But just for the hell of it…

This song means a lot to me. And I really like this recording of it too. Apparently other people don’t; it’s got a one star rating on YouTube. And ordinarily that kind of feedback would be enough to drive me back into my hole never to resurface… well, at least for another 6-12 months. But I’m filled with a uncharacteristic sense of pride for this little thing I’ve created. And I actually found myself in that moment being grateful that people seemed to hate it because actually in that moment I realised my love of the art of songwriting and the act of forming the chords with my fingers and the melody with my mouth… And that I’ve always done this, to a greater or lesser form, and I’m tired of feeling apologetic and I’m going to do it for the rest of my life.

This is a weird disjointed rant. It’s late and I’m tired. Thanks for humouring me.

I have JohnLacey.com and JohnLacey.net. This is slightly confusing, but there are reasons for this. Some of them relate purely to my own vanity (being frustrated to discover I’m one of a billion John Laceys on the planet and wanting to try to own the name online). Some of them were practical, logistical… I only registered JohnLacey.net initially because I was moving all my sites and wanted a new email address to use with all my online accounts. There is an element of link building involved too. And these things are all… well, they are what they are, I suppose. But they’re not really that important.

The real difference, in my eyes, is the function of the two sites. And the content. This is my personal blog. This is a dumping ground for random thoughts. I joke that I’d close down my ‘personal blog’ except “where would all my existential angst end up then?” And this is true. JohnLacey.com is obstensibly a professional site for someone who has shunned professional life. I voluntarily left the work force to explore some whims I have. But on that site I write about writing, about wanting to write, I write about creativity, I collect interesting quotes from people I admire. There is a creative focus there because I want to be a creative person. I’ve been trying to express this sentiment for a long time and every time I do the words ‘lofty’ and ‘ambitions’ come to mind. At times I can’t begin to imagine what an artist is or does, but I know I want to be one. I know this when I watch Sunday Arts in awe and with a degree of envy. I watch people make sculptures and paint and draw, and I think… ‘wow, this is amazing!’

And then there is JohnOfJordan.com… This is about YouTube and community. Not about ‘the community’ really, so much as about ‘my community.’ I interview my friends about their hopes and dreams and video technique. I include tips and thoughts and ocassionally a video of my own. The point I want to make is that I never had any desire to become a video maker. I wasn’t one of the drama kids in high school. I hadn’t done any acting since the primary school play Nowhere Boy (where I was given an important supporting role until the moody director, hell bent on living his dreams through school children, recast my role and made me an extra). My attraction to this site was all about people and not the ‘famous’ people waving down from their ivory towers, but the people who were just like me somewhere else in the world sharing their lives, sharing their world, sharing themselves. (And I suppose this is what people like Rohan and Christopher Mast mean when they talk about YouTube being a “social networking site.”) I’ve come to enjoy video production and be deeply fascinated by it, but it was always in service of connecting with people and people I cared about.

But still those ‘lofty ambitions’ hover. Still that artistic aspiration exists deep within me. JohnOfJordan is community directed, and that is what I love about it. But I guess I started JohnLaceyTV so I had a forum where I could be more self-directed. A place where I could be myself, under my own name, and perhaps shed some of the YouTubian concerns I had fostered with JohnOfJordan. It is oddly liberating to start again, to start from scratch. Working on a video that I’m proud of and putting it on a channel four people have heard of makes me think about the work, the art, more than the views… (I think viewers of either will appreciate content that is collected slightly thematically too.)

I always felt this great pressure to ‘be’ one thing and to be ‘the best’ of that one thing. I struggled with that idea for a really long time, because everyone is an ‘expert’ and everyone thinks you should be an ‘expert’ too. And not just an expert but ‘the’ expert. And for me the most rewarding thing has been not choosing between competing desires, but finding a way to explore as many of them as I can. It is about trying to honour all of the pieces of me.

You can listen to this episode in full, or download it, here.
Or subscribe to the JOJCAST via iTunes.

So I was going through these videos, one by one down the list and I was struck by a couple of things. I was struck by how differently I made videos today than I did when I started two years ago. Obviously the humble webcam (as lovely as it is) had some technical limitations compared to more sophisticated camera technology, but there were lots of little things that I never used to consider – things that, today, I often get quite hung up on. Like what I’m wearing, the angle of the camera, white balance, lighting. I don’t even try to record video at night these days, back then I would just experiment with a single desk lamp and hope for the best. I tinkered with colour and brightness and contrast controls to give not the most accurate representation of the scene I was recording, but just the most interesting one. I would hit the switch and hope for the best. Obviously there were lots of takes that never saw the light of day. There were things I had never used and may never use. But as I watched these videos I wondered if my creativity had suffered a terrible blow as my production values had improved.

