Pownce tee provided by Startups Schwag.

As you already know, I’m a big fan of the 2.0 social nets. I was an early adopter of the big three 2.0s: Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce. (We shall not mention myspace. I like to pretend that it doesn’t exist). So far I’ve maintained active accounts in all three, but lately I find my ability to keep up witty repartee a la hotdogladies on all three almost impossible.

After a while, I find my tweets turning more into “What are you putting on your toast this morning?” than intelligent commentary of the technerdy things I’m doing. Plus, with the audience of these three nets differing so dramatically it’s not really appropriate to copy and paste or feed your status from one soc net to the others.

Twitter’s audience is uber geeky, from the tech, design, and blogging elite, to the politically active, to the dot com moguls. Anyone who is anyone on the www is on Twitter. Pownce seems to draw in a mixed bunch of users. For me, Pownce’s audience seems quite diverse, somewhere in between Twitter and Facebook with a huge teenage population who love youtube clips. Wowie! And the behemoth Facebook seems to attract everyone, including grandparents, ex-flings, your 9th grade English teacher, your arch nemisis, your 12 year-old Turkish penpal, and that annoying kid that ate Beefaroni out of old camping thermos everyday for lunch… Seriously, who isn’t on Facebook? I can only think of one person I know who isn’t on Facebook.

So if you are to keep the peace between your geeky Twitter iFriends and your tech-illiterate Facebook friends and your uber trendy Pownce friends you probably shouldn’t feed your daily WP plug-in tweets to your other nets. I find that it confuses people and then I have to explain things to people who think that Google is the internet and then I get annoyed and then bored and then I fall asleep in mid-sentence. And people seem to not like it when you fall asleep during dinner time discussions. Oops. Plus, with so many people on multiple nets, you don’t want to be double, or triple posting stuff to the same people.

What’s the solution then you lazy smart arse? Well, I think if you want to maximize your networking and community building opportunities you really need all three. I feel the same way with IM programs. You really need Adium, iChat, and Skype to communicate to all your iPeeps. But, in order to minimize the amount of time and effort you need pick one 2.0 net as your home base. This is where the majority of your updates and networking happens.

For me it’s Twitter. I have the most contacts on twitter and find it to be the best resource for tech updates, random geekiness, and general good times, including drunk tweets (:p) But, I must say there are a lot of fun times on Pownce. The ability to share photos, vids, and muxtapes is pretty awesome. I do think that Pownce is underrated, and I think in the next year it we will see it really catch on. But for some reason I don’t think that the Twitterati will ever abandon the little bird, no matter how many times they see him upside down or robotized or 404ed.

What’s your 2.0 home base? What do you find good or bad about this trifecta of 2.0? Do you use Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook? Opinions? Thoughts? Or comments on my drumming skills?

PS. Why am I sat in front of an uber kit? Kind of random isn’t it? More sweet photos and a special DIY photo blog from my latest shoot with uber Vancouver drummer, Jesse Godin this week!

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Is it true? Is Canada finally getting the iPhone?

Canadian wireless carrier Rogers Wireless said Tuesday it has reached an agreement with Apple to begin offering the iPhone later this year, putting an end to months of speculation on the subject.

Well. It’s. Aboot. Time!

Now, I can finally ditch my unlocked Fisher Price Skytalker Walkie Talkie which I’ve been using for the last 12 years as a method to communicate with my friends, family, lost polar bears, ice skating beavers, and the Mounted Police within a reception range of 1 - 25m… assuming they have the other Walkie on them… and they turn it on at exactly the same time as me… and the batteries don’t die in the subarctic temperatures.

It’s a crap shoot, I’ll admit. But, you know how Canadians love to be the underdog in a long and arduous, losing battle.

Another great screenshot I see. Sometimes you just can’t win. Zoink.

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A few weeks ago, I was a nobody. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was basically rabbit kibble. Do rabbits eat kibble? Chomp?

But then G4’s Attack of the Show ranked me as the 5th hottest woman of the web and my life went from bunny kibble to like, a really expensive cheese… that’s been aging for years and packaged in fancy paper and served on a silver plate from a store that sells uber fancy plates. Don’t forget the Crystal.

For more videos as cool as this one check out: Mostly Lisa’s Presents a Model Moment.

I wouldn’t mind if you Subscribed to my feed.

I’ve already received some uber design entries for the First Annual Mostly Lisa Illustrator Vectorama Contest. In fact, I’ve almost snorted milk out of my nose because of one of the entries.

But I have to admit, nothing really holds a candle to my 5 legged spider. Oh he’s cunning that one. Well, he really has to be, with only 5 legs to scuttle aboot.

So get you’re act together! Open Illustrator and get your Adobe-on. You have until Sunday, March 9th at midnight (-8 GMT) to get your entries to me:
mostlylisa *at* gmail *dot* com.

