Creating multimedia content such as video and photos, specifically to post on your Website or blog is a complete waste of time. Social media such as Flickr, YouTube, et al., provide the answer and provide the following benefits. First, since you're hosting all this media on someone else's server, think how much you save in bandwidth. Recall, hosting on these services is free to very low cost -- $24.95 to host unlimited photos on Flickr for example or about $70 to host videos on Vimeo. Next, think of all the great references you will be creating by correctly tagging the media and embedding links back to your web site or blog. Third, as you update those social media with new content, the content on your website instantly changes as well without any extra effort! Lastly, it's very easy to embed the media into your website or blog by using either a widget or grabbing html code which most all social media can generate for you.

Videos - still a work in progress. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the scant few videos I do have but what I'm aiming for is similar strategy I apply to photos -- somehow post a library that reveals only the newest stuff. Right now, I can certainly post select videos but that still requires work on the backend. So hopefully, I will find a nice bit of code someone has already written or a widget exists that will accomplish the task.

UPDATE: Figured out the video thing. Since I upload many of my videos to my company's channel, SAFVision, I needed a way to feature just my uploads. Easy solution was to create a playlist for just my stuff then embed the playlist stream. Voila. Check out the result at the top of this blog! And check out the new Videos menu item to see how I embedded individual videos using the iframe YouTube provides.

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Just "claimed" my Facebook domain this morning although I meant to do this at midnight. But really, in my case, how many other Renato Soguecos would be competing for that URL? My friend John Smith on the other hand has problems (yes, I do have a friend named John Smith). Although I appreciate Facebook allowing us to further ease access to our profiles, I really wonder why it took them this long?

Point is, grab your custom URL without delay! Have a fan page for your floral shop? Fellow SAF blogger Amanda Long has the 411 on nabbing your custom URL - Check out SAF's shiny new blog at http://www.saffreshdelivery.com. It's the first story. Here a direct link to the story.

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Vint Cerf's Wikipedia entry.

And to clarify, it's not just Vint and myself - right. It'll be a gathering of about 25 CIOs and IT Directors talking with Vint about Google's presence in DC, their nice collection of online Apps which work remarkably similar to many other well-known products, their intentions regarding security and government and more. Stay tuned, I'll post an update after the breakfast tomorrow.

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