This got me to thinking about the types of people I connect to on each of these social media networking sites. In my eyes this blog serves a different purpose and has a separate target audience to my Linkedin or Facebook profiles.

In light of this I’m giving a rundown of the groups and categories of people I connect to via each of these sites and their envisioned usage in my eyes.

Blog

The hub of this particular Chris Miller on the web. It’s where you’ll be able to find out about who I am and what I’m up to. From here you can branch out onto each of the social media sites I’m to be found on where more information in each of their specific focuses can be found.

Although technically not a social site it does mark the start of a web of profiles on various other sites as well as providing a blogroll (which is terminally out of date) of other people and sites I follow on the web.

• My blog is for: me to post random nonsense and technical articles to.
• My blog connects me to: other sites I syndicate.

Delicious

I’m terrible at using Delicious for bookmarking as well as bookmarking things locally. I tend to read an article that’s relevant to the thoughts running around my head at a particular moment then move on, forever forgetting said article (much trolling of web history ensues at a later date).

Although this site allows connections to other people I’ve shunned away from doing so. Feeds from the likes of Reddit and the BBC combined with Twitter tends to keep me up to date with any relevant articles flying around.

• Delicious is for: posting links to interesting/relevant/funny articles and categorising/tagging them.
• Delicious connects me to: nobody at the moment.

Facebook

Facebook is the only site in this list that I’d truly describe as a social media site. By this I mean that it serves no other purpose than to be a platform to connect and keep-in-touch with people I know socially. All the other sites in this list are quite focused in their purpose.

In light of this, Facebook is where most of the connecting comes into play for me. I have friends on Facebook from various facets of my life: school, university, work and other social situations. The one thing that sets Facebook apart from most of these other sites is that anyone I am friends with I have actually met, interacted with and have subsequently added as a friend.

The site itself is easy to use, little or no expertise is required to set up an account and start connecting with friends. There are various ‘applications’ to be added, groups to be joined, photos to be looked at… essentially it’s a procrastinators wet dream. This of course means it has no real focus or goal for me other than being stayintouchwithpeople.com.

• Facebook is for: everyone! Staying in contact with people I know socially.
• Facebook connects me to: pretty much everyone I know personally.

Flickr

Flickr, certainly for me, started out as a tool for online photo storage and organisation. I jumped on Flickr not long after it started up, before those pesky Yahoo! logins, and a tool was certainly what I was using it solely for.

Over time as the site developed and the whole social media thing took off Flickr added some nice functionality for discovering other people and building a photography community.

Connections I have via Flickr tend to be people I know with a smattering of people who have some interesting photos up. For the most part I find Flickr a useful tool for distributing photos onto other social media sites and it serves as an online repository of all my photos. That said however, it does make it very easy to keep up-to-date with photos of peers and colleagues who have a ton more photography skill than I (particularly Chris Hannah, Jim Moore, Steve Strowes and Dean Wright being of note).

• Flickr is for: hosting, organising and sharing my photos online.
• Flickr connects me to: people I know and other Flickr users with interesting posts.

Last.fm

I think I initially signed up to Last.fm just to see what it was, what it offered and to see if it’d be useful. Since then I’ve been off and on using the service to capture the tracks I’ve been listening to with iTunes. That is until recently with the switch for most of my music listening to Spotify which offers integrated Last.fm scrobbling.

The stats over time from tracks you’ve listened to are interesting and the music recommendations can be good especially if, like me, you generally don’t listen to music that’s very recent. I tend to view this more like I did Flickr initially, as a tool to draw information into other social media sites. That being said, I do have friends added on the site. The friends I have added tend to be actual friends I know and have somewhat similar music tastes to.

• Last.fm is for: collecting information about my music listening trends and sharing them on other sites.
• Last.fm connects me to: friends I know with similar music tastes.

Linkedin

By far the most professionally oriented of any of the sites listed here and again on my part initially used as a tool rather than a networking site. Linkedin for me initially was a convenient way of creating an online, plain and simple CV which could be easily updated and seed any full written CVs I’d need to write.

The focus of this site has shifted quite dramatically for me over time, I view this site as more of a networking site than I did previously. Now it provides a forum for me to stay contacted with people I’ve worked and studied with, without as many social faux pas such like drunken photographs or questionable music tastes. Ok they’re not hard to find, but the site does provide a professional front for me.

As I’ve said above, the people I connect with on Linkedin are those I’ve previously worked and studied with, aside from a few recruitment agencies who try and cram job offers down your throat (can’t hurt can it?).

• Linkedin is for: providing a professional front.
• Linkedin connects me to: those people who have had the privilege of working or studying with me.

Twitter

Twitter in my eyes is by far the most loosely defined group of people I follow. I view Twitter as a pick-it-up put-it-down source of random pieces of information, friend status updates and broadcasts from various companies.

My follow list generally reflects this. I follow people I know as a means of staying up-to-date with them; companies whose services I use as well as updates on various pieces of software I utilise on a daily basis; and pretty much anyone who posts something interesting or funny. So the list of Twitter updates I see in my client varies between lunch orders, company/software bulletins, 160 character quips and interesting links.

Twitter is by far the social media service that I read and post to most often, though I tend to skim over a lot of tweets to find those that are relevant or interesting to me.

• Twitter is for: quickly posting interesting links, thoughts, lazy discussions, product updates… disseminating information.
• Twitter connects me to: absolutely anyone, friends are a given but other than that, anything that interests me.