I’ve always struggled to find my place in the sun on YouTube. The rhetoric is always the same wherever you go; find one thing you do well, mine the hell out of it and do it on a regular enough basis that an audience knows what they are getting and knows when they can get their next ‘hit.’ The truth is I get distracted very easily. What amuses me one day might bore me the next. People dust off the same advice when it comes to finding a job or a career or “your life’s purpose” too. Intellectually I understand our economies are founded on the premise of specialization and that specialists are in greater demand, but, frankly, the idea of doing one thing for the rest of my (working) life terrifies me. So, actually, I just have this vague desire to do things that are personally satisfying, I want to be appreciated for what I do and (if it isn’t too much to ask) I would like to derive some income from it too.

One of the computer programming adages that is permanently etched into my brain is: Don’t reinvent the wheel. But, actually, when you have no idea what you’re doing it can be remarkably tempting. When you don’t know what you want to do with your life but just want to be appreciated and “successful” the desire to just emulate other people who are appreciated and successful is significant. (And when Tony Robbins tells you to go out and emulate the most successful people in your field it seems oddly compelling.) But, frankly, the world doesn’t need another Michael Buckley or another Robofillet or another Sam Proof. We already have those.

I was listening to a presentation that John Gruber and Merlin Mann made recently. (I really like Merlin Mann incidentally. It is easy to get caught up in the machinations of being productive for productivity’s sake. Mann’s focus is much more about devoting the time and resources to building something that really matters to you. That resonates with me.)

John Gruber:

Our instincts I think serve us wrong and we call it like a “Lizard brain” thing. Our instincts tell us if you want to write something – I mean, and that is part of these assumptions that we’re making, that if you want to write – and we say ‘write’ because that’s what we do. But it could be photography, it could be a series of just making a short film a week, any kind of thing. But I mean obviously the whole reason that you’re publishing it is you do want to find a readership [...] you want to find an audience. [...] The mismatch is that our instincts tell us that if we want to find an audience you should try to make something that is like the things people are already enjoying.

That makes sense. But what does a person do until they figure who they are and what it is they are supposed to be doing? And how does a person figure that out anyway? I feel like I’m tinkering with a lot of different things, experimenting, hoping that something will ‘stick.’ But I can just as easily see myself tinkering until the day I die and being one of those people who puts the trite cliched notion “Jack of all trades, master of none” on their Twitter biographies.

In a funny way I think I’ve come full circle. I feel like I finally understand what Todd Henry means when he talks about “unnecessary creating.” In my haste to create a workflow, I’ve created a series of paths of least resistance. Shortcuts. Tried and tested techniques that give me a predictable result. Somehow, somewhere I stopped being an artist and started working in a factory producing a product. Somehow the need to experiment got replaced by the need to meet a deadline. And the whole process became more and more about the product and the feedback; I’d produce something, wait anxiously for comments from people and let those comments dictate (to some extent) future creation.

And those webcam takes… those hundreds of random, silly, nonsensical, profound webcam takes. That is unnecessary creating. I realise now that even in my most popular vlogs it was the improvised moments, the moments where the words coming out of my mouth surprised even me, that really reasonated with people. I need to find a way to reconnect with that.

Oh I should probably tell you. I am also writing at my other blog. As far as I am concerned, this is my personal blog. I have another one which is obstensibly a professional blog at JohnLacey.com. I find myself writing lengthy, interesting email to the Internet Marketing Masterminds group I am a part of and I decided I would collect many of them and publish them there with other content about social media, content creation and creativity. I replied to a few emails and published one of them on that website and put another one in the drafts section of the blog.

I thought about writing a Sensational Sabbath column here on Sunday but ultimately gave up on the idea. Erratic sleeping patterns rendered me zombie-like for much of the day. Sunday Night Safran, even now three months into 2009, is still best of “reruns.” I wonder if Triple J haven’t sacked Father Bob and John Safran.

This morning the weekend was over and I could get back to serious productivity. Or so I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to shut down TweetDeck. For some reason I couldn’t form words intelligently enough to make the drafts public. All I wanted to do today was revise the notes I made on Friday and write some articles and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was full of energy but I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I sort of played Mario Brothers for much of the day and listened to random podcasts. (iProcrastinate, incidentally, is the name of an actual podcast. Turns out procrastination is a failure to self-regulate and can apparently be overcome with ‘mindfulness meditation.’ The true beauty of this podcast though is that while hosted by an actual Professor at a Canadian University it invariably starts with an apology for not having updated the podcast sooner.)

