Layman Media

Layman Media recently completed a couple of exciting projects for a pair of Democratic Party candidates in Indianapolis which put us in the spotlight in our home market. Layman Media provided Social Web Identity Management and Internet Coordination services to the Dr. Woody Myers for Congress campaign and the John Barnes for State Representative campaign as well.

Dr. Myers ran a very competitve campaign against the incumbent Congressman Andre Carson (D-Indianapolis) in the Indiana Primary which just concluded on May 6th. Dr. Myers spent $1.7 million of his own funds to run a very high profile campaign in which Layman Media was the sole IT provider to the campaign. We were responsible for the setup, maintenance and operation of several social web profiles including MySpace, Facebook (page, group, application and personal profile), Twitter, Vox, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, iMeem and Odeo. Layman Media was also the sole multimedia producer for the Myers 2008 web properties, archiving local media coverage and original video and audio content via the various account profiles established by Digital Life Coach Joh Padgett who also served on the Myers 2008 staff as Internet Coordinator.

While Dr. Myers may have ultimately lost his primary battle, Layman Media's other political client in the Indiana Primary ran a very successful campaign and won the Democratic nomination to run this fall in Indiana House District 89 on the east side of Indianapolis. John Barnes, a Warren Township Schools teacher and previous candidate for the position in 2006, won his primary fight with 78% of the vote for the right to run against Republican candidate Chris Swatts. Layman Media provided Internet Coordination, Website Development and Multimedia Production services to John Barnes, and continues to operate his website and manage his Social Web Identity profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. 

I've been using Open Pandora for a while to listen to my Pandora radio stations as I work periodically and I have to say its a brilliant piece of software that has some really cool features built into it. The primary reason I grabbed it in the first place was to take advantage of the fact that as you listen to songs on your Pandora stations, your song feed from Pandora will be syndicated to Last.fm where it will track your listening habits for sharing with others via widgets in such social networks as Facebook, MySpace and more.

For fans of the Pandora service this is a godsend, it gives you the powerful Pandora music sampling service, with the social features of Last.fm that Pandora in its pure form lacks. With so many social nets using last.fm widgets and feeds, sharing your musical taste has become easier than ever before. In addition to Last.fm Open Pandora also features integration with Microsoft Messenger, Xfire and Skype

My Social Music Links:

My Global Master Feed Aggregator:

Layman Media is pleased to provide digital and media support services to the Dr. Woody Myers for Congress 2008 campaign. Layman Media will be conducting Social Web Identity Management and Digital Community Organizing as well as Multimedia Production services for the Myers campaign. Joh Padgett will also serve as Official Campaign Blogger on behalf of the Myers campaign and will conduct outreach to the Indiana blogging community.

Monticello Politics, a Layman Media production, will go on hiatus until the conclusion of the contract with Myers 2008. Archives will still be kept available at www.monticellopolitics.com. We will still continue to produce the Dissonance blog and other various client sites maintained and operated by Layman Media. 

I am trying out the cool service Talkr that uses a Wordpress plugin to use your WP feed as a script for an automated podcast of the posts you write. I've been testing this lately on my local political blog Monticello Politics and so far I have found it to be a very efficient plugin and a cool feature addition to the site.

Talkr even has its own podcast feed that it generates. This however is not available through the native feeds via Wordpress, so if you wish to offer that feed available to your readers you will have to use Feedburner to unify your various feeds. Check it out at www.talkr.com.