Monday, January 3, 2011

Media Management

I don't think I maximize my media outlets because that would require an initial investment that I do half-heartedly then regret that I didn't do well enough.
Case in point #1: iTunes
In order to use iTunes you must first import all your songs- faves, kids' songs, family music, downloads, old and new. But to really enjoy using iTunes you need to categorize them into playlists. Songs to play when you are happy or sad... Road trip music, exercise playlists, gleeky tunes, and any other category I might want to play at any given moment.
I am always too lazy to make the most of what I have on my iPhone in order to enjoy it most.
This is why I like services like Pandora, which organizes the music for me. I can pick their playlists depending on my mood.
Case in point #2: Twitter
Twitter gives me live streams from approximately 600 people I am following. There are people who follow 15,000 so my 600 should be manageable, right? Sort of. I have learned to scan and skip while reading tweets. Unfortunately Twitter has taught me that some people are just clutter!
Introducing Twitter Lists which are a means of filtering twitter streams into any category you want (similar to playlists). I should make lists like "moms," "jewcrew," "techies," "friends" and whatever else I listen to on Twitter. But again, like playlists, I am lazy.
This is where I think Facebook has been successful. Facebook's news fees provides an organic kind of list. I can choose to see more or less from a friend fairly simply. I can see recent posts or most popular (based on comments and "likes." Perfect for me.
Here's to hoping 2011 brings simpler media management or motivates me to actually invest some effort so I can maximize my media.

3 comments:

  1. Why not just decide that it is easiest for you to see random tweets or play random music? Then you can just be happy with what you have!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like to shuffle my music but within a genre- so random is good if I have playlists :)
    As for tweets, I wouldn't want to miss tweets from certain people so I should really just make lists...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm like this too, I don't spend time organizing my media properly. I do have a few playlists on my iPod(s), like "Gym", "Hebrew", but for the most part it's not well organized. And within them, I always use shuffle for variety.

    I've sort of arranged FaceBook with a few tags like "Neighbor", "Classmate", "Israel", but I haven't found a way to only show specific tags or groups of tags.

    And I have lists on twitter, but they are useless to me because so many people I know tweet about all sorts of things and their tweets are repeated in many lists. More efficient to just read all the tweets and when pressed for time just the tweets of those I follow "closely" (a subset, still large though, of all the people I follow).

    ReplyDelete

Come again!