the time, over a year ago, that made sense to me. Everything in its own compartment… However, I hadn’t reevaluated my own goals for internet positioning, even though I advise OTHER PEOPLE how to position themselves on the net. :D

Consolidation didn’t matter to me because I broadcast what I’m doing anyway on twitter, pownce, jaiku, facebook, rarely myspace, email, iChat, whatever every time I do something. This is because whomever happens to be “listening” to me right now can choose whether to click on the link or not. So if I twitter one site this morning and a different site this afternoon, it doesn’t matter, first of all because they’re turned into tinyurls in the first place, and second, a click is a click. I’m bringing my offsite posts even MORE off-site by masking them twice more. 1) tinyurl, 2) twitter, 3) offsite post.

I’m not going to go through the myriad points that Tyme made, but a major one for me was when she said that people are less likely to join some other site that requires membership in order to respond to your posts. I had had experience with that JUST THIS WEEK when I had posted something offsite to a group that just locked down their site so people have to have an account with them in order to post. My friend skyped me and informed me that she had something to say about my post, but she wasn’t going to join that site and give away her personal information just to comment. I was glad enough to chat with her about it over skype, but I see now how that’s a loss all the way around. I WIN because I get her reaction to my post, but everyone else loses, because nobody gets to hear it but me. Then I lose, because I don’t get anyone’s reaction to HER reaction. Then SHE loses, because nobody reads the brilliant things she has to say. Then I lose because I don’t get to respond in text to her text response…… So this big CASCADE is all because I posted to a walled garden instead of to a site which lets you input your name and other information right on that page and speak your piece.

Besides the excellent and relevant points, it became a drag for me to scoot around from site to site to find posts that I had made on different topics. So… In the vein of ReelSolid.TV‘s 3rd season, aptly entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”, this is now the Bill Cammack fansite! :D

That’s right. :D This is now my own fansite. All Bill, All the time. :D MuuuuHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

So if you want to know what Bill has to say today, (which I don’t know why you would, but DoG affords me the ability to not care at all one way or the other! :D) come on through. I’m still planning on my Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio screencast series, but other than that, I’m ditching the “show” format. You get what you get. It’s your fault for clicking on the bookmark! :D You might get “Bachelor Cooking Show”. You might get “Girlfriend Auditions”. You might get a birthday party in a quiet-ass bar.

You might get interviews. You might get bike riding. You might get a turtle on the floor.

Whatever you get, that’s what I had for you. :D Enjoy it! (or not, hahaha)

Getting back to the point…

Once I had the concept of doing things differently, I needed the implementation of that. This is where I learned the umpteenth lesson of this week. Remember how I mentioned that I don’t care how things work? Well Liz Burr and Tyme White care, and at first, I tried to keep up with and absorb their suggestions. Unfortunately, A) there were too many suggestions, and B) each suggestion was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to understanding how they came to that understanding in the first place. Very soon, I found myself spending more time googling ish than changing my site, so I dropped that and just did what they said to do and added what they said to add. Sure, I had to be happy with their layout suggestions, because it’s *my* site, and I’m the one that has to look at it and feel proud that it represents ME, but if it weren’t for them, on the technical/infrastructure side, my site would look exactly like it did last week, and I’d still be researching templates and fantasizing about what my new site is going to look like… eventually.

What I learned from this is WHY.PEOPLE.NEED.CONSULTANTS! Seriously.

Since I do everything myself, filming, music, “acting”, editing, color correction, compositing, compression, site design, uploading, blogging, tagging, advertising….. I never need consultants. Other people come to The Kid when they want their videos done in a quality fashion. This time, *I* was the one completely in the dark, and I’m fully aware of how NOWHERE I would be in this process if I didn’t have someone who already knew their way around and knew the WHYs and WHY NOTs about the infrastructure of building sites. Admittedly, it’s not a good feeling AT ALL to admit you can’t do something, even if the fact of the matter is that I’ve applied myself to learning other skills during the time they’ve applied themselves to what THEY know. It’s like the more they talk, the more you realize you’re actually standing in a deep hole, in the dark, when you thought you were at ground level in Times Square at lunchtime.

So, amongst many other things, that was my takeaway from this situation. As a consultant who doesn’t need consultants, I got a glimpse from the other side. I got to be the producer that sits behind me on the couch, wondering what’s going on on those multiple screens that keep changing and then somehow, magically, what you said you wanted happens on the television screen. I got to experience myself through experiencing Tyme & Liz doing their thing. It’ll help me choose what I do and don’t want to do as projects. It’ll help me understand who appreciates how much time they’re saving and how much better their productions are by calling in the pros….

