It’s week three of The Record’s beard contest, and my plans to regularly post video blogs has been foiled by by deadlines and short weeks due to holidays. I do have a special video blog planned that I hope to have up by the end of the week. I’ve also continued to shoot video daily for the stop-motion video I plan to post when the contest has ended.

Meanwhile, ianhillmedia.com is happy to present a post by its first-ever guest blogger: Record Editor Mike Klocke. Here are Mike’s beard contest rankings; they’re sort of like the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll rankings, only better.

The light was somewhat warm on Thursday morning, so I decided to take a few minutes before work and walk down Lafayette Street in downtown Stockton to shoot some photos. I focused on the parking meters, which I always thought were visually interesting – the yellowish rust and red “Time Expired” marker provide a nice contrast with the steel gray of the meter casing.

Like Record photographer Clifford Oto, I was inspired by the clouds that marked the skies around San Joaquin County this week. Unlike Cliff, however, I lack skill with a camera. I’m still learning.

After I left the gym Thursday and Friday morning I spent a few minutes taking test photos of the sky in downtown Stockton as seen looking east on Main Street from Hunter Square. Most of the photos I shot Thursday looked like this.

Social media can get pretty complicated. I have a relatively small social media presence – the links/icons in the sidebar at left, plus Flickr – but at times I’ve forgotten how each of my pages or sites are connected.

Take, for example, the video blog below, which I uploaded to Youtube yesterday and intended to post here today. A few hours after the video was on Youtube I received a message from my sister on Facebook saying she had watched it. I had forgotten that I had a feed from Youtube to Facebook, and it probably cost ianhillmedia.com a few pageviews.

It’s something I’ll keep in mind in the future. Perhaps I need to create a flowchart mapping out the connections between my social media pages.