Blogging still bores me somewhat right now. I honestly don’t know if I am going to recover sufficiently to allow myself to actually maintain 2 blogs and a lifestream (nicharalambous.me). I’m over it. I’m over talking, writing, opinions, publishing and the bollocks that goes along with it.

I’m frustrated and fed up. When is the next big thing getting here? I’m bored.

With the help of Justin Slack I have (read: “He has”) finally managed to get nh [dot] com back up. Finally.

I say this with much trepidation. I am not sure how I feel about having my blog back up and running. I feel a sense of pressure back and looming over my head. I feel a slight sense of relief that it’s up and running and I think I feel a bit sad that I couldn’t go on without it. Some part of me wants to let it go.

But I can’t, and I wont.

Strangely though it took me almost a week to figure out that my blog had gone down. It took a further week for anyone else to notice and it took a further week for me to get off my lazy ass and ask someone for help.

Three weeks of downtime. Three weeks of no blogging concerns. Three weeks where I just didn’t care. Although I must admit that I think it is more than three weeks since I started the end of my extreme blogging days.

Twitter has killed me blog. There I said it. I’m not sure if I believe it but I said it out loud for everyone to read.

As a writer deep down inside it pains me to think that a service offering me 140 characters has usurped my focus from a platform that allows me almost endless freedom to write whatever comes to mind in as many words, sentences, paragraphs and pages as possible. Maybe this is a further sign of our times? Maybe the 30 second generation has become the 140 character generation and is soon to become the “Icanliketousesmallwordsandnospaces” generation?

Am I the only one who is potential a bit concerned by this? Again I give you: Maybe…

Nevertheless I love using Twitter and wont stop, I love writing and wont stop blogging and still am not fond of the book in my face.

I have recently been chastised at every turn for “falling off the radar” so to speak. By “the radar” most people are referring to that of the social media world; blogs, twitter, the book of face and many others.

But here’s my question, How quiet is too quiet? I don’t feel I’ve dropped of the radar too dramatically. I completely agree that I am blogging less but I think that’s because my paradigms are shifting a bit.

I no longer believe that the web is the best place to throw down your thoughts and hope for some response. I no longer believe that my blogs are the best way for me to spend my time online. I have a job that pushes me to my limits almost every day and fulfills my need to constantly be innovating, creating and developing within a new and uncharted territory. So what do I need blogs for?

Don’t get my wrong, I love my blogs and they are a great outlet for me to do precisely what I am doing right now, a dump of mental thoughts (moughts?) running around my head that help to keep my very few readers up to date with the direction of my thinking and life. That’s it.

SA Rocks serves an entirely different purpose so that’s not really worth discussing in the same context.

Regarding Twitter, the book of face, the space of my, linked in, last fm and any (every) other social network I belong to, I am fast feeling that they are all relatively useless to me. I don’t understand the value of Facebook. Linkedin is a network worth keeping alive, but just barely and the others were great for me when I wanted to keep abreast of the latest tech out there. But right now, I am in a different paradigm that has very little to do with the web and how social it can be right now.

So I think I am being the correct amount of quiet up in here.

This is clearly evident in this blog. I tweet my rants now, I don’t blog them. That takes too long.

But with regards to SA Rocks I have been trying to figure out a way to make effective use of Twitter. I’ve struggled as many have been doing. I haven’t managed to integrate SA Rocks in to Twitter at all.

I don’t think that punting blog posts via twitterfeed.com is the right way to go. I really feel like that is just pushing content and gaining no return on investment whatsoever.

So I am trying more of a social feel attempt at integrating SA Rocks in to twitter. The pull of SA Rocks is that people want to feel good about South Africa. I know I do. Now what I am looking for is reasons for people to feel rocking in South Africa in 140 characters or less.

I will then take my favourite rocking @ifeelrocking replies and put them in a daily blog post and tweet that via @ifeelrocking.

Let’s do it.

You can download it or listen to it live by heading over to the Digital Edge website.

From the site:

We speak to Nic Haralambous of SA Rocks, Seth Rotherham of 2Oceansvibe, Exmi from Expensive Mistakes Cheap Thrills, Shaun Oakes of Shaun Oakes.com, Jason Bagley from the Incredible Connection blog and finally Se7en from Se7en.org. We round up that line up with a summary of the blogosphere by Justin Hartman, head of blog aggregator Afrigator.

Nothing particularly groundbreaking came out of the bloggers interviews: We are all egotistical, we all like to win stuff, we all brag, blah blah blah. It’s riveting blogger “Days of our living lives online” sorta stuff.

Definitely worth listening to. Do it.

And thanks to Saul and Jarred for having me on the show. Always a good boost to the ego hey?!

Hi Editor,

You won’t know me – I’m a big reader of 2Oceansvibe and was referred by a link there.

