Social Media Platforms I’m Using

I’m a proponent of using social media to expand my professional and private horizons.  Currently my number one platform for reaching out is from the micro blogging platform Twitter.  The biggest reason it is working out for me is because I focus on the many users / followers / friends clouds.  Similar but smaller successes are happening for me with Flickr, You Tube, Linked In, 12 Seconds TV, and My Space.  Face Book is a very successful social media tool but today I choose not maintain my profile on that platform.  For me to achieve optimum results with Face Book I need to use it’s features.  Today I don’t want to and it’s possible I may never want to actively use Face Book.  If someone else told me this I would advise them to delete their Face Book account because it’s counterproductive to let it just sit there.  I believe I have enough social media upward momentum right now to let my Face Book coast for now.

Meanwhile, someone else set up a Face Book fan site for my hair.  I have nothing to do with this fan site but I know who put it together.  It’s pretty funny actually.

Here are the links to my other social media profiles.  I don’t follow / friend everyone back who follows me so if you do follow me say on Twitter and I don’t follow back, don’t take it personally I’m just not able to follow everybody that follows me.

Twitter
http://twitter.com/johnpemble

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/people/ambientjohn

Linked In
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpemble

You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/johnpemble

12 Seconds TV
http://12seconds.tv/channel/johnpemble

MySpace was the first mainstream successful social media tool that grabbed our attention a few years ago.  Other services followed.  This year the micro blogging social media site Twitter.com saw huge growth with the majority of it's users joining over the past few months.  Some communities have been able to use Twitter in conjunction with other social media sites like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and so on to bring people out of their Internet caves and into social venues for face to face interaction.  Des Moines is a city that experienced a great deal of activity thanks to connections made through Twitter. I am one of the Iowans using Twitter to make countless connections in Des Moines and in time zones far away.

Nathan T Wright from Lava Row wrote about successful events Twitter helped move along in Des Moines this year.  His blog speaks well of Twitter's practical daily use.  Oh and he also features a picture of me from a Des Moines Epic Ugly Sweater Party at the top of his blog titled "Thanks Tweeps. Love, Des Moines" so of course the blog is worth a look let alone a read.

http://www.lavarow.com/2008/12/30/thanks-tweeps-love-des-moines

My recent change to Iowa Public Radio's news department began three weeks ago, and my first feature aired last Wednesday.  It's about coworking, a new business venture for young professionals and independent business people.  South of downtown Des Moines Impromptu Studio hosts numerous professional themed evening events to promote it's main objective, provide a coworking space during the day.  Because it involves multiple goals for many professions coworking is not easy to describe, but owner Daniel Shipton, his wife Abbie, and some of his tenants talk about this concept in this audio feature.

http://iowapublicradio.org/pmm-cms/NewsCMS/news/single_story.php?storyid=73

The above link is a beta page for an audio stream system for Iowa Public Radio.

I am developing more feature stories for Iowa Public Radio and I will share them here.

By the end of fall I will be working full time in Des Moines with my current employer Iowa Public Radio. While technically I am an employee of Iowa State University's department WOI, it's easier to address my work place as Iowa Public Radio.  This radio network is the collaboration of three universities and the multiple stations attached to each university.  Gradually we have been changing our identity away from individual stations to the single identity Iowa Public Radio.

In 1989 I started with one of these stations in Fort Dodge.  KTPR was a small 100,000 watt public radio station from Iowa Central Community College.  In a ten year span I worked in every department for a period of time.  I hosted many music programs, news magazine programs, created news and arts features, managed a small staff, organized our satellite operations, program log creation, and much more.  By 2000 KTPR became part of WOI's Radio Group where I continued to produce music programs and manage a large part time staff of ISU student board operators.  When WOI transitioned to Iowa Public Radio in 2006 I was taken away from my regular on air programming to focus on various behind the scenes work.  Quickly it was evident to me that I needed to be back in the position of producing content for on the air or over the Internet distribution.  Others in our organization agreed that I should be back in a position where I can produce content for Iowa Public Radio.  There were a few conversations about finding a place for me to be a producer again and thanks to good timing this month I have been reassigned to the news department.  Like all jobs in radio it will be a mix of many things including but not limited to producing arts and cultural stories from the Des Moines area, hosting talk shows, and reporting general news stories.

Because this is a Des Moines based position I will be leaving Fort Dodge in October so by November I can be completely transitioned out of my current job description and start working in my new job description for Iowa Public Radio news.  This is a welcome change in my career path because it allows me to continue working for Iowa Public Radio.  This also allows me to work extensively in a department I've only been able to do every now and then over the past two decades.  Having a varied set of skills has always served me well with my broadcasting career let alone the part time side jobs of being a college level instructor, post production audio engineer, ambient musician, and video blogger.  In 2009 you will hear and see a lot more of me on public radio, the Internet, your ambient music collection with a new record, and maybe even a classroom will have me swing through.  You might even hear me on non public radio stations sitting in on morning shows occasionally.  It's happened a time or eight recently.  Bottom line, there will be more John Pemble stuff in 2009 and I'm very happy.

This fall I am moving from Fort Dodge to Des Moines to work as an arts and cultural reporter for Iowa Public Radio's news department.  I welcome this reassignment and look forward to resuming a regular role as an on air producer.

This year I began to blog in two new forms, microblogging and videoblogging. 

Twitter.com is a microblogging site where each post (or tweet) is limited to 140 characters.  I follow other Twitter users and when I log in I chronologically see the tweets of all those I follow.  What I discovered quickly is there are more responses to my encapsulated messages as compared to a long form blog like the one you are reading now.  I was able to find interesting and useful people related to my broadcasting profession as much as I was able to find people in Iowa I like to hang out with and drink beer.  My list of followers continues to expand with fellow Iowans as well as some very interesting people from other parts of the country.  

This summer while at a Twitter "tweetup" I borrowed a small video camera from Adam Pirillo.  Within 24 hours I ordered my own.  The Flip Camera is a small shoot and point video camera that records  640 x 480 avi files.  The resolution isn't amazing nor is the clarity of each shot, but it allows one to create a lot of compelling material quickly that doesn't look bad.  It works well in low light, there is no focus or zoom, and to start recording press the red button and go… and go go go I have been going with my Flip Camera for one month.

There are a lot of video blogs out there where a person talks into a video camera for a few minutes and that's about it.  For me I wanted to move along a storyline about me in a way that was a bit more packaged.   In four weeks I found a style that I am comfortable with in my first six edited video blogs.  It was easy to find material to video blog about with my vacation out west that included four days at Comic Con.  There is so much video footage from my California trip I haven't finished the final two video blogs, but I'll get to those very soon.  I also had two video blogs featuring my visiting relatives while I was working at the Iowa State Fair for six days.

My background as an audio producer of interviews and features for public radio has helped me a great deal with writing short tweets for twitter and for telling a story using multimedia for video blogs.  These two new means of expression have helped my creativity break out a bit more over the past few months and I'm still processing the new experiences these mediums have allowed me to have.

I will be writing more about microbolgging and videoblogging but until then one can find out more about me from twitter.com/johnpemble and youtube.com/johnpemble

This is an iTunes mix I published awhile ago titled "So Quiet So Pleasing".

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