it's all about channels

channel: "a course into which something may be directed," "a means of access," or " a frequency band of sufficient width for one- or two-way communication from or to a transmitter used for television, radio, CB radio, telephone, or telegraph communication." c/o http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/channel

The more I work with Social Media tools the more I am thinking about channels.

As I've mentioned before I am not comfortable writing, but I will talk with you for hours and wave my hands and scribble on white boards or do flying-finger demos with internet resources. We can enjoy lateral digressions that eventually loop back to the original premise.

Back to channels.

I'm slowly evolving this notion that all these nifty new internet toys / social media / multi-media blogging are in fact different channels that ought to serve different message types as well as content. In brief text based content such as this piece can be scanned quickly or read slowly via either RSS or original form. Photographs & graphics can be scanned via thumbnails and later savored in full scale. Audio and video I feel are victims of their reproduction of real time so in most cases the content doesn't survive well with fast forwarding. (Ah, I perceive a possible crack in that last notion).

Currently I have consciously decided that I will use the following channels:
> Utterz will be a channel for spontaneous moments of happy emotion. No set schedule.
> Flickr will be a daily visual diary from my phone camera along with documentation of events and travels. [off track: I'm intrigued how Stowe Boyd uses his Flickr to feed blogs and other channels - yet the Flickr track itself is a cabinet of curiousities].
> Facebook will be a social channel and ongoing experiment to see who stays and goes and who plays with what widgets.
> LinkedIn is an odd gathering of resumes and adding people who I do and don't know well.
> Twitter is the informal village commons. I have multiple communities abd have basically given up trying to keep current. [TechnoSailor's post about Terminal Velocity was a leve set for me.] I have fun and try to bring value to the various communities.
> de.licio.us is my communal bookmark archive that always amazes me when I find things that I forgot I found last year or longer ago.
> Netvibes is an interesting aggregator, kind of a Reader's Digest for all the places I drop stuff on the net as well as my friends stuff.

More channels to come.......