I was telling someone about my day and it was only then when I thought about what I was saying did it start to make sense. I really didn’t think I could do the things I wanted to do. I had this well of unarticulated anxiety. The Podcast, which was my pride and joy, had stalled. At first it was fairly effortless because people were lining up volunteering to be interviewed. I had hoped to supplement the interviews with shorter episodes featuring tips and ideas for video makers. To be honest I felt silly recording these solo pieces. I did one about YouTube Resolutions – essentially asking people what they wanted to achieve in terms of video creation in 2009. Its funny I got a lot of response from people inferring they had heard the podcast though nobody actually responded to the central question. Two weeks later I had some issues with my audio setup and after a day of frustration I took my piece on video syndication tool Tubemogul and turned it into a PDF document. This way the iTunes subscribers would still receive something in their feed.

I guess on some level I feel kind of stupid talking in an authorative way. I don’t know why exactly. I may not know everything on the subject of online video but my interactions with others have lead me to believe I know a lot, and a lot more than a lot of other people. People quiz me on different things all the time. Usually if I don’t know, I can find out. In 2009, my YouTube Resolution was going to be a testimony to what I thought was my own changing role within this community. One which was more technical in nature, one that offered support and knowledge to others within this community. There were going to be interviews and profiles and tips. I was determined to get the best experts I could find on various subjects I felt would interest my readers and listeners.

The ever-changing nature of YouTube though drives me nuts. Once I think I’ve gotten the technical details figured out, that I’ve got my workflow streamlined, they change a fundamental setting and my time is eaten up with technical concerns when they should’ve been devoted almost exclusively to creative ones. I appreciate that technology is change and that the site itself is evolving over time, but the issue really comes in the form of the complete lack of communication from the company. I used to think that people protested new features and changes at YouTube too much, but the truth is the YouTube company is in partnership with a lot of content creators – many of whom rely on the service as a primary or secondary source of income. Can you imagine what would happen on a movie set if the crew stopped communicating with the actors? YouTube isn’t the only game in town, infact it’s not even the best game in town. Its strength comes from its brand’s awareness and that a lot of people congregate there. As much as it frustrates me I am reluctant to jump ship. Certainly I have content on other video sharing sites, but it is still the heart of my operation. My friends are there. They consider themselves ‘YouTubers’ not video creators. Even the premise of the reworked JohnOfJordan website is more about that community than it is about me as an individual. I am emotionally invested.

And I realised that I had been flying much lower under the proverbial radar than I had previously anticipated. I resisted the urge to promote the podcast very much since I felt like I was still finding my feet. The other day I casually asked on Twitter if anyone was listening to it. I was dumbfounded by how many people didn’t know it existed. Despite talking about it constantly on Twitter, despite linking to it from within Facebook, despite even writing about, and linking to, it in a video description. (I joked to Rohan that nobody reads video descriptions but I am really beginning to think it’s true.) I wasn’t disappointed, I was just amazed that people didn’t know about it. Its time to step up marketing efforts. Its time to arrange more interviews. If I can’t bring YouTubers to the Podcast, I’ll bring the Podcast to YouTube… and 12seconds.tv and… other places too.

I want to connect with more people, but in ways that offer more immediate feedback. I was hoping to do a show at BlogTalkRadio but realised that it would require me to ring a US phone number just to host the show. (A potentially expensive proposition for an hour long show.) Non-live audio work has made lazy. There is no pressure to speak fluidly the first time since you can always go again. I want to put myself in a situation where I have to think on my feet. I am tempted to return to local community radio but part of me thinks this might be a distraction to my online aspirations. I would really like to host a regular BlogTV, Stickam or UStream show, but I am severely hampered by my internet speed.

I also wish I had someone to talk to on a regular basis about my efforts and my progress. I would love to think I wasn’t alone in my process. I’m sure knowing somebody will check on my status would be a great source of motivation too.

This won’t be a newsflash for any Australians, but it’s been extremely hot lately and this has impeded my desire to do much of anything (except, occassionally, retreat to the air conditioned library.) Parts of Australia – Melbourne, Adelaide and Launceston come to mind – have been experiencing temperatures of upwards of 40 degrees celsius. I don’t know how they cope, especially since power shortages have accompanied these weather patterns. My heart goes out to the poor people. Stay cool – both literally and metaphorically.

