New New Media Tools and Experiences

With all the different aspects of the social web out there, I’ve gotten linked in to a lot of different sites—though I don’t have any sort of LinkedIn account.  There are, in fact, a lot of accounts that I don’t have, or that I didn’t get for a while.  Why is what I use or don’t use in terms of new new media tools important?  Well, believe it or not, you can actually tell quite a bit about a person by what new new media tools they use and how they use them.

By Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

So what do I use and how do I use them?  In rough order, here’s how I started joining and using new new media sites:

Facebook Account: I joined Facebook in early 2007.  I’ve had a love-hate relationship ever since.  However, it’s where the people are.  I can find pretty much anyone I know on Facebook, making it an incredibly convenient communication tool.

YouTube: I joined YouTube primarily to subscribe to video channels and comment if necessary.  The secondary reason was to create videos.  The latter has not worked out so far, but I still plan on starting up a few reviews and/or webshows.

Forums: I’ve been on a variety of forums that are now mostly dead.  I count this as a form of “new new media” even though they’re usually more along the lines of just “social media” or “new media,” because the areas of the forums I would frequent most were more than just discussions, but involved the sharing and critique of writing and art.  I actually moderated the Inheritance Forums for a point (fan forums for Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle), but I’ve since moved on and am not currently part of any forums.

TV Tropes Wiki: It was a while between the time I started reading and when I created an actual account, but I’ve dabbled in editing the TV Tropes wiki.

Wordpress: I have several Wordpress blogs, which I started after I downloaded Windows Live Writer with a version of MSN Messenger.  The first was a personal blog, the second was a blog about internet-born urban legend the Slender Man, and the third was Bad Andy-Reviewed Fiction, a site where I poke fun at terrible fanfiction and original fiction.  All three sites are still running, though the first and third are largely inactive and the second has moved to a different site.

Blogger:  Ooh, boy.  Blogger blogs.  This is what I have the most of and what I’ve actually seen the biggest “new new media” interaction.  Well, after starting my blog about the Slender Man, I decided  write several stories in a blog medium.  I’m not the only one who’s done it.  There are a lot of “slenderblogs” out there, and the best way to find them is comments on other blogs.  My stories, in order of writing, are Now I Shall Know You Again, Don’t Shoot The Messenger (perhaps the most well-known one, currently sitting at 112 followers), Unplugged 161 (my shortest and perhaps most accessible blog), and Wandering from Death (my current, ongoing one).

After a while, I started some more traditional blogs on blogger.  These include DaLadybugProductions (where I post reviews, thoughts, and project updates) and A Terrible Fate (a series of essays that take a critical look at The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask).

Slenderbloggins: This is the first website I actually ran, a Slender Man fansite that continued off of the aforementioned Wordpress blog.  It was kind of a taxing experience, and I’ve had all sorts of issues—the site is currently still down—but it was interesting to be running something on a scale a bit bigger than I had been.