Sam Razi

I know some people find it kind of goofy to snap pics and apply little filters to them and share them online, but I am becoming addicted to Instagr.am, the photo sharing social network for the iPhone.

Here’s a shot I took and posted to Instagr.am today:

And yesterday I signed up for Viddy.it, basically the video snippet sharing clone of Instagr.am. Also addictive.

Viddy.it let’s you apply quick filter effects to small video snippets that you post via your iPhone to their social network. You can follow people and they can follow you.

I used to slap together this quick little snippet.  I filmed this when I went to DrupalCon in Chicago in March, but I snipped it using Viddy.it and added the Snoop filter.

Both of these nifty little apps let you easily share your content with your other social network accounts.

Aside from the fun of it all, these apps are making photo and video sharing ubiquitous. And with new technologies on the way, these apps will form a pool of public content that can be trawled, the meta data about them extracted, correlated and linked with other content in ways that we can’t even imagine yet.

The future of media will be crowd sourced.

Even this blog post was done on my iPhone.

More than ever before, this was the year of the mobile phone and social media.

2011, with two months to go, has been a year of profound change.

More is happening and more information being created, curated and consumed about it than in any year prior, by more people than ever before.

It’s a global phenomenon.

I think anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention will agree, 2011 will be looked upon as a pivot year.

In so many ways 2011 s a change, a breaking free of sorts. It has been singular.

In areas having to do with all aspects of our lives, changes are occurring. It’s both exhilarating and disconcerting at the same time.

Take for instance one of the most important aspects of life:

Work.

I would bet that this year a lot of people are rethinking their careers. In 2011, models that try to create silos with dry corporate trophy titles for positions, that seek to track employees’ actions and distill them down to productivity quotients and performance metrics while sucking the soul out of the job–you get the drift–are stale and outdated, and everyone knows it.

People are realizing that they can leverage their personal and career networks, using social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with each other like never before.

For those with the inclination, the means exist, and are more readily available in 2011 than ever before to trek out on their own and do things far more rewarding than what the typical corporate or bureaucratic jobs have to offer.

Internationally, 2011 has seen revolutions that have thrown out dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and uprisings in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. We have seen riots in the UK, and Vancouver. We have seen social movements spreading virally from city to city, nation to nation. We have seen anarchy. We have seen bravery.

In the U.S. we have the Occupy Wall Street movement spreading to become the Occupy Movement globally. In some ways it is modeled on the horizontal, spontaneously organized, leaderless and peaceful uprising in Iran in the summer of 2009, and the bravery of the Arab Spring.  All were powered by the cell phone and social media.

In 2011, we witnessed the devastating Tsunami in Japan, and the perils of nuclear power with the meltdowns of the Fukushima reactors. We are seeing the degradation of the planet’s vital resources and extinction of its treasured species on an alarming scale while simultaneously we are gaining deeper insights into the nature of the universe .

Economically we stand at the precipice of another recession. The entire planet holds its breath as the Europeans try to figure out what to do with the ailing and defunct economy of Greece.

Technology? Where does one even begin to tackle 2011 in technology?

Have you noticed that movies from even a few years ago appear oddly outdated in the technologies you see in them?

There has been a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction.

The technologies of today remove the barriers to entry into so many areas.

More than ever before, 2011 was the year of the mobile phone and social media.

Think: everyone a media entity.

2011 will change journalism profoundly and permanently, with the rise of citizen journalism on a scale never seen before in the history of mankind.

We lost Steve Jobs. But he left us with the notion that we can follow our curiosities and passions and be content with our lives, and he left us with a legacy that will continue to inspire us and drive change for a long time.  May he rest in peace.

2011 has been a year of getting connected with the human spirit. And in that spirit, it has been a pivot for me personally.

I have the honor to be working with some great people on an idea of mine that I have wanted to pursue for the past two years. I mentioned journalism earlier…

There are two more months left in 2011…

Happy that the photo of BC Place that I took and posted up to Flickr (also in my last blog post) is featured in Vancouver View Magazine’s October issue!  The photo is featured on page 16.  View it here:

Just re-launched the site from scratch.  Wanted to get it up today but have a number of errands to run.  Will update with a proper post shortly.

Welcome, and stay tuned!