But even more than that I’ve been a bit preoccupied with some things that probably sound quite crazy. I guess I am a bit isolated and prone to overthinking things. Questions about human nature and the characteristics of the world have been weighing me down. I’ve noticed a lot of people in my life becoming very fickle lately. I’ve really felt like I’ve been micromanaging parts of my (if you’ll forgive the expression) “community.” I’ve grown increasingly envious of people who produce things and then just release them to the world without the time and energy consuming task of managing the reactions of others to those things, post-creation.

Technobabble and Tech Support

I feel, too, that I’ve been spreading myself too thinly. I’ve committed myself to projects that I did – and do – believe in, with extraordinarily talented people who I care about and want to support. However I’ve come to realise I have finite resources. I have to admit also that some of these initiatives were motivated merely by a desire to be liked by others, or to be associated with people more successful or talented than I regard myself.

I have a lot of technical knowledge. I’ve come to regard that as a strength. But I can’t be everybody’s “go to” technical guy. Nor do I want to. What I really want to do is help educate and empower individuals to take control of their own technology and use it to reach their goals. And I also want other people to be less dependent on me so I too can take control of my own digital destiny.

Future Plans

I have started a new YouTube account in the hopes of rediscovering the joy of video creation away from the constant gaze of subscribers. I am not ready to promote that profile, though if you find it, I always appreciate feedback. This seems counterintuitive on many levels since the JohnOfJordan account is part of the YouTube Partner program and this new account likely won’t ever be. But I’ve decided I need this outlet to rediscover my passion. It’s either this or put away the camera permanently… so I am hoping at least some of you can find a way to be patient with me during this process.

I am also going to unveil (hopefully some time in February) a brand new website. It is going to be a showcase of my talents, a collection of videos, photographs, and articles on specific topics. It is going to be my professional presence on the internet. I’ve worked hard to differentiate between JohnOfJordan and John Lacey. This isn’t motivated by some Clark Kent/Superman or Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana need for secrecy and privacy, just an expectation that different things will be of interest to different people.

So yeah… that’s where I am right now.

The Vatican has joined YouTube. Well actually apparently the “Vatican” channel on YouTube has existed since November 21, 2005, though the first video has been only uploaded three days ago. (This interests me because I genuinely doubt the username would’ve been registered in 2005.)

But even more interesting than this is the content itself.

Benedict XVI: Networking promotes dialogue and solidarity

The video itself is not available to be embedded however I have decided to reproduce the text of the video (which is also provided in the video description):

“This is the theme of the message for the World Day of Communications announced by the Vatican during a press conference today. The new initiative of Vatican Radio, the Vatican Television Center and Google Italia was presented, bringing brief clips on the Pope and his activities to be aired on YouTube, beginning today. In his message, the Holy Father stressed the great potential for openness to the world, to dialogue and communication that electronic technology can achieve. The new digital arena makes it possible to meet and learn the values and traditions of others. For such meetings to be fruitful, however, requires honest and correct means of expression, along with a disposition to attentive and respectful listening. We must not let ourselves be taken advantage of by those simply seeking consumers in a market of undiscerned possibilities, where subjective experience overrides the truth. Benedict XVI addressed young Catholics in particular, as the leaders in bringing the testimony of faith to the digital world. “

First Obama and now Pope Benedict XVI?

One cannot help but feel that this setup provides for very one-directional communication however. The video cannot be embedded. Ratings have been disabled. Comments are “pending approval.” The particular video I reference here has had 3,537 views and not a single comment has been approved, three days after it was first uploaded.

As far as Laurel Papworth is concerned, No Comments? No Engagement. She cites Seth Godin as an example. The comment I left on that entry has since taken on a new significance. Keep in mind that what I wrote took place four days before the Vatican account had been unveiled.

I wrote:

I guess on some level you’ve got to want to be social. Presumably there are people out there who are completely asocial, or even antisocial. And one might wonder if Godin’s ivory tower approach doesn’t make him seem more aloof/mysterious to many people. I mean if he didn’t already have some level of noteriety we wouldn’t be discussing him now. Is he gaming the system? Sure. Are people still digging, stumbling, tweeting and retweeting? Yes. Not a day goes by that something doesn’t appear in my twitter feed about him – and I don’t follow Godin. And maybe, just maybe, it is within the twitter vernacular we might garner the most telling aspect of Godin’s (ahem) “tribe.” He doesn’t have readers so much as followers, not in the twitter sense but in the religious sense. He is as engaging as the Pope. They both appear periodically to make announcements from their pulpits and from within the relative safety of their Pope mobiles, and some people listen. But will any of us have any audience with either? Seems doubtful. lol

Happy Sunday!

