Here's a rough proposal for a talk at the 2009 CT Film Festival. Let me know if you have any comments or questions!
Being online is a must for any burgeoning content creator, but standing out from the crowd is an ever-growing challenge. As the online community grows and matures, so too must your online persona. In this session, I will go over a pair of tools that anyone can use to create a home for that developing persona. I will also cover ways to get media distributed online and ground rules for interacting with your online community.
The majority of this discussion will cover two avenues for creating an online home. First, I will cover a new, simple solution: Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one modular service where you can easily assemble pre-made components in order to build a community-oriented website. Though not the most flexible solution on the market, it is one that has much appeal for less technical or time-constrained users. I will follow up with an introduction to Wordpress, a more traditional software package with a far greater breadth of use, but one that requires more technical skills to set up and maintain. For both packages, I will cover the basics for integrating video, audio, and photos.
The last part of the talk will be devoted to dealing with an online community. I will cover such basics like moderation and not "feeding the trolls". I will also showcase some good and bad examples of online community management.