I've been keeping pretty busy lately and haven't been able to get away to leave a post in a spell. My initial, unspoken goal of putting up a blog post at least 3 or 4 times a week has evaporated! The fact of the matter is that there are just so many lines of communication that I have open, it's getting tough to keep track of all of them.
As of this moment, in addition to trying to keep this blog up to date, I'm also trying to keep my website current, I have a monthly email blast to construct on an ongoing basis, and I'm on all of the "big 3" social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. Not to mention I have a Youtube account that is painfully neglected. Most of my attempts to stay on top of all of these different sights are thwarted by my normal, day to day activities of being a dad, trying to keep our house from falling on top of us (or just plain trying keep the house at all!), so on and so on.
One thing I have to say about all these social networking sites is that they have been great in getting me in contact with friends and relatives who I have not seen in a very long time. In fact, an old childhood friend of mine recently contacted me who I don't believe I've seen since perhaps 2nd or 3rd grade! I also get to talk to a few of my close friends that I don't get to see in person very much because of my performance schedule, or our respective family lives.
My venturing into the social networking scene was somewhat calculated. I first joined Myspace a couple of years ago as a marketing experiment. I learned a few things from that experience, but mostly that it is an over saturated media to try and get your voice heard as a musician. It seems that everybody and their grandmother is trying to promote their band on Myspace, making the whole experience a little overbearing.
Facebook was my next move. Oddly enough, I didn't join because I wanted to market myself. My first objective was to find a lost family member that I had evidence showing that he may be a Facebook member. My second objective, and less important to me at the time, was to try and find a booking agent that I had been told about.
The result was that the person who I thought was a long lost family member wasn't who I thought he was (the search continues), and the booking agent turned out to not actually be a member of Facebook. However, the booking agent's name was very similar to the name of an old friend and former girlfriend of mine and caused her name to come up in the search results. It lead me to the discovery of someone I had not seen in something like 15 years or so. In fact, my wife and I just recently had dinner with her and her husband. We all had a great time and she and my wife really hit it off!
So anyway, I guess online communities are cool and all because you can keep in touch with people that you may not be able to keep in touch with through other more "traditional" means, but it sure is a handful juggling your attention between them!
