It’s kind of pitiful that I need to create a login just to comment on Metroblogs, yet as an author I got blackballed nearly two years ago, that login got blocked but I still recieve author mailing list emails from Sean Bonner et al.
Sheesh, they like to make life difficult…
I’ve been involved in social networks, social media or whatever you call it for the best part of 10 years now, which is actually quite scary in some aspects. It’s more funny how in those 10 years public sentiment has changed from one of trepidation to embracement, it was only 9 years ago I went to New York City to spend Labor Day weekend with a whole bunch of people I met on the old SixDegrees site. Back then there was kind of a stigma about it, you know, “you met people on the internet?” Now I can safely say I met my wife on the internet, and all my friends in Atlanta? All off the internet too, all without scorn or ridicule. It’s just part of everyday life now.
Why, it was only Friday night I had drinks and dinner with friends at The Brick Store in Decatur and part of the conversation was WordPress 2.5, and who was upgrading to it, everyone who could updated their Facebook status to say they were indeed at the Brick Store and one of the parting comments at the end of the night was “see you on twitter.” Twitter is currently my social network of choice, mainly because I’ve been twittering for so long:
I was only the 5,628th person to join Twitter, my first update was the 27,416th tweet in Twitter history. A little over 18 months later there are countless millions of members and my latest tweet is the 776,485,029th. There’s something about being there near the beginning, like Flickr users who were part of Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, it’s that hierarchy of geekdom (not to be confused with the hierarchy of gamerdom that is a baptism of fire in the form of kids yelling and cursing at you) we wear it like a badge.
Like my early social networking exploits, who can say they scored free swag from a startup who literally force fed them beer from a fish tank/cooler in their head office in New York, well around 30 of us out of a member base of over 3 million. Nothing can take that away. And those people haven’t quite disappeared neither, all it takes is an email to the old Topica mailing list and boom, nostalgia city. I think a 10 year reunion is in order next year.
But I digress, nearly everything is social networking/media nowadays, everything is RSS feeds and it’s making me somewhat lazy. I rarely visit blogs anymore as Google Reader keeps everything in order for me. I rarely blog as I’d rather update my Twitter/Facebook status. I rarely take pictures now as my phone has a semi-decent camera, and it’s always on me and I can quickly upload it to Flickr. It’s been a slow but significant shift for the last year or so. And it can all be aggregated on my Lifestream or FriendFeed, so you don’t even need to visit here anymore, it’s not worth it.
Embrace the socialism, reject the individualism.
Another year, another shot at glory. This time I’ve made one significant change to my March Madness routine of years past, no second guessing myself, version 1 of the brackets is sticking after the advice of Brian last year (I never did find out how he did though, a flaw perhaps?)
So yeah, I’m backing Kansas to go deep again, will I ever learn? And I’m on the Tyler Hansbrough Farewell Tour Bandwagon™ all the way to the end this year, so for that reason, and that reason alone, I’m opting for blatant homerism and backing North Carolina over UCLA. And sorry Dave, I’m not buying into Memphis to go far.
The worst part is I’ll miss all the opening weekend as we’re heading to Atlanta this weekend, so if you see me, excuse me for glancing at my iPhone every so often, gotta keep track of my LOCKS!
Michael Stipe confirms that he is, as everyone already knew for years, actually gay. Now this isn’t really news worthy, what is news worthy is the fact that Robyn has a picture of him with a male stripper at a birthday party at Go Bar in Athens, GA. from at least 8 years ago. That pic should be scanned and Flickr’d just for the hell of it now…
A severe wind storm, possibly a tornado, hit the centre of Atlanta, causing damage to skyscrapers, hotels and two sports arenas. The storm struck during a SEC Championship tournament basketball game between Alabama and Mississippi State at the Georgia Dome, sending fans and players running for cover. Damage was also inflicted on Philips Arena during a game between the Hawks and Los Angeles Clippers, as well as the CNN Center and Omni Hotel.
