Web 2.What?

As much of an early adopter I am, I sometimes miss the boat on some big crazy trends. One of them was the iPod. No, I’m not kidding. I just got my first iPod ever (a pink nano video) about 2 months ago.

Boy am I ever glad I held out. I mean I feel like I missed years of music listening opportunities, but having video capabilities is just amazing. My favourite thing to do is load up some video podcasts and head to the gym. Before I used to watch TV at the gym and get de-motivated during commercial breaks (Poor attention span sometimes), but now I can watch the content I choose interruption and commercial free!

Here are a few of my fav podcasts (both video & audio) on a variety of topics:

• Ask A Ninja - A classic! It’s a silly show for Ninja enthusiasts.
• Generally Speaking Production Network’s Lost podcast - All Lost fans need to listen to at least one podcast & this one I particularly enjoy!
• Jaffe Juice - Conversation marketing podcast with Joseph Jaffe of crayon. Always loaded with useful information (in fact, that’s how I found out about the GSPN Lost podcast) and he’s got a delightful accent as well which always helps!
• Six Pixels of Separation - fellow Canadian Mitch Joel talks about social media and all sorts of cutting edge marketing stuff
• Wired News - Alt Text Podcast. Seriously, host Lore has made me burst out laughing numerous times. The first episode I listened to, he was dissecting the lyrics to “La Isla Bonita” specifically how it makes no sense.

This is really just a random sampling… but I’m always on the lookout for great new podcasts (especially video ones!) Please tell me your favourites in the comments…

Whether you’re interested in social media for professional or personal reasons (or both!) it can get overwhelming. There’s so much information out there, and now even more tools to consume information. If you’re into what’s new and hot in the social media world, you likely know how daunting it can be to stay up to date with everything. At times I feel like if I don’t spend a couple hours each day browsing blogs in my reader, doing some Stumbling or checking out Twitter, I feel like I’m back at square one in the social media game.

However, I have figured out a few shortcuts which can help you stay up to date without giving up sleep time.

1. Bestofyoutube.com - As fun as it is to browse You Tube every day for the funniest or most interesting videos, it can take a lot of time. But how embarassing is it when everyone starts talking about that crazy popular video and you haven’t seen it yet? Well Bestofyoutube.com takes the most popular videos from youtube each day and aggregates it in a podcast. I love downloading these babies to my new Nano and watching ‘em at the gym. (I admit, I’ve burst out laughing once or twice!)
2. Twitter - Get the right people on your Twitter feed and you’ll be amazed how much great info you can digest in a small amount of time (and 140 characters at a time!). Honestly since I got hooked on Twitter, I’ve been opening Google Reader less and less.
3. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang - Jeremiah is easily one of the most influential and knowledgeable web strategists out there. In fact, Twitter is taking off big time and I think a particular post by Jeremiah on what is now dubbed ‘Twitter Tuesday’ has a lot to do with it.
4. Google Alerts - These handy little suckers help you monitor issues you are interested in. I use it for several keywords that are important to what I do, as well as for monitoring mentions of the company I work for on the web. You could also set up an alert for your own name, to monitor your personal brand reputation. Whatever you use it for GA are super useful, quick and convenient.
5. Alltop - Are you still wondering what an RSS reader is? Or how you subscribe to blogs? Or maybe you get all that but just don’t have the time to seek out all the best resources. Well Alltop is probably the place for you.  It is a collection of blogs on a wide variety of topics. Each topic includes “All the top” blogs on that subject. Check out socialmedia.alltop.com for all the top stories on social media. (Though web2dotwhat.com is not there…yet!)

So there you go, consider it your ‘Coles notes’ to being a social media geek. There’s probably tons more, so drop a comment if you know of something good.