Salutations and Seasoned Greetings, I'm still doin the spicy sugarcane lip-mambo from the holiday season. word.
Today i thought i'd do some direct explaining, about who i is, and what i be 'bout.
My name is Offie, and do a bunch of things. I do photography, graphic design. I create magazines. I create online communities. I develop strategies for businesses to foster communication with their audiences. I help businesses FIND their audiences and hold their attention. I Art Direct/Project Manage. I Create brands and concepts. I'm a visionary intellectual and an urban individual.
My main slant is that i create online communities and with my experience doing graphic design and layout for magazines, i can now create a whole new genre of magazines based around the work i do with their respective communities. I am busy democratizing content production, turning the audience into the producers. The wider MY audience is, the more content will be generated and we all know that websites and magazines are content driven. Ad driven magazines cost alot of money and few people read them except to look at the highly targeted ads.
One of the guiding principles of any "web 2.0" application is that it gets better as more people use it and people can use it as a means to their own ends. I want to make communities that serve the users as much as the proprietors. fly.paper is all about building an actual self contained creative community and i am using multiple sites to achieve different goals for the fly.paper community. Eventually i want to have a deviantart site where we sell our featured artists' prints and on other sites as well that sell prints. Right now i am doing some research into the viability of doing bookmark sharing on http://flypaper.ning.com by using del.icio.us .
Social Online Applications are a good way to use the power of crowds to sift through a lot of information in a quasi-intelligent manner; like a Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us. But i am more interested in content creation, at this point. How do you amalgamate blogs, drawings, photos all these things found on different sites across the web and different activities in different people's lives and put it all in one place that has some kind of significance not only to the user but to someone else.
I wish my boss would look at fly.paper and ask me to develop the magazine and sell ads for blue sky. that would be an awesome assignment or even if he asked me to this for one of our clients right now. Hi, I'm Offie, i develop online communities and social applications.
In other projects i've worked on my main contributions outside of photograpy and graphic design revolved around development of the online community. And the more projects i work on the more knowledge, skills and ability i have to find success. An i plan on doing this untill it pays off for me and the teams of people that work with me. I will never be allied to one project to the death. If it's dying it goes, the formula needs to be dissected so we can know where things went wrong and keep it moving. Some people have trouble when you keep it moving feeling like you should be under them and owing them for the steps that you've made. Thats when you know you are on the right track when people are hating on the innovation. I'm sure i've stepped on a few toes but is it really that major to you?