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By GLYN MACLEAN
Staff Writer

Here is the thing.

A man builds a tower to unite all people. God, having this awesome sense of humor, says (not literally) "Righto then, (sneaky grin) I think I'll make them all speak different languages."

So here they were, coming together and hoping to be in one accord and they are left without the comprehension to understand each other.

That's interesting.

Ok. So now we have about 6 billion or so people all gathering around the internet. I'd hope that one mechanism could be that "tower of babel" uniting all of human kind into one great social network. I even suffer the delusion that this tower is Facebook. Sadly, I find this is not the case.

In order to effectively use Facebook, I also have to be on ReverbNation, ILike, LastFM, and other such media content networks. Each one of these has their own network but they also integrate with Facebook.

So then I get confused.

I go to MySpace fans and say "We love you but we're going to Facebook because that's where most of you are." Then the fans come back and say "We're not there at all, we're staying here! We don't like Facebook.".

I get more confused. I thought MySpace was dead. Turns out it aint!

So the fans tell me that I have to have an online presence in ALL the networks. Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, ILike, LastFM, Twitter, TwitterFM, GarageBand, ReverbNation and the list goes on and on.

So much for the one network to rule them all. It doesn't exist.

So I set about creating an online presence in all the networks and learning how to integrate and cross market them with each other. Lo and behold, the fan base starts to grow exponentially. We find that Yulia is No.1 Pop artist in NZ on ReverbNation, that's she's around 28th position on top 100 charts (all genres) on MySpace and no.1 in her category.

So we develop a system of maintaining the multitude of web sites that only Mac/Apple offers giving us the productivity and work flow of probably a dozen staff on equally as many computers. We achieve this by using two ME accounts giving us 8 users to run around 30 web sites.

We may not be able to control how many web sites there are out there that we need to be in, but we can control the machine that we need to interpret and mediate those languages. Thanks to Apple, we are able to have two people doing the work of an office full of staff.

So yes, there is a need to have so many web sites. The fans have demanded it from us. They told us off when we wanted to close MySpace and they demanded more regular updates.

So we will continue to listen to Yulia's fans and whenever possible we will give them what they want. Even if that means lots of towers and lots of babels.