Adam Schultz

I received another message from my new MySpace buddy. It was an apology. Apparently, there was a bit of drinking and MySpacing going on that night involving too many Newcastles.

This brings up another thought. In the bar down the street, you can get drunk, pissed off drunk, and in time, the memory you and those in attendance have of that evening will fade.

On-line, however, everything is archived, everything.

I currently have full archive of that drunken provocation and can keep it as long as I see fit.

Drunk dialing is one thing, drunk social networking is another thing all together.

Expired: Drunk Driving
Tired: Drunk Dialing
Wired: Drunk Social Networking

Do you have any stories of people making complete fools of them selves on-line and leaving behind a shameful byte trail that is archived still today?  Put it in the comments (with a link to the evidence).

I checked my myspace profile today and saw that there was a kid from chicago, most likely in college, telling me in a private message that I stole his name and adamschultz.com.

So I mesaged him back and asked that he must also be an Adam Schultz and he promptly replied and called me an asshat.

I have thick skin, I’m not worried about some stranger with a similar name throwing ignorant insults. However, I am intrigued.

There was a time not so long ago where a person only had one name. If there happened to be another person in the same town with the same name and it wasn’t your father you would add your Fathers name or your trade to your name to differientate. This was the case for some time and continues to be the case in many cultures across the world.

This worked well for a long time and even in a big city, middle names and the local nature of our existance limited our exposure to others who shared our name, the essential core of your outward identity.

But now, things have changed. We have moved into virtual worlds where the proximity in which we exist has shrunk. Additionally, our names exist in what can only be considered real estate in this new space.

Presently, in the Google neighborhood, there is 1 other Adam Schultz who has better real estate than I do. In Naymz, I’ve got dibs but others can still move in. In the domin neighborhood however, I’ve got Boardwalk - AdamSchultz.com.

Now, there is another Adam Schultz who is frustrated with the fact that someone else owns the land for which he naturally feels entitled. There is only the one .com name to own. He can get all of the other .whatevers but I have .com.

Because of this, as we passed each other in the MySpace neighborhood he essentially spit on my shoes. I didn’t know who he was before this altercation, but he sure knew who I was.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Online identity is getting stranger and stranger.

Public Service Announcement: If you don’t worship John Battelle, you need to get your head checked.

Here is an great conversation currently underway talking about the differences and challenges ahead for both Consumer Packaged Media and Conversational Media.

http://battellemedia.com/archives/003199.php

Here is the comment I contributed to the conversation:

At the end of the day, there will be some people who understand and embrace CM for what it is worth and others who will renounce it, or, through a lack of understanding, attempt to embrace it and miss the mark all together. (mycoke.com)

Much like every other movement of the media to democratized platforms, those who currently think they are in control will continue to attempt to maintain what they think is control.

They will never see users and consumers as resources but always as walking talking wallets good only for their lifetime consumer value.

Even with the NewsCorp purchase of MySpace. They are using the platform to push the goals of PGM into the space rather than focusing on new ways to extract the maximum value of the content and resources of the users within MySpace.

The MySpace users are seen as an audience, not as the largest group of energized, dynamic, interesting and diverse content generators ever to populate the same domain.

Equip and incent this group with the ability to more easily share of them selves, invent of them selves and project themselves into this medium and who knows what they can do.

I just wanted to take a moment and wish you all a Merry Chrismukkah.

Click here for a special message.

Enjoy,

Adam

So, if you know my brother Mike, you know 2 things.

He loves sports and he is friggin hilarious.

A few months ago, he and a friend, we will call him Jamie, submited a pilot episode of a sports radio show they called Slim Mikey and The Jamer for a contest with ESPN Radio on XM. Well, they went pretty far but didn’t win the contest and they are still trying to get something going on local radio in Jacksonville. The problem there is that it costs $$$ for airtime and studio time and the acceptable margin of error is slim.

So, I thought it would be a good idea to just bootstrap the thing with a super low budget and see if he can create an audience online first. Chances are, online, he can reach more people and muster a more loyal following with the same content. That’s the hope anyway.

There are so many web 2.0 tools out there I figured it would be easy enough to get it going at little or no cost. Boy was I right.

In my research, I stumbled upon podOmatic.com. What a great site for bootstrapping the creation and simplifying the distribution of podcasts.

Inside 1 hour I was able to get the MikeInTheBox chanel completely set up including a call in line for audio comments.

There aren’t any shows posted yet but the infracture is all set. I did all of this in less than an hour and all completly free of charge. We are planning the first weekly installment later this month.

You can check in out here - MikeInTheBox.podOmatic.com, email Questions or comments for his first show here MikeInTheBox@podOmatic.com and leave audio comments and questions by calling 1-206-337-1768.

Go there, email, call in, ask questions, tell your friends about it, and scream it from the mountain tops and let’s make Mike “Internet Famous”.

So, I have been in the web business for about 8 years now. During this time, I truly felt that Microsoft technologies had value beyond their detractions.

Despite the fact that server space is more expensive, support is harder to find, qualified .net developers are few and far between, and all of the other Microsoft is evil type reasons, I have fought for and stuck with Microsoft. Currently, all of my sites are on Microsoft servers and most of them use asp or .net.

I have always been close to the fence on the Microsoft issue but nothing has sent me over… until now.

When I heard about Community Server almost 2 years ago, was was pretty excited about it. An out of the box web community that was easy to customize and deploy in rapid fashion. It had all the bells and whistles and was customisable to no end.

Well finally, I was able to get it deployed on a test server in the demo version and, wouldn’t ya know, not all of the features work when browsing with a Mac. (I recently switched to an Intel Mac. I love it.)

Now, I was so excited about this solution I had already purchased a license before setting up the demo server. I was that excited and committed to .net as an environment that it not working was never an option.

I should have known. Of course a Microsoft product is going to have little bugs with safari, but also with Firefox!?! Give me a friggin break. I was completely unable to use some of the page authoring tools from either browser in my Mac.

Well, so much for using that platform. I contacted Tellgent about my situation. That I purchased before I demoed the product and that I am unable to use the software from my Mac due to issues with the application, not with my Mac.

I still have a couple of lines out to get this resolved but so far I’m being denied a refund due to corporate policy. This, despite the fact that I am actually unable to use their product.

Will update soon.

 UPDATE ( later the same day ):

I spoke with the head of customer service at Telligent and once I explained my situation he agreed to issue me a full refund. It’s nice to know that while the corporate procedures over at Telligent are poor, there are still some people there who aren’t. At the end of the day they did the right thing so I’m not to terribly upset over the ordeal.