For those trying to leverage twitter to help them make money may benefit greatly from this, for the casual user, it may mean having to block many new followers per day. I’m kind of on the fence on this issue because I’m not so sure I want or need to use Twitter to network with new people. Twitter is an open network though, and as such, you can expect a few pains in the patoot now and again. In that Twitter is yet another attempt at social networking, and thus far pretty successful, most people on it still aren’t sure what it’s true purpose is. I guess we as tweeters are all rats in this grand experiment.

I enjoy Twitter quite a bit. As one of the “old people” that can’t STAND texting on a phone, see it as a way to engage in both insight and pointless blather, and it’s not as though it’s directed at anyone at times, and a very useful direct communication tool at others, I think there’s a lot of general appeal. At the same time, I think most of us tweeters are pretty unsure why we like it or what we really want to do with it. I think part of the point of Twitter is that it’s a comfortable enough place and malleable enough that we can pretty much use it for whatever we want with respect to our interaction with followers and also the pointless blather part.

For me, I at least want to stay so I have yet another place to broadcast blog posts and such. Wordpress has a twitter plug that automatically posts a tweet every time I post an article. Not so much a time saver as a brain saver, it’s one less thing I have to remember to do.

The real unmet potential for those of us in the South Florida Camera Club is to be able to get to know one another better. The potential is there for it to be a crucial communication venue and important for the club, if for no other reason than our ability to hook up with one another and do some shooting together. THAT would be really cool, all we need to do is get people to understand the advantages I guess. Like anything else internet, there will always be a majority of people that either don’t want to or won’t buy into “what’s new”. I’m one of those, but I always at least try new things. Most things I try, I find a waste of precious time and move on till the next thing comes along. Both Twitter and StumbleUpon are pretty much a part of what I do now though. Facebook is ok, but one of the things I don’t care for about facebook and absolutely hate about myspace is it’s a mess. Pardon my french… a cluster fuck. Too many blinky lights, too many things to do, too much information. I find most of the information pretty much useless.

You know what? When you think about it, Twitter is pretty much useless too on that level, but at least it has a very narrow single “thing to do” and I think that’s one of the reasons I like it as much as I do.

Let’s just hope that Twello doesn’t ruin it for us! I don’t think it will. I do pity those who have a ton of people following them, as that number will grow greatly in the weeks and months to come. I guess that’s fine with most of them though… I just don’t get the “need” to be that popular. I would much rather build something with great meaning on the web, and have that be popular.

One of the last things on earth I ever want to do is add a toolbar to my browser. I have enough of the things, and oh how I HATE the fact you have to pay careful attention when installing programs these days because it seems more than half of my installs has an "add the Yahoo toolbar" box with the install checked by default. Curses!

All that changed when I decided to give StumbleUpon a chance. After all, one can uninstall a toolbar as I’ve done several times to get that blasted yahoo toolbar off my browser. I joined the site, installed the toolbar, didn’t read much for instructions. I noted that there was a "Stumble" button all the way to the left. I clicked it, and suddenly a whole world began to open up that I never knew existed. I have never been much of a surfer out of frustration over having to step through so much crap to get to a good site. Google is a great tool for finding specific info, but it is sorely lacking in a methodology to insure quality of sites.

StumbleUpon changed ALL that for me. I have found the most amazing sites since I installed and started stumbling. The way it works is, much like Digg or Delicio.us, thousands of users submit sites they think are uber cool. Still, weeding through THEIR website to find the cool stuff you’re looking for can be a frustrating pain at times. The stumble toolbar makes it super easy to just kick back, relax and be blown away by amazing sites that others have found. StumbleUpon leads you through the process by asking you to pick the kind of sites you’re looking for with a page of simple checkboxes, then it’s just a matter of hitting that stumble button.

There are so many internet gimmicks out there, I was certainly skeptical, but StumbleUpon represents a paradigm shift for me in how I view and use the world wide web. It has turned what I once viewed as a chore into a brand new experience, one that brings joy and amazement. I’ve been on the internet for 13 years now, and finally, the world wide web is something I actually love as a casual experience. I still use it to get stuff done, I still use google—I really couldn’t do without it, but now I have something else that has changed how I view the internet in a pretty profound way.