(I promise to use my new found clairvoyant powers mostly for good.)

An old fairly inconsequential YouTube video was being inundanted with not-terribly-nice comments. To be honest I didn’t really care if random people on the internet liked it or not, or thought it was clever or stupid. What concerned me was the new subtext they were reading into it, that it actually revealed me to be a chronic racist. Certainly that wasn’t my intention. The video was profoundly silly, granted, but I always felt like the only person I was making fun of was myself. The whole project was born out of nothing but love and adoration for my British friends.

It frustrated the hell out of me too because time and time again random people will come up to a particular video and go, “That didn’t solve poverty!” or “That didn’t introduce world peace!” or “That isn’t a proper sociological study of accents in the United Kingdom!” And, of course, none of my videos attempt to do any of those things. I mean whether or not you enjoy something, it is what IT is, you know? It doesn’t morph into something different just because you come at it from a particular ideology or with a particular expectation. That people were happening upon a video titled, “HAPPY FAKE BRITISH ACCENT DAY” and then complaining about how fake the accents were… it blew my mind. While I haven’t delved very deeply into the statistical information YouTube offers, I severely doubt these people were finding this video by accident. It is my expectation they sought out the information, and, somehow, still didn’t understand the nature of the beast.

At any rate I have removed the video from public viewing. I genuinely believe I hadn’t done anything offensive or wrong, but decided it probably wasn’t worth fighting for the purposes of my own convinction. But more than that, I thought, this video isn’t really what JohnOfJordan is about. In that way, it was a no brainer. I confess there have been moments when I’ve been driven crazy by a desire to connect with people and moments where I’ve equated my own personal worth to the ability to get views/comments/subscriptions. I’ve uploaded things that I wasn’t proud of because I felt compelled more by a timetable than a desire to produce quality content.

But by the same token I was very conscious that this video – regardless of whether people loved it or hated it – had really captured the imagination of a lot of people. It was getting an obscene amount of views (at least by JohnofJordan standards). And this in itself brought up a raft of psychological dilemmas. I mean, I guess I could bait a lot of people into viewing anything if I managed to be controversial or trivial enough, surely? What if Nalts is right; what if good content isn’t popular? What is the point of putting the time and energy into something truly magical if nobody cares enough to embrace it?

I didn’t end up writing very much about it, but I found YouTube Live a profoundly disappointing development. I remembered thinking at the end of it a great sense of, “Oh great, THIS is the world we now live in.” Everything seemed so horrendously contrived and pointless. Novelty was favoured over quality, and nothing was allowed to linger too long lest the ADHD generation become bored.

And I thought that perhaps this silly video was my own personal demonstration of this insight into the world that we live in.

But maybe I am too soon to pass judgment on the world. Another video from some time ago has had its own momentum, even in what has frankly been a video creating lull for me. Unlike the earlier video, this one does mean something. Infact to me it means everything. It was a labour of love and much editing. It was an attempt to dissect and assimilate my own life experience.

This was the most recent comment on the Unconditional Love video:

nsyncangel101 (1 week ago)
this is great, and all so true. i just recently came to this conclusion as well. you have a lot of guts for putting yourself out there like that, but way to make a statement! :)

This comment meant so much, but truthfully by this stage I was so used to meeting condescending comments with whimisical replies that all I could do was say ‘thank you.’

At any rate I feel that for me the true power of online videos isn’t about skateboarding dogs, or the ability to increase sales of mentos and diet coke. I mean those things are wonderful. But it isn’t where I want to live. It isn’t what I want to do. And if that means my videos get fewer views, so be it.

If you don’t believe me, check out my garden gnome’s channel. No, really. Its a video channel hosted by a garden gnome. It’s not a troll account, not a sock account, it’s a gnome account! This gnome with a whopping four subscribers has the following dubious honour:

#36 – Most Subscribed (This Month) – Gurus – Australia

I was happy, overjoyed even, that I got to hang out with a more select group of YouTube people recently. These people actually were my friends. But the point I really want to make here is that these relationships are meaningful because they are based around more than a shared nationality and a single hobby. Relationships are connections entrenched in familiarity, shared values, interests and dreams. Not merely demographics. That is the ‘old skool’ marketing view of the world – an expectation that all males 25-30 residing in Australia will all fall over themselves to snap up your product. My hope is that people have a more innate understanding that individuals are more than the raw data on their birth certificates.

