Getting involved in other communities ...

One community I have found myself getting involved in more now that I have started this module is within www.youtube.com I have always been into developing videos (some of which you can find on my web site – www.tallguypete.co.uk) . Though I never thought I would share some within this community. I am glad I joined it as I have contributed to it, and that to me feels like an achievement within the community.

To receive replies on my videos is a sense of recognition within the community and allows me to find out what other people of different backgrounds think of the work that I have produced.

I have had both positive and negative experiences within this community. An example of a positive experience would be the responses that I have received from fellow members about my work that I have produced. You can find the comments here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSK-T8VM1mI

My negative experiences involve that I have had negative comments on one of my videos. When uploading videos I always make sure that I am able to approve or disallow a comment from being published in public view. One time I had a comment which involved a fellow member trying to post a comment which was leaving some unrelated material of an adult nature on my video page. Lucky enough I was able to delete the post and disallow this comment to be in a public viewed domain and am glad that I choose to control my contributes. My main reason for doing this is the content of my videos is viewed by all ages (including children aged as low as 8).

One contribution I may consider adding to this community in the future is of my musical talents. Throughout the massive database of YouTube you can find videos where by people have recorded themselves playing a certain song or tune to which they believe they are good at; (whether this be their own compositions or songs that exist already). I would love to provide my own compositions to the public and see what comments would be made. If I was to do this I would still moderate the comments being posted but would allow negative comments to be posted as long as they were relevant to the context of my video (playing my own compositions on my keyboard). You can find an example of Classical Gas (original artist is Mason Williams) being performed by a guitarist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP0lUAJ7-7c

Online Exeperiences So Far ...

So why the late blogging posts? Well I am going to be honest this year has been probably my worst year yet. Physical life itself is testing more than ever with me finding it extremely hard to cope with working two part time jobs on top of university work; as well as other life problems. With these certain experiences I have found myself becoming more involved in being ‘online’ rather than going out.

I am normally a person who is very shy and not confident in real life, and find myself able to be more a confident person online. An example of how my recent life experience has affected me to become more online than ever before can be found here:

http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=19864

Why did I choose to post online? Well in short I have, what I consider to be, close friends on that forum of which I trust and turn to for comfort when my family or friends cannot. I have been a part of the above forum for several years mainly helping out in providing technical support but have also found myself being involved in meeting up with certain members in real life.

Currently to date I still provide my technical expertise but also help run a virtual airline of which I have already mentioned in my last blog.

My personal view is that you can be yourself more online than you can in reality. Even though you miss out on physical interaction, from my own experience in this case I found myself feeling a lot better.