When I started this blog, I was enrolled in an Advanced Social Media Training course, I intended this blog at this domain to be my business blog. I expected I would come out of the training enthusiastic about helping individuals and businesses develop and execute Social Media Marketing campaigns.

I enjoyed the course, learned a lot, but at the end realized I really don’t have enough interest in marketing to pursue any type of career in it. I’ve always been an artist, my passion is for making art. I’ve always spent some left over energy on marketing and while doing that, I did developed a sociological interest in Social Media, watching it become mass media, but, not enough interest to be a Marketeer.

I’m sixty-six years old, I’ve worked forty-nine years, held rewarding jobs, but none have been as much fun as making art. I decided to retire and to devote my full-time efforts to art-making.

My wife, an artist also, and I moved to from Lower East Side Manhattan, to a family home in Orange County, California that needs to be fixed up to sell. We’ll do that and ease into painting. After we sell the house, we’ll move some place more interesting.

Because I’ve worked as a Web Designer / Social Media Producer on a large Consumer Electronics eRetail Website for the past 12 years, Art, for me, involves quite a bit of Internet display and Social marketing. I have the ambition to use the inter-tubes to organize collaborative works with geo-dispersed artists. I will pursue that as I talk to more artists, explore more web-technologies and work on my painting chops.

How I use this blog or what I put on this domain remains to be discovered. Since, today, I’m traveling to San Francisco and while there will be attending WordCampSF10, I’ll report here on my experiences.

I’m also known as Steve, p0ps and p0psHarlow.

I keep a photo stream at Flickr
I post frequently to The Real Steve Harlow
I’m on Twitter @p0ps
The rest of my web actions may be tracked through My Google Profile.

The Social Media Training class is not tool-centric, because the tools change so rapidly. I’ll make this blog tool-centric and, with your help, be agile enough to keep up.

Here and on connected services, starting with twitter & posterous, I want to report investigations of the Social Media space, without the industry details bothering my art friends and family who would not be that interested.

I’ve set up two new Gmail accounts and will be sorting my communications into two profiles: the artist, friend and family guy, p0psharlow [at] gmail and the social media student, stephenLharlow [at] gmail. Besides the two Gmail accounts, these two profiles, have their own iGoogle, Reader, Docs and Google profiles, shared items, etc. I’m in the midst of setting all up these, I’ll report the appropriate links when complete.

I’m currently struggling with the setup and the separation, since for the past five years I’ve only been using another Google profile, wolrah.evets [at] gmail (even tho I was fairly early into Gmail, steveharlow, steve.harlow, stephen.harlow, stephenharlow were all taken. I thought it clever to spell steve.harlow backwards: wolrah.evets, but it’s proven to only be annoying).

I use Mailplane on Mac for toggling between the multiple Gmail accounts. For the other necessary separation of Google logins, I’m, currently, managing with separate browsers: I have Firefox logged into stephenLharlow, Safari logged into wolrah.evets and Opera logged into p0psHarlow. When I’ve completed sorting all connections between my two new profiles, I’ll be able to drop wolrah.evets and have “only” two Google profiles. If you have an idea of how to easily toggle between the two Google profiles in one browser, let me know in comments, I’d like to know.

My objective for this blog is to periodically recount what I’m learning about using Social Media. I’m currently (December 1, 2009 – January 25, 2010) enrolled in an intensive online class from University of San Francisco Online, headed by Christopher S. Penn, with professors: Jay Berkowitz, Wayne Brantley, C.C. Chapman, Jim Kukral, Gaida Zirkelback

I posted my reasons for considering joining the class and after some discussion with friends, I’m in the class.

Rather than betray Chris Penn, the other professors and USF by simply repeating everything taught in the class, I expect to post here the results of my study: what I learn; the ideas that resonate with me; the methods I’m able to apply; the tools I use.

We were giving a list of 18 books for suggested reading, only one of which I’ve read, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. This has been a staple in my web design career for years. If you have read it, you know what I mean, you don’t forget it. Those you don’t know it yet, go ahead, read it. The most difficult and the most necessary task of design is to keep it simple. This book helps.

Although I intend to read them all, it will take some time, since the pattern of my life is not conducive to spending long hours in a reading chair (I don’t have a long train commute and I don’t even have a reading light in my apt.) But, to get started, I ordered two other books from the list, both written by authors I know and respect, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith and Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by good, ol’ reliably brilliant, Seth Godin.

I’ll post what I learn from these books and inform you when I order or read others on the class list.