Props to the ladies. Welcome to my new fansite… Let The GAMES Begin!!! :D

Kathleen & Charles, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Kathleen Grace & Charles Hope

Charles Hope’s birthday party
December 11, 2007

Charles Hope, Grace Piper, Bill Cammack, Obreahny O’Brien, Rachel Clarke, Adam Quirk, Annie Arthur, Eric Rochow, Jackson West, Jared Klett, Nathan Freitas, Sonia Chaghatzbanian, Paul Idol, Brian Conley, CharlesHopeBirthday2007

Charles Hope & Brooklyn Hilary, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Brooklyn Hilary & Charles Hope @ the blip showcase @ the Pioneer Theater in NYC.

Feb 2007

Bill, Grace, Charles, Bonnie, Lan & Aaron, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Lan & Bonny in NYC – October 19, 2007

Bill Cammack, Grace Piper, Charles Hope, Bonny Pierzina, Lan Bui, Aaron Dieppa

As I reported back on June 28, 2007, Twitter ‘ruined my life’ [link].

I realize _now_ that there’s something that I left out.

Today, Charles Hope twittered… Yes, “twittered”… There’s no such thing as a “tweet” or else the app would be named “tweeter”…. Anyway… Charles twittered that the “older” link was no longer at the bottom of our Twitter pages. I checked it out, and sure enough, there was no link allowing me to check back past my first page of the most recent posts. I figured that since they’re always doing tests and trying to improve how twitter works, it was a programming error and that it would be quickly replaced. Then, someone mentioned an issue with spam, and that the link was deliberately removed in response to it.

I still wasn’t concerned, because I know that I can type http://twitter.com/home?page=2 directly into my browser to get to the next-most-recent page of posts. No dice. Pages 2, 3, 4 and 5 all returned the exact same Page 1 entries….. MINUS the entries that had fallen off the edge of the flat Earth, because new people had twittered since I had last refreshed. :/

The link removal wouldn’t be a big deal to people following a handful of people, but when you’re following > 230 people, like I am, it’s a major ‘problem’ and jacks a critical amount of functionality that I get out of Twitter. Fortunately, out of the > 240 people following me on these social status-update sites like Twitter and Pownce (and Jaiku? … Haven’t heard from that app in AGES!), Veronica Belmont replied to my status update on Pownce [link], informing me not only that it was a temporary issue, but pointing me to the Twitter blog where Biz Stone had already addressed the issue earlier this morning. Fortunately, she replied on Pownce, because on Twitter, her post would have scrolled off the bottom of my “page 1″ and been (temporarily) lost forever, unless she had added an @BillCammack to it and it would have alighted in my “replies” section. So, thanks to Veronica, this is a different post than it would have been. :)

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

For me, one of the values of Twitter is that you don’t have to pay attention to it and it will save the status updates for you. I’ve gone back as far as 11 pages, which span several hours. That’s normally where you lose the “older” link. This means that when it’s crunch time, and I’m being my most effective and efficient, I can release Twitter from my mind entirely and only get back to it when I have processing cycles for it. Removing the “older” link from the first page means that I have to constantly remember Twitter to check it on the web site or I’d actually have to install a widget which would keep sending me the messages, non-stop, all day, consistently distracting me from what I’m trying to do. Neither option’s optimal.

It’s one of those things that you don’t miss until it’s gone. :) Taking the “older” link from the front page of Twitter turns it into the home page of Facebook. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to increase the number of pages of updates that you can see on Facebook’s home page. They’re not even in chronological order. If they were, you wouldn’t see that an entire stack of your friends just joined a new group… You’d see individual instances with other types of updates in between them. When I get to the bottom of Facebook’s ome page, I invariably wonder what happened BEFORE the edge of the flat Earth that the rest of the updates fell off of. Of course it’s a good ploy to make it so people go to Facebook more often specifically so they DON’T miss the revolving-door updates, but that doesn’t work for me personally, so removal of the “older” link on Twitter is nothing short of a disaster. :)

I just checked my page right now, and there are only 20 twitters on the front (read: ONLY) page. Amongst the > 230 people I’m following, the oldest post is a whopping 22 minutes old. :/ I’ve been writing this post for more than 20 minutes, so there’s an entire ‘generation’ of comments that I’ve entirely missed and will never ever see unless they fix their spam bot issues within the next 8 hours or so.

This isn’t the stock market, so it’s not mission-critical for me to know in real-time what my Twitter friends are doing, thinking or saying. However, I was glad to read in the Twitter blog that the “older” link is going to be reinstated ASAP. Part of my daily productivity is using down-time during rendering, uploading, etc to catch up with what’s been going on in the last couple of hours since I even THOUGHT about Twitter at all. 22 minutes worth of status updates from > 230 people isn’t even a drop in the bucket.

Good thing I checked twitter within 20 minutes of Charles’ post, or I would have been completely in the dark as far as WhereTF my “older” link went! :D

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack