GDC is now something akin to a marker for me. While the first industry event I ever attended was E3, it was at GDC that I feel I found my true calling. I knew I wanted to get into the industry, but I just didn’t know where it was that I fit. I didn’t like programming overly much, I wasn’t a great artist, and design wasn’t something you just waltzed into – nor was I sure I wanted to dance that dance. However, I attended a few panels on community management and social gaming, and everything became clear.

Since that time I graduated from college and actually got myself a career in community management and social media. During the first year of this job, I found myself back at where I felt it all started: at GDC. This time though, I wasn’t learning about what I wanted to do with my life, but instead I was actually living my dream. That was an accomplishment that felt like none other.

This year I wasn’t attending any actual sessions, but instead I ran a booth. Considering I’ve been to E3 as media and GDC as a student, actually working the show and running a booth was a totally different experience. Instead of holding interviews, I was the one answering questions. Instead of learning about every company I could find (well, I had plenty of time to walk the expo floor, so I did that too), I was doing the informing. It was different, and it was an awful lot of fun. I met a ton of very cool people and I am absolutely looking forward to the next show.

While I uploaded these to Flickr, I haven’t paid for a pro membership yet, so… Here are links to the relevant Facebook albums:

• The Grand Shrine at Ise
• Fushimi Inari Taisha – Also my favorite place in the world.
• Shirakawa
• Minoo
• Graduation Day
• Japanese Flowers!
• Misc Japanese Images
• Last Semester of College in the US – Just as a bonus, although also old.

… I need to start taking more pictures again.

I’m not going to totally dive in head first with everything, though. For example: I’m not about to live with just Pandora and Last.FM when I have a perfectly good music collection. I’m also not going to be able to replace some applications like Photoshop, and many games. However, things like IM,  Twitter (although I am counting browser-plugins!), IRC, productivity software, e-mail, etc… will get moved over to help make the browser the main focus of what I am doing online.

So, while I already use Gmail as my e-mail client, and Google Reader for my RSS feeds, I’m going to try out a few other services.

• Google Docs will take over my productivity software (although Zoho might be a better choice), and while I have used it in the past, I haven’t much.
• While technically a browser-plugin, I am counting it… Yoono will handle IM, Twitter, and other social networks.
• Mibbit will handle IRC – and it seems to be doing a much better job of it than I could have ever expected.

So, while this isn’t a huge list – granted it covers most of what I do online/on my computer – I am interested in other options. So, if you know a spiffy web application, or any other neat web services, post it up in the comments! I’d love to give it a shot.

I’ve also had one other thing dropped on my lap too, that isn’t so related to the job of Community Management: performance testing. However, that comes with a certain perk: two nice towers and a shiny new monitor which are stored at home. The machines are for testing purposes, of course, but still!

Basically it boils down to this: I had a job that I really didn’t like. There was nothing wrong with the company or anything, but it just wasn’t the position for me. I had very little work to do – which actually benefited this site, but I’d rather be engaged with my work. That was something I very much was not. I hate being bored and I hate not having something to keep me busy. I was actually strongly considering heading back to college and grabbing a PhD in Information Sciences, and finding myself a nice research position, either at a University or at some epic company. That would have been along the lines of what I wanted to do with my life, although not exactly it.

Of course, to do grad school, I’d need some money first. I’d also have to go through the application process which would take around a year. That would be a problem though, because after a while I realized a major problem: I wasn’t going to keep my job. Now, I didn’t do a bad job, mind you. However, I didn’t have enough work. Things took to long for management to approve, so I was often stuck waiting around until I could move forward on my project. Management realized that and, in a recession – or ever for that matter – you don’t pay someone to sit around doing nothing, because you don’t have enough work for them. Thus, I was let go.

This as a problem, because I had little in the way of savings. I lost most of my money trying to get that one job, so it was a pretty rough place to be in. I saw it coming for a while, but just didn’t have any luck turning anything up.  The greater problem was that I had a year long lease to sign and no way to pay for it if I didn’t get something pronto. I also didn’t have many places to turn, with my family in a major financial crisis over all.

This could probably have quickly turned into a pretty depressive story, except that I’m apparently retardedly lucky, so I get to provide a happy ending (for now at least). I received a call from a company that I had applied to, and interviewed with, shortly before I got the other job, Bigfoot Networks, the creators of the Killer NIC gaming network card. It was for a Community Manager position. They called me up and asked if I was still interested – and I said yes! Absolutely! It took a few phone interviews, but then I was offered the position on a contractual basis (which will grow into full-time).