So that’s my rundown of the social media sites you’ll see me on and my usage of and connectivity on them. I’d assume most people use each of these sites in a similar manner (barring Twitter which has various marketing and advertising uses that I’m not really clued up on). Any other uses or different perspectives are welcomed.
- Chris

I’ve only been playing with it for a short while, but my initial impressions are that it’s pretty damn sweet.

It allows you to post things straight from flickr, downloading your photo stream and showing it to you, so there’s no need to go to the flickr site and grab the photo url or the code you want to paste into your post, you simply have to drag in the photo!

Anyway, I’m impressed and you should get yourself a copy to try it out.
- Chris

The other web based application, Colr Pickr, allows you to pick a colour and then chooses some photos from the Color Fields pool which match it. Try it out, you get some really nice looking pics back!

If you love flickr… then you might like these.
- Chris

I snuck out into the secret garden and managed to take some pictures for all to enjoy, here are a few samples:

Don’t tell anyone, remember this is a Secret garden,
- Chris

The insides of the box were far more interesting than the outside. It contained the box which in turn contained my camera. After opening the box I played with the camera for a while then went off to the pub for a game of dominos.

A few pictures are below:

I’ll be posting some more photos which I have been taking today soon! I’m sure you can’t wait.
- Chris

So anyway, I upload, name and tag all my photos. The tags on the photos dictate which ones will be shown to users when they search for them on flickr.

Upon just checking this most viewed list I find my second most viewed photo has had 146 hits, whereas the most viewed photo has just reached 400 hits, all because it has been tagged with blowjob.

I give you BJ?:

I’m wondering what the most frequently searched tag is?
- Chris

World of Warcraft is an amazing game! Having played Warcraft all those years ago, then Warcraft II, and more recently Warcraft III, I am a huge fan of the genre.

This game, although costing £8 a month to play and can only be played online, is still an instant hit with me, I have managed to rack up more hours playing this in the last few days than I have studying (no great feat some will be saying!).

Anyway, the game is amazing, you should definitely buy it, here are some screens from it:

Later, I’m off to slay something,
- Chris

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to
reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in
the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of
those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU
ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to
2 years, and your new expiry date is Mar 4, 2007.

2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it
is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you
what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth
is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your
generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are
today.

They’re right, I do ROCK!
- Chris

Edit: I have given away the first account to Derek.

As mentioned, Thursday saw the handing in of the 4th year solo projects and the 3rd year group projects, after this was the compsoc end of term event at Café West followed by the GU.

My project was finished and ready for handing in at 3:30 (30 minutes early!), after handing it in it was off to Jim’s Bar via the food factory to grab some lunch.

Then after a few drinks it was Café West time, whilst there we were kept entertained by Stevie, Neil, Steve and Derek all having a pop at DJing for the night. After a lot more drink there it was off to the GU and to The Hive.

Finishing the project is strange, it has been coming for so long, yet now that it’s done I’m kind of missing not having to do it. On Friday, after my project demo, I was feeling really charged and ready to do some more work on the project even though I had nothing more to do. I’m sure I’ll be able to channel all this drive into my revision, or perhaps playing some computer games!

My photos from the night out are available on flickr. There is a set containing all the photos from the night, or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

I encourage everyone to join flickr and also to join the Glasgow DCS group, here you can add any photos you have of nights out or other things relating to the department, as well as post to the group only forums.

Hope everyone had a fun night and your easter holidays are relaxed and fun.
- Chris

A picture of one of the phones in the Boyd Orr building.

They were both out of order!
- Chris

Most of you will have heard of flickr as it seems to be booming with new members and loads of bloggers seem to be using flickr to host pictures for their blog.

I signed up for a free account a few weeks ago and had been browsing through the content and trying to assess the usefulness of having an account (having 3Gb of server space and another Gb backup has meant my space needs have always been more than satisfied) and how it differed from the PHP Gallery I had been using.

After just a few hours playing around with flickr I had decided that it was much better than the Gallery I had, so I thought I would use it to upload pics from now on. The only problem with this is you can only upload 10Mb of pictures per month, although this is a fair enough figure, and most of the time I wouldn’t ever generate 10Mb of pictures. However there are some times when I manage to rack up an obscene number of pictures at one (parties, ends of term – which is ever nearing, and so forth) and 10Mb (hell 50Mb) wouldn’t cut it.

So I had a look around the site to see how much a full account was, currently due to flickr still being in its beta stage the sign up fee is only $41.77 (which works out just over £20 at this time) for a year, what the hell, it’s only £20.

So I signed up to flickr pro which offers:

• 1Gb monthly upload (10Mb in free version)
• Unlimited storage capacity (only last 100 photos are user accessible in the free version)
• Unlimited bandwidth (dunno what this is for the free version)
• Unlimited photosets (limited to 3 in the free version)
• Full size images archived (smaller ones are archived in the free version)

I am sitting at the moment uploading aall my photos to flickr and am nearly finished. So far I have been able to use around 20% of the monthly limit. I fully intend to start taking more photos and try to at least put a dent in the limit each month. There has been many times this year when walking around I have thought that something would make a great picture, but have never had my camera with me, hopefully I’ll start carrying it around and taking some oportunist shots to post.

Another thing about flickr is that it seems to tie in quite nicely with both my PowerBook and PC. On my PB I can export photos to flickr using an iPhoto plugin, on WindowsXP I have a desktop uploader. flickr also allows you to post photo blog posts to many types of blog (including WordPress blogs).

Anyway, you should try it out!
- Chris