@retrogrrl on Twitter brought this fascinating article from 43folders.com to my attention. The whole article is worthy of your consideration, however a single tweet encapsulated the central idea:

Apparently, you should pretend to like anyone who pretends to like you. This is called “networking,” and it’s why the web smells like feet.
- hotdogsladies

We know instinctively when people are being disingenuous. This is why we abhor the concept of Sub4Sub. Personally I realise now that I was trying too hard to ‘play nice’ and ‘fit in’ with certain people who were more acquaintances than friends. I had identified that Australia – in terms of video content creation, at least – was a very small place indeed and was wary of offending anyone. I humoured video collaboration requests I had no interest and was frankly disappointed by the results of. I gritted my teeth and accepted vexing Skype group chats that again I had no interest in. When eventually I had become so fed up of the experience that I did express these sentiments the other party was shocked. In hindsight I realise I was in part responsible for maintaining the illusion. When I dared to speak out about harrassment I received from one of the people in this ‘clique’ I was further shunned.

The concept of ‘community’ may contain some element of truth, but there is no one community rather a collection of communities, of social networks – or to abandon the jargon entirely, groups of friends. They form in organic ways and overlap with each other in ways that might seem counter-intuitive. I am frequently amazed at how often people know all the key players – but one – in a seeming social construct. Anyone who still maintains there is only one community is either confused or hopes to create one homogenus mass for reasons that beg considerable scrunity. One community with which to rule them, perhaps?

The true value of interaction – be it online, or otherwise – relates to the integrity of those conversations. While it might feel nice to have someone pay you lipservice, there is no real benefit to it. I don’t know about you, but frankly I lack the energy to maintain such facades. As I told the person who recently called me ‘pathetic’ I want my friendships to mean something.

YouTube fame is such an illusion.

I put to you, dear readers, that YouTube fame is not an illusion; that fame is present on YouTube and in other areas on the internet. I present to you that the reason people do not believe in YouTube fame is because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what fame is and means. We’ve come to associate the notion with glamour, paparazzi, scandal, and model-esque good looks. It need not mean any of these things.

From Dictionary.com:

fame
–noun

1. widespread reputation, esp. of a favorable character; renown; public eminence: to seek fame as an opera singer.
2. common estimation or opinion generally held of a person or thing; reputation.

I can already hear protests. “Define ‘widespread,’” you will say. How long is a piece of string? We could set an arbitrary number at this point. We could say that 2000 subscribers or 20,000 subscribers was significant enough to be considered widespread.

How Long Is Your String: A Sample Of YouTube’s Most Subscribed

It is all relative anyway; or as Nalts put it, “It’s a bottomless pit.” For as many subscribers as you might have, you can always have more.

Culturally we have an expectation that ‘famous’ people are whisked away from us mere mortals, hidden behind bodyguards and public relations representatives. This medium changes the way people interact with each other. There are new opportunities to connect with people, irrespective of their profile. You can comment on blog posts and videos and they are usually read. Sometimes they’re responded to. You can offer counter views on topics on your own blog and use trackbacks to notify the author. Frequently this offers an opportunity for engagement you might not encounter in day-to-day life.

Many businesses and individuals utilise technology like Google Alerts and search facilities to find out who is talking about them, and what they are saying. I received an email from Sol Lipman, founder of 12seconds.tv – a service I signed up to but hadn’t used. I remarked on the email in Twitter and was surprised to find within minutes Sol had personally replied to the tweet.

My point is simply if you’re known for something – anything – you are famous. The number in and of itself isn’t important. Indeed for the movie and television actors it is remarkably difficult to even quantify. Is it the sales for their last movie, the ratings for their last television episode appearance, sales of a magazine their picture appears on the cover of? (How do YOU attempt to quantify your worth, your creativity, your output?) Instead of reaching for modesty the next time somebody takes an interest in you and your work, just express gratitude; say thank you.

Of all the things I’ve done in my 26 years, none of them have been as well-received as my involvement at YouTube. I currently have 515 Subscribers. [I choose to capitalise the word Subscribers in this instance to denote how much I appreciate them!] The number might seem quite humble to the likes of RoboFillet (1,212 subscribers) and HalfScottishGuy (2,031 subscribers). It might also seem quite generous to the likes of Brojoghost (90 subscribers) and Azukar8 (13 subscribers). But it has allowed me to extend beyond my geographical reality, and share and connect with a much broader audience than other outlets have allowed me to do thus far. To me, that is wonderful.