Anyway, I’m going to take a flyer here – just drop a little bait and hope for a bite…

I’m a music producer at the moment, studied at UCT and now living in Johannesburg trying to hit the big time. My record label has recently signed our first artist, a guy by the name of Timothy Moloi and are busy in studio recording his debut album. In the mean time, though, we decided to record a couple of live videos of him doing some covers of cool and interesting songs. Basically it’s just a way for us to get word out, create as much of a buzz as we can. We’ve had an incredible response to them so far and I thought I would share the videos with you:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TimothyMoloi

Now, I’m sure that you must have MANY people pawning their wares to you, but as a blogger (and in particuler, a South African one), you undoubtedly act as one of the tastemakers of our generation and I figured it would be worth a shot to see if you would like any of the videos. My favorite is the One Republic cover (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4fiPe4U_Ow&feature=channel_page), but feel free to have a browse around and prove me wrong! All the artists on the videos are South African – hope you’re impressed!

I’m not too sure what to say from here, man. I won’t beat around the bush – obviously it would be in my best interest for you to actually cover us on your blog and for that I would be incredibly grateful, but if not, a simple personal reply would be fantastic – another viewpoint to see what we’re doing right!

Look forward to hearing from you!

Let me break down the above email in to sections/reasons why I was taken by it and responded immediately.

References

The email references 2oceansvibe, I know I have a link in Seth’s sidebar and therefore know (or feel) a little bit of legitimacy from the email’s author.

Hope and a wish

The author openly admits that he is taking a chance. He isn’t being too presumptuous and assuming that I will obviously respond and act. There are no orders coming from the email, there are hopes and requests.

Know the blog

James (the author of the email) clearly went and read SA Rocks. He knew that I liked local music, liked to help promote local artists and liked to support an underdog. So he appealed to these attributes with: “My record label has recently signed our first artist, a guy by the name of Timothy Moloi and are busy in studio recording his debut album.”

Play on my field

Multimedia and new media content are integral to my world, it’s how I make my living and how I interact with people. So it’s a good thing James didn’t tell me that he hated the internet and would never release any of Timothy’s music online for the world to swipe. In fact, he did the opposite. He sent me links to a YouTube video of Timothy vocalising the hell out of a song I knew “Apologize” by One Republic. He had dropped the bait in my lake and I was not only staring at it, listening to it but chewing on it as hard as I could.

Play to my Ego

The crème de la crème, my ego. James played the game perfectly by stating the following: “Now, I’m sure that you must have MANY people pawning their wares to you, but as a blogger (and in particuler, a South African one), you undoubtedly act as one of the tastemakers of our generation and I figured it would be worth a shot to see if you would like any of the videos.”

How could any self-indulgent blogger possibly say no to a line like that? James got my, hook, link and sinker.

End the pitch

Do not linger, do not be verbose, do not become pedestrian and cliched. Write what you want to write, get it out, close it down and end the email. Do not linger. I hate it when I have to sift through ten paragraphs of shit to get to the point of the pitch. Say what you want and leave me alone.

And here I sit blogging about James and Timothy and will be meeting with them very soon to see how I can help them in any capacity I can think of.

James, well played. And to anyone who is trying to pitch to bloggers that might be reading this, take note: A good pitch will be responded to immediately and will have the bloggers commitment from the word Go.

My Tumblr, nicharry, has revived my ability to post content online without too much thought, reactively and instinctively in a short space of time.

I am besotted with Tumblr.

Let me explain what the service is, in my opinion, for me. It’s a lifestream sort of a blogging platform. A stream of consciousness I think sums it up relatively well.

Tumblr has legs in the market right now for one simple reason. It’s simple to use. I have a “Share on tumblr” widget added to my browser. I click it and automatically a popup appears and allows me to share video, audio, photo, links, quotes and other types of media. The little widget handles the linkback to the source and posts to your Tumblr immediately.

I’ve also installed the Tumblr desktop app for Mac OSX which allows me to tumbl from my desktop. Simple, easy and effective.

Furthermore the type of content that I’ve come across on Tumblr is incredible. It’s alternative, different, cutting edge, pushes all the boundaries and seems to not abide by the regular rules and regulations of producing content. It’s a place where anyone and everyone can find a home.

It subscribes to a very similar model to that of Twitter. You can follow people’s Tumbles and they, in turn, follow yours. You can see everyone who you follow in your Dashboard and follow their content as it is published.

The person who got me on to Tumblr is Wes over at BlackNotes. If you have some time, head over there and read Wes’s Tumblr, you’ll be occupied for hours.

But for the moment head over to Tumblr, register, choose a theme and tumbl-on.

I must commend him on finally placing blog comments to his posts. Many times I’ve wanted to bash him in a comment, commend him on his arrogance or leave a general comment but to no avail.

I can now do that. And this year there will be no controversy if he wins an award at the SA Blog Awards because he can now be classified as a blog.

Seems as though the big guns in the blogosphere relating to number of bloggers is Cape Town. I find this one a tough pill to swallow. I think there were some extenuating factors to consider. But that’s just me as a JHB resident talking!

Apparently there were ±1000 responses to the census which is relatively good considering there are only estimated to be ±7000 bloggers (allegedly) in SA who are active. So 1/8 turnout isn’t too shaby. Not fantastic, but not too shabby.

Here’s the slide I received about location.

I am still very interested to see what the final results will be. Apparently they are coming out on Monday so keep your eyes peeled for those.