Last year Gary Vaynerchuk declared April 3rd Good People Day! This year he said that you had to write a blog post or make a video to talk about Good People. Seeing that today is my 1 year anniversary of randomsarah.com, and that I started this blog with a Good People Day video last year, I thought it was only fitting to do a post this year to talk about all the GREAT people that I have met over the past year.

Gary Vaynerchuk, I would not be writing this post if it wasn’t for you. You were the first person who told me to trust in my community when you pushed me to raise money for the Thunder Cruise and you have been very supportive ever since. So thank you for starting good people day, and for being a great person yourself.

I wanted to focus on people that have really helped me feel more comfortable in this space, and who have given me a great chance to grow.

Matt Knell. You were the first person to ever come up to me, already knowing who I was, at a Mashable event back last summer. It was one of the most flattering moments EVER. Since then you have become a great friend and provided me with some great advice over the past year. You have never stopped believing in me and pushing me to be the best person I can be.

Rob Blatt. You have always believed in What’s it all About from the very beginning. Thank you for taking a chance on me and helping me produce and edit the show. You have been a lifesaver. And Amber (I know you don’t want me to use your last name) you have been wonderful over these last few months, you are a great writer and you inspire me to be a better blogger every day.

Tim Kress-Spatz you believed in What’s it all About, and decided to help me with the show by bringing the show into the Ambush TV family and I could not be more thankful to you. You are a great entrprenuer and you inspire me.

Jonathan Dingman, simply @dingman to most people. Jonathan you have taught me so many things, from how to love Google, to understanding SEO, and the art of kicking a** and taking names with Wordpress. You are a great friend and an even better Wordpress developer!

Who can describe Brett Petersel, Oz Sultan, Micheal Gruen, and Nater Kane. You four have made this entry into the New York Tech Community one of the best experiences of my life. It’s been a crazy ride, but I am ready for another year.

Chris Brogan… there are no words for how awesome you are. I can only aspire to be a fraction of your awesomeness, but it’s something I work toward every day! Thank you for your words of encouragement every time we see each other.

Jeff Pulver, I have to thank you for always believing in me, and for giving me all the opportunities that you have to succeed. Thank you for believing that I am a rock star, and lifting my spirits every time I see you.

Whitney Hess, you are an amazing woman. People just couldn’t wait for us to meet each other and we clicked the second that we did. I am proud to call you my friend and I am thankful for all the great advice you have given me.

Walt Ribeiro, YOU ARE AWESOME! When you first met me, you came up to me and said “oh my god, it’s Random Sarah!” Like I was the best person on earth!  You are a great musician and a wonderful friend. You are a true rock star!

Finally Cali Lewis, you were my person for Good People Day last year, but you need to be on this list again. I wanted to thank you for all the great help, advice and feedback you have given me over this past year. Thank you for inspiring me to start doing online video and for continuing to be a great mentor.

And to all of my friends and family who knew me before I was blogging, and before I was on twitter, and who were reading my blog daily when no one else was…you guys are what keeps me going every day! Thank you for being so supportive.

FINALLY!!! I made a new video blog!

I know I have been away from video blogging for a while, but I am back! For all of my new followers on twitter, tumblr, and everywhere else, hi! This is me!

In the begining I mentioned Chris Brogan, he is awesome, check him out!

Also you can check out my Tumblr for more random stuff.

Keep checking back here for more video blogs in the future!

Media is one of those really broad terms that can refer to just about everything we do these days. There is old media, new media, social media, digital media, mass media, internet media, and the list goes on.

Mass media is probably what we all deal with the most. You read it, you watch it, you listen to it.