It’s weird, you know? I was in what felt like the worst place in my life. I was stuck, had no where to go, no way to get out of my situation, and nothing was working out. It was stressful as hell. Then, out of the blue, my dream job just showed up and was dropped on my lap.

Go figure.

This will have some affects on this blog though. I’ve not started posting here before, because I wanted to really focus on this position for a while. It also involves me blogging over on the company blog, too – which is still small right now, but I have… high hopes for, let us say. I don’t want to let this site die, though. Luckily, I think I can continue to blog there and blog here just fine, too. Over time, I’ll port some more game news over there, but I’m going to still talk an awful lot about major news from the game industry here, like I did before. I’ll also happily discuss hardware, too. Most importantly of all, I get to talk about community management as a professional in the field instead of just some random dude. Woo!

So, yeah. I’ll try to get the place runnin’ smoothly again.

Yet, the important question here, is what does a company need to do to be successful on something like Twitter? It seems like you can sum it up quite simply as this: don’t just talk about yourself, pick an area to focus in, have a real conversation, and make sure you come across as a real person behind the keyboard. The real important thing though, is to be sure that you’re simply interesting. Apparently well over 60% of Twitter users (according to a poll over at Stwittergy) don’t care if the person they’re following is a business or whatever, so long as they have something interesting to say.

Basically, if you’re running a company and you want to advertise yourself with Twitter, don’t’ just talk about yourself. Post links to what people are saying in related fields, talk as an expert on the field in general and not just on your own products, and basically take part in the conversation. The best example I heard on Thursday is that Twitter is like a cocktail party. You don’t just walk in and start shouting out “I MAKE GAMES” or whatever. Instead, you listen in on what people are saying, and you pipe up when it makes sense to, and otherwise just add to whatever the conversation happens to be.

Oh, and apparently you should also Retweet a lot.

On a totally unrelated note, I appologize for the silence lately. I picked up a new contract and I’ve been adjusting to the new schedule. Hopefully things should be evening out again.

Yesterday was spent at the Screenburn Arcade over at South by Southwest – hence the lack of news coming from the site yesterday. I had planned on spending a fair bit of time at the free section of the SXSW event going on here in Austin, but quickly discovered that was going to be unlikely. Suffice to say, the expo was, well, tiny. Extremely tiny.

There were approximately two companies there: Gendai Games , who are indie developers working on a spiffy project called GameSalad which is designed to allow people with no programming experience to create Flash games easily, and Critical Mass who are an outsourcing development studio for games and films. Given that I already knew the Gendai Games people and Critical Mass was largely focused on running gamers through Halo 3 matches up against the professional girl gamer they had at their booth, that was only minorly interesting.

Still, it turned out to be fairly good in the end, although largely not for the actual Arcade event. Instead, I managed to meet a few interesting people from a couple of companies after being tipped off to a premiere party for an upcoming indie comedy movie called 2 Bobs, which focuses on two game developers who have their game stolen before launch and begin tracking down the thieves. Also, I can totally say I attended a movie premiere party. So, the day was far from a bust.

Also, I’m not a fan of PureVolume. Sorry guys, but waiting outside of an empty bar/club for over an hour with the rest of your RSVP’d guests is just dumb.

While I am saving my cash for the Austin Game Developers Conference this year, I will still be attending the Screenburn Arcade, which is open for the public at large and still contains a huge chunk of the gaming section of SXSW, without spending the $500 entry fee. As a result, while I won’t likely be able to post quite as much one of the days this weekend, I hope to pop some updates on SXSW to the blog when I get out there. Given that  I’ll be knee deep in game industry while there, I should be able have quite a bit to report. So for now, I’m looking forward to getting out, seeing some neat innovations, and meeting some interesting people.

To be honest though, I’m surprised I am actually able to type on this machine at all. When I received my packages, I opened up the TV and server boxes to see that they had arrived completely unscathed. My desktop, however, had suffered a few problems. For one, the CD drive had somehow popped lose from the rack and my graphics card had popped out of the PCI-E slot. Given that these were secure in the case to begin with, I’m actually pretty shocked that this happened. I’m even more shocked that the graphics card suffered no damage, nor did any other components. So, while that was a bit of a “WTF” moment and a slight scare, it turned out that nothing was wrong after all.

The TV has been a nice addition as well. Although I do not currently have cable TV, I’ve gotten my Playstation 3 hooked up to it and my media server streaming music and video. I’ve also been happy to see that I can stream Pandora, Last.FM, and Hulu videos via the Playstation 3 browser as well. This has seriously rocked. While I’m still going to be in the market for a nice HDTV service, I’ll get by in the meantime as is.

Also, pictures: