New Horizons, Signing Off - Sorta

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to just what I want to do with this blog. When I first started, I was working through a career change of sorts, moving away from my role as a developer to, well, I don’t know what I am actually.

I had a discussion with several folks at Northern Voice of aligning your audience with your work. The main issue that seems to exist is that as we change as individuals, so does our voice. As someone with many different interests and experiments, I’ve found that many people have followed along with me as I stumbled along. I don’t know that it’s fair to change, but “you get what you pay for” - right?

Today, I’m at an interesting crossroads with what I am interested in. Things seem to fall out into three main buckets:

socialconference.com

My company, syncPEOPLE, is developing a vision I’ve had for the world of events. We’ve been pushing through to develop something that solves so many of the problems I’ve encountered as a semi-professional conference-goer. We’re also bringing in and addressing the needs of the organizer and the people that sponsor and exhibit at these events.

In this regard, I’ve been spending more and more time at blogs and sites that deal with the event and meetings industry. We’ve been looking at how to mediate - how to forge a natural middleground that lets us be participants while still understanding that organizing successful events has never been easy and will continue to be ripe with concerns.

xposted.com

This is the secret project that we gave a glance at during Northern Voice. It is essentially a system that will give bloggers a much more direct way to monetize (or as Nancy White has suggested “cha-ching” their blogs. I’m going to refrain from talking too much about this for the moment, but the reception we’ve gotten from everyone tells us this is a direction to pursue.

In this arena, we’re dealing with many different audiences and issues. I’ve had to do a lot of reading about copyright, blogger’s rights, and publisher’s needs. It’s quite a bit of information and will require much more research to make it succesful.

blogaccents.com

If I ever had one passion as a developer, it was for solving interface issues. I’m not a Jedi Master like Josh Porter or LukeW, but hey, I’m pretty good at what I do. Though I have spent most of my time on the business side of things, the one aspect of building both projects above has been in simplifying the design and working on improvements to the metaphors we use.

Over the last few months, I have also spent quite some time contracting my time out to provide that special blend that I can offer to other startups and large companies alike. Where else can you get a sociologist, graphic designer, programmer, idealogue, and entrepreneur all rolled into one (probably lots, actually)?

One area that I have seen blooming in that time has been the arena of products I call Blog Accents - they’re the accessories being created to adorn our blogs. Web 2.0 has given us a number of different ways to integrate cool things. I’m planning on running each of these sites on a different platform so I can test things out and see how it goes.

Next Steps

So what’s this all mean? Well, sometime soon, I am going to be dropping this site into an archives.socialtwister.com domain. This site will be come an aggregator, of sorts, from my other entities. With x:posting, I will be able to write once and publish anywhere - allowing me to give individuals the choice to better choose which type of information they wany.

I’m also going to be adding more voices to discussion. My partners, Duane and Pete, will be new contributors. I’m also looking for others that want to talk to any of the communities mentioned above.

So that’s it. Fasten your seatbelts and keep your hands inside the vehicle of change.