Inspired, perspired, tired and wired by Lori, here is my random, last 10 on iTunes…
The Roots – 75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)
Blur – To the End
Dr. Dre – Forgot About Dre (featuring Eminem)
Bobby Womack – Across 110th Street
Green Day – Wake Me Up When September Ends
Radiohead – Subterranean Homesick Alien
Moby – Inside
Corinne Bailey Rae – Put Your Records On
Josie and the Pussycats – Shapeshifter
Marvin Gaye – Too Busy Thinking About My Baby
I’m actually surprised I went through 10 songs without either Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Oasis, Led Zeppelin or U2 in there…
Hillary Clinton has been branded a “monster” by one of Barack Obama’s top advisers. In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman in London, Samantha Power, Mr Obama’s key foreign policy aide, let slip the camp’s true feelings about the former first lady. She has since quit. Who knew an Edinburgh-based newspaper might tip the balance of the US Election?
Normally when a basketball team makes a bone headed mistake off the court it doesn’t affect me, but when the Charlotte Bobcats jumped the gun on Sunday I was there to capture it and in turn set off a series of events that lead me to here today.
First a little back story, since it opened in 2005 Charlotte Bobcats Arena has been Charlotte Bobcats Arena, and that’s pretty rare in modern arenas and corporate sponsorship. I can only think of four other big arenas that don’t have corporate sponsorship, Madison Square Garden in New York, Rose Garden in Portland, New Orleans Arena in New Orleans and The Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit, but I digress… Recently it’s been reported that the Bobcats are in talk with Time Warner Cable to rename the arena the Time Warner Cable Arena, quite a mouthful no?
Now this hasn’t been officially announced, but on Sunday at the game against Toronto, on the sideline they had big Time Warner Cable Arena signage on the rotation. Odd I though, as at this point I hadn’t heard anything about it being renamed, so I snapped a picture of it. Later that night I uploaded it to Flickr and thought nothing of it. The next day at work I received two calls in quick succession on my iPhone from a number I didn’t recognise, and when I get calls at work from numbers I don’t know, I kick them straight to voicemail. So I had 2 missed calls and no voicemail, kind of an odd combination. So I called it and it took me through to the secretary of Greg Economou, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Bobcats Sports & Entertainment, another mouthful, but needless to say, he’s high up in the Bobcats organization. Not knowing why he would call me I left my name and number and about an hour later he called me back…
He explained that it was a mistake to display that signage, and in order to defuse a potential hiccup, would I be able to remove my image from Flickr?
Now, before I continue:
The company I work for actually do work for the Bobcats in the realm of internet marketing. Any comments made here DO NOT reflect the views and opinions of that particular company, after all, the picture was taken by me at a non-company event, uploaded to my personal Flickr account and the call came on my private cell phone number
OK, now that’s out the way, he proceeded to say that he would repay me for the inconvenience. Whatever I wanted, tickets for a game, be his guest at an event, press pass to get on the floor, whatever… Now I was quite taken aback by this, I mean, if you were offered pretty much an open door to a major arena, what would you do? I did the first thing that came to mind… Tickets to Springsteen in April! I said this as I’d previously mused how extortionate the prices for this event were, and how often to you get to see Springsteen and the E Street Band live nowadays? Consider it done he said, he or one of his associates would call me.
This was on Monday afternoon, now almost 72 hours have passed with no reply and I’m unsure what to do? Like I said, the Bobcats are a client of ours, so I don’t want to be a dick and rock the boat on this. But on the other hand, a man’s word is bond, right?
Another thing that kind of weirded me out was how quickly he found me. The picture hit number 3 on Google for the term “Time Warner Cable Arena”, but even then there no mention of my cell phone on my Flickr account, somehow within 18 hours of posting the picture to Flickr my cell phone was buzzing away. He worked hard to track me down, and it wasn’t even a “are you the Gregor Smith who was at the Bobcats game last night?” He knew it was me, there was no beating around the bush.
So yeah, what should I do? I’ll prolly call his secretary in a few hours, maybe I’ll push the picture back from the privacy of “marked as private” on Flickr and see if it reenters Google quick as before. Many possibilities…