Mostly Lisa’s Illustrator Vectorama Entry Rules:

1. You must use Illustrator (obviously)
2. Your design must not scare small children or warp the minds of impressionable youth
3. You must include some kind of text that encapsulates the meaning of your illustration

The Vector-sized glory and a spot on my advertising gold mine of a sidebar could be yours. It’s only a few clicks away.

In the last year, I have been on a quest to find an application that will allow me to upload and organize my flickr photos from my desktop. I’ll be honest, I hate the navigation and homepage on Flickr. I just don’t vibe with the work flow. It’s just not instinctive to me and I find myself constantly backtracking and fiddling with tags and sets and clicking on avatars and drop down menus… Uh. Enough!

Today, my quest finally ended when I met: Photonic: Flickr Client for Mac OS X.

Looks nice. Uploading, tagging, setting privacy, and adding photos to sets and groups is easy peasy. You can even view your contacts photos and explore the flickr universe all from the comfort of your desktop. And after playing around with it for several hours, I can find no real fault with it. Also, it appears to run smoothly with Leopard. Yeah! That’s some good news.

I thought that the latest OSX update, 10.5.2 would fix my whoas with Leopard. Not. so. much. Safari, iChat, iMovie crashes are still plentiful, as well as complete system hangs. And yesterday my Mac Pro woke up from an hour long sleep with this lovely multilingual message plastered on it’s screen:

Now granted I push my Macs to the brink with all the media stuff I’ve got constantly churning away, but seriously, if Safari crashes one more time, I might… uh… write Steve an angry note? uh… use the Leopard disc as a frisbee? uh… threaten to rename this latest update 10.5.sucksbollocks? Yeah. That’s what I’ll do! And don’t try and talk me out of it. This is no flimsy threat!

I wanna know if you’re experiencing the same suckiness with Leopard. If you experience a crash or hang on Leopard, vent your frustrations in the comments below.

PS. I promise to write about something that does not suck tomorrow.

Independent Thought:
Not all vacation packages are made to suit everyone. One might have cheap hotels, and the other may be offering cheap air fare. The best one is the one that offers an economical assemblage, regardless of the fact that you will be staying at resorts or a travel lodge.

 
That’s me. Lying on the cold cold ground in the early AM photographing a pair of running shoes. There are no lengths I will go to to take a great photo. Good thing I am wearing my big, fluffy Canadian parka, as it is taking ages to get the flashes to sync because my cheapo Gadget Infinity wireless triggers keep misfiring! Arg!

If you are a recreational photographer or if you are like me and you just started your own home media business that requires a ton of electronic gadgets and creative gear that sees no financial boundaries, you probably don’t have $500 to spend on Pocket Wizard’s wireless triggers. That’s why I bought the Gadget Infinity wireless triggers (Cactus Model) for a bargain basement price of $60 for one transmitter and two receiver to go on my flashes, the Canon EX 430 & 580).

Before purchasing the cheapo version, I had read loads of reviews that warned of misfiring and unreliability, but the Gadget Infinity triggers seriously take the piss. These are the main things that suck about these triggers:

• Flash misfires, often. This totally sucks because it uses up all your flash’s battery power and not only do you have to wait even longer for the flash to charge, but when it finally does, your flash is likely to be dunzo.
• Flash is out of sync with the shutter. This is possibly the most annoying thing ever. More annoying than a late-90s boy band reunion. I know. That’s infinitely annoying.
• Flash doesn’t fire. Period.

If you have a time sensitive shoot or you are dealing with a live subject that might complain more than these running shoes, I recommend renting Pocket Wizards (approx. $25).

Has anyone else had a sucky experience with cheap triggers? Is there a budget solution to make them work better?

Independent Thought:
An ideal deal should take care of everything from airline tickets to the details of rental cars as well as the hotel reservations. Finding cheap flights should not be your concern.

I just sorted all my photo, video, computer and AV gear. These are the casualties. Some are totally dunzo, others still have a bit of juice left, and some are functional, just completely obsolete. So I really had to be really brutal in getting rid of things that I no longer need or use on a regular basis. I kept at least one of every cable cuz you never know when you are gonna need a rare or random cable. It happens almost once every week for me. So I like to keep all my ducks in the basket… a row. I think my smarts are currently disintegrating with every tv season I cram into a 48 period (which is Flight of the Conchords today).

It breaks my heart to bin this stuff. Does anyone know a good charity that I could donate any of the working gear to? Are there any charities that could make use or make money from recycling stuff like old cell phones and their chargers, film cameras, VCRs, an Apple G3 monitors? I may even have an LC475 kicking around somewhere.

I would also like to know if anyone knows of any organizations that recycle any electronics for parts or safely dispose of batteries and other environmentally toxic materials.

Thanks for your comments!