(via wikipedia)

Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. It was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, although mass media (like books and manuscripts) were present centuries before the term became common. The term public media has a similar meaning: it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across media such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting, which may require union membership in some large markets such as Newspaper Guild, AFTRA, & text publishers. The concept of mass media is complicated in some internet media as now individuals have a means of potential exposure on a scale comparable to what was previously restricted to select group of mass media producers. These internet media may include:

• Blogs
• Message boards
• Personal web pages
• Podcasts
• Television
• Video hosting services

The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The term “MSM” or “mainstream media” has been widely used in the blogosphere in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

We all consume media in different ways. You may DVR a bunch of shows for the week and sit down for a nice long Sunday afternoon watching them all. You might constantly hit refresh on your favorite blog while sitting at a desk at your boring job.

We all have different media habits, but the ways in which we consume and even create different types of media make us all unique. A little more than a year ago if you asked me what was the first thing I did when I got online in the morning I wouldn’t have said, checked my email, I would have told you that I read my feed reader which, at the time, was full of only apple rumor sites. That was the most important type of media to me.

Many people think that consuming large amounts of media is a waist of time. I have heard many people say that throwing away their TV added hours of productivity to their day. But what do you do when it becomes part of your job to keep up with all this media? How do you keep up with it all?

Many of my close friends find it fascinating that I can go on and on about popular culture at it’s connections to mass media at the time. They wonder how I keep all this information in my head. Well that is easy:

#1 I am a Media Studies major, so while everyone else is taking chemistry, my professor’s would reference last weeks episode of the L word so it would benefit my grade to know what was going on.

#2 I make it my job to read tons of  technology, pop culture, and social media blogs every day. Why do I do this? Because that knowledge becomes valuable when I can make connections to why some things work and others failed. For the same reason that we study history (so that it won’t repeat itself) we all should keep a closer eye on the patterns in Media.

I decided to take a look at the tools I use to keep up with all the media that we all see every day. Inspired by a post by Chris Brogan who was inspired by John Jantsch I decided to write out my “social media system” Mine is a little more inclusive however to describe how I keep up with other forms of media as well.

The Workflow:

• Constantly – monitor twitter: I use tweetdeck when at home and Twittelator Pro on my iPhone. I also have certain people’s tweets as well as DM’s pushed straight to SMS. This helps me not to miss anything important. I use twitter favorites a lot to help me remember tweets that had links I wanted to check later or tweets I wanted to follow up on.
• Constantly – check email and respond: I’m one of those people who can’t leave unread message notifications bothering me on my phone. I need to check to see what it is.
• Constantly – monitor Tumblr (if I’m home): Tumblr is another thing that keeps me in the loop. A lot of the time I will see something on tumblr first. I’m a very visual person so I am much more likely to remember something if I see it in my tumblr dashboard than I am to click through a link on twitter.
• Twice daily – Go through Google reader: I try to skim in the morning while sharing and staring items that I want to read later on. In the afternoon or evening I will read it all in depth.
• Daily – Watch new podcasts: I subscribe to over 20 different podcasts, most of them aren’t daily but there are always new unwatched ones I need to catch up on.
• Daily – Write blog posts: While I may not post something new every day I am always working on something. Evernote helps me a lot with this. I can keep writing and bring in photos and different reference links.
• Less daily – Swing by Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn and check for new content and respond to messages.
• Less daily – watch new TV content
• Weekly – Read the Sunday Times Magazine, and the week in review.

In the background:

In order to watch as much video media as I do there are some very important tools I use. iTunes is how I manage all my podcast subscriptions. This way I can always catch up when I am away from my computer on my iPhone.

While I do have a DVR, sometimes it just isn’t enough. It can only record on two channels at once and on Monday nights that just doesn’t cut it. I use a great program for OS X called TVShows. TVShows is an application that automatically downloads torrent files for your favorite shows. Manage your subscriptions and preferences from within the TVShows application, and TVShows takes care of the rest: a background process is automatically launched at a regular interval to check for new episodes. This allows me to keep up with shows I watch regularly and watch them on my computer via Boxee anytime I want.

So that is how I keep up with all the media that I consume. What is your media flow? Write a post on your blog and post a link!