Adobe aside, I’m never one to say “this is how I do it and this is what I use”. I had done most if not all my RAW processing in Nikon Capture. Their latest product, Capture NX is so f-ing slow (and I run it on a dual 3ghz Xeon motherboard, albeit 3 plus years old) I simply can’t go that route, even though the control points is killer technology, at the same time though, it’s a lot of work to fudge a photo. I imagine if I have a shot that “could be” that I need to fudge with control points, I will use NX to get that done, but for now given what I know about the world of Adobe, it’s just silly to use a program that slows the process so significantly.

So I am currently using Adobe Camera RAW as my raw processor, I also use it (especially at work) to tweak JPEGs, as it makes available all the same tweaks available for RAW (except for color temp, which it fudges). I imagine soon I will dive into Lightroom so I can wrap my bulbous head around yet another software program, but for now, because I know bridge and ACR adequately well, I’m using that. Adobe Camera RAW does after all provide all the same adjustments as Lightroom, it’s just not packaged the pretty paper and bows. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing but so far, the only thing I can see is the lack of the “idiot proof” curves adjustment. I tend to set most of my curves in photoshop as adjustment layers anyhow so I have the ability to go back and tweak them at a later date, or find another avenue to work the contrast levels. I’m quite sure I’ll be blogging about my impressions of lightroom as I get into it, but I am so used to bridge at this point, it will be a slow process, mainly because I don’t like the fact that I have to “import” all my shots to begin the selection process. Bridge as a thumbnail viewer doesn’t need any imports, you just surf to the place on the hard drive you want to work from and it makes all the thumbs right there, you have ratings and all that, so it’s easy enough.

I don’t use Bridge for the RAW weeding process anyhow, because it is not adequate to really check for stofties, shake, etc. Maybe Lightroom with become the cohesive solution for that, I’m not sure, but for now, I’m still using a proggie called Photo Mechanic which has an awesome interface for weeding and selection that lets you get immediately to 100% with one click, which I really like. If lightroom solves that for me so I can get into one cohesive software situation, that would be great, but for now, it will remain as it is until I get more time!

At any rate, I plan to use this blog for all kinds of purposes, even some web development for photographers. I decided to run this site on Wordpress because it has by far the best and easiest tools for gallery presentation. The integration of PicLens is a REAL coupe’—giving the user full screen sideshows is an amazing feature, and even in the fairly early stages of development it seems well structured and fairly bugless, at least on firefox. I can’t speak to IE because I absolutely refuse to use IE except for checking website structure under that inferior browser. I plan to install the IE interface in Firefox so I never have to launch the stupid thing. That’s one of the many things that sets Firefox head and shoulders above IE in so many ways—the ability to install an amazing number of free addins like the IE page addin. The real credit for this technology goes to (of course) Adobe and Flash v9. They have once again raised the bar to impossible heights for anyone seeking their downfall. In the words of dana carvey as ghw bush… NA GA DA!

So, this is a start… we’ll see how far it takes me. The one thing I’m going to do tomorrow am is order a new monitor, because looking at my site at work, I noticed one shot I processed that on a good monitor like I have at work, I could see that I over saturated the reds. It looked fine on my 3 year old dell, but I’ve known for a long time that monitor isn’t the best for true color. The Samsung BW I use at work is very faithful, I know this because I work images that go to print at a commercial sheetfed printer and the results are always exactly as expected based on the output I see on that monitor. Mwave has the 22″ Samsung BW on sale, so I’m gonnna snag it. Don’t quite have the money, but I won’t when it gets off sale either, so now is the time to get the new monitor! FWIW, Mwave is absolutely the best source I’ve found for anything computer and anything they sell. I may get a riadata 8gb flash card when I get the monitor, because the price on those are so ridiculously low. That would give me 26gb to walk around with.

So this is a start. Feel free to place comments on the blog, I cherish everyone’s input, good bad or indifferent!