Check out www.iEllie.com, a personal blog by a college student majoring in mass communications, which focuses on PR. Her blog is an interesting peek into the heads of college students and how they're viewing blogs, media making, and media consumption. Encapsulated on the first page alone are some interesting points to consider. And before you go and dismiss the blog for being unprofessional, or scattered, or anything else derisive, think creatively for a moment. Look at it as a mixing board, a paint palette. See what iEllie is putting out there; and from there, we can extrapolate.
Notice how iEllie uses a sideways picture in the banner. Fun, not pro. Fun. It shows a human, someone communicating. Then look: iEllie goes right into making media, with an Utterli post embedded at the top, a podcast right below. She shows all her related networks (tons!) and some personal data right on the front page; iEllie is out there, telling us who she is, but not giving away 100 percent of what a stalker would need (important point to consider).
Packed into iEllie are pictures and podcasts and Flickr and tons and tons of production. She's creating all the time, and using the various formats interchangeably. This gives you a sense of the mix culture. It's not a blog. It's not a podcast. She's making something, and it doesn't need a name because there's a payload.
Key to the game: Forget the labels; focus on the payload.
In addition, iEllie posts YouTube clips right up there alongside her media. She doesn't single out one over the other. In fact, I'm going to bet that she doesn't distinguish between what she makes and what she finds, cultivates, and curates. Why should she? It's the same as clipping the words out of a magazine and forming your own sentence or writing on a page. It's the same output at the end.
It's not about iEllie, specifically. I'm sure she's wonderful and all that. I just followed her on Twitter. But I see it as a way to illustrate simply all the various facets of media making, media usage, and media consumption in the coming year. If you want to distill it out, here's what I'm thinking should happen:
Big media (journalistic, entertainment, etc.): You should divert some of the ad budget (0.01 percent?) to media-sharing projects, such as giving people mash-up clips of movies and songs.
Marketers and advertisers: Have people willingly sharing stuff all over the place. Give your projects handles, and see if people will take them.
PR types: Don't go after just the A-list bloggers. Find the iEllie's of the world, find legions of them, and get them into your campaign.
Professionals and leaders of the world: iEllie is your next employee. Look at how she rolls. Is your business ready for her? It better be, because that's your job pool right there. Someone who mixes, mashes, uses all the social networks, someone who considers this the same as doing work for you.
Parents: Are you equipping your kids to make media? (Don't get into a privilege story here.) If not, your kid is disadvantaged in this regard. Computers and the Internet and powerful tools aren't frivolous. Ditto game systems. Ditto networked game systems. This is our golf, people. Halo 3 and Tweetups are the new golf courses and country clubs. At least for some.
Media makers: Are you purists? Are you mashing and reusing and mixing? Are you making it easier for people to share and use your media?