I cannot tell you how giddy I am right now. I have been through the ringer trying to embed videos, create photo galleries, post videos, make buttons, side bar video thumbnails … It’s always a hassle, especially since I’m not a whizz at flash. I used Widgetbox.com for quite a few JS widgets for my revver videos, 2.0 mashups on my old blogspot blog. And since moving to Wordpress, I’ve relied on the plethora of WP plug-ins. But more often than not, they don’t work, or do what I want them to do. I’ve always wanted a really clean, simple, and functional image gallery. And the Flicker Albums plug-in ain’t cutting it.

But at 2am this eve, Techcrunch brought Sprout: The Online WYSIWYG Editor for Flash into my world. I’ve been playing with it for about 30 minutes and it is dead easy to use, especially if you have a PS background. You can create a video album, audio player or a music playlist, and a image slideshow in seconds that the lovely Sprout coding monkey will publish to most social net sites i.e., Facebook, Myspace, blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, page flakes, etc.

To test the new site, I made my first “Sprout”: An image slideshow of some shots I took at my first Wedding shoot. It took me less than 15 mins to create and customize my sprout. All I had to do was import my flickr photos and Sprout did the rest. There are controllers at the bottom for pause/play and fwd/back. I was also able to add a hyperlink to my flicker album at the bottom. (Takes a few seconds to load)

The other day I met up with an old friend from my Blades of Glory days who asked, “When did you get so geeky with all that stuff on the internet?” (he’s not so technologically inclined). “You used to be so… organic,” he continued. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by “organic”… i blended well with shrubbery… i smelled a bit like dirt… i was tasty, good for you, and wasn’t sprayed in loads of pesticides???

Whatever he meant, I’ll admit that I’ve gotten pretty intensely geeky with social nets over the last few years. My very first experience was with MySpace in 2004. I lasted one month. During that month, I received over 100 creepy messages from internet suitors and Sir Spam-a-Lot. That, and the design aesthetic alone, was enough to turn me off MySpace permanently. But having a small taste of an internet community started an insatiable hunger in me to connect and be heard.

After finishing graduate school, I had a wee bit of a “Post-University-WTF-do-I-do-with-My-Life-Now?!?” Crisis. I literally ran screaming from my MA defense all the way down the west coast to Anaheim, California, through the Disneyland gates, to Futureland and up the steps to Space Mountain, then across the park to Splash Mountain, then finally settled during Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (Peter Pan was closed. Lame.)

This was the beginning of my “Return-to-Childhood-Shirk-All-Adult-Responsibilities” phase. So far it’s lasted 4 years. I may push it through 2008, just for good luck.

So after uni ended, I moved from Victoria to the big city of Vancouver to find work and I was lonely and needed a creative outlet so I started my first blog “they mostly come out at night… mostly @blogspot in November 2006. The community was immense, but I am a bit of an elitist snob so I moved to Wordpress shortly thereafter. And it was in one of these blogging commuities, that I read about the Facebook phenomenon.

I was most reluctant to join Facebook and put it off for quite some time. It’s reputation as an American college dating site really turned me off. But one day I joined, and ever since I’ve been moaning about it. For every good experience there seem to be 10 bad ones. The wasted time looking at crappy, poorly lit, drunken self-portraits kills me, yet I can’t seem to part with the random delight of connecting with some really cool people.

Which brings me to my beloved Twitter. On June 20, 2007, I began my journey with Twitter. I started out slow, twittering to myself in the wee hours. And then within a month, I got literally obsessed with tweeting my every move and @tweeting everyone elses’. ‘What are you doing?’ became ‘What are you wearing, eating, drinking, listening to, thinking about?’ and most importantly ‘What techno iGadget are you lusting after?’ It was brilliant. it changed my everyday mundane existence into a bright and shiny one that I could share with glittering iFriends. And they are so beautiful.

And that’s how it started. And from there it all went pear-shaped. I lost control and the beast started controlling me. I was literally signing up to a new social net everyday. I’d create a profile, surf for a bit, add a few friends, then I’d lose my password, get locked out, and forget about it all by the next morning when more fresh, crispy bacn arrived in my inbox.

I’m at the point now where I can’t keep track of it all and I’m finding myself aimlessly wandering the 2.0 www for hours without a single recollection of what I’m doing, what I just did, and the kicker, why?

So over the next couple months I’m gonna start chucking the 2.0 losers and committing to the 2.0 winners.

Here’s the list I’ll be dealing with:
Twitter
Flickr
Lastfm
Facebook
Revver
Pownce
Virb
Vimeo
Digg
Jaiku
MyBlogLog
del.icio.us
Technorati
StumbleUpon

I know there are more, but I’ve already forgotten what they were. Anyway, this post is too long. I’m boring myself. I’d rather hear what you have to say. So lemme know what your favourite 2.0 nets are and what you love and hate about them. Much Love.