Needle from Space (Taken with Instagram at Space Needle)

A Valentine’s Day info graphic courtesy of the good folks at Mashable.

Taken with instagram
Finally got around to messing with Instagram. I see why people like this app. So much you can do. Just playin around with a pic from last Christmas. Would actually look vintage if there wasn’t part of an LCD TV in the left hand side of the pic!

First day today at a new gig.  Didn’t even have time to think about it since I accepted the job yesterday (and for the record I’m NOT complaining about it).  My mind is fried.  Took in a lot of information today, but excited to be handling social media for a team at Microsoft.  

I think it’s going to be a great opportunity for growth and obviously great experience to put on my resume.  I realize it’s a huge company and I am only one person, but I hope to make it a little better than it was when I started.  By that, I mean I hope I can generate great ideas to make our team more effective and hopefully the division we represent.  It always irritates me when I hear people that live around here bash on Microsoft.  You don’t have to like their products, but they are an essential piece to the local economy.  (Almost) everybody that lives around here should want to see them succeed since they support so many different industries.  Just a random thought.  I’m tired.  But excited to finally be back in the work force (getting paid).  I hope this is the start of big things to come.

One of my favorite parts of social media is location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  I’m somewhat of an extreme case, and currently use four of them.  I do this because I’m excited to watch their evolution and the different ways these companies try to invent specials to benefit the consumer.

One of Foursquare’s claims to fame is badges that you can earn.  They get verycreative, and have badges such as “Player Please” and the “Crunked” badge.  I learned today at 4sqindy.east44.com that Foursquare has unveiled Super Bowl Sunday badges that users can earn.  All you have to do is check in to a place and “shout” which team you are rooting for.  Once you do this, you will earn that teams badge.  The cool part for the consumer though (aside from the cool badge of course) is that the badgeswill come with codes for 20 percent off at  NFLShop.com.  Pretty sizable discount for not a lot of effort!

Who will you be rooting for today?  Do you use location based services, and if so, which ones?  I’m curious to know.

Enjoy the game!

Thursay, February 3, 2011.  My first virtual date.  What constitutes a virtual date?  Well let me explain…

Where do I start actually?  Maybe the beginning.  I use Twitter a lot.  I think its great.  I recognize the business power, but it is also great for meeting new people.

About a month ago, I struck up a conversation with a girl who is interested in moving here to pursue a career in public relations.  She’s a social media enthusiast like me.  It was a nice conversation, but I didn’t expect much more to come from it.  To my surprise, we found each other commenting back and forth to various posts and continued to talk.  One day she mentioned that she was still listening to Christmas Music in January and would only stop if 

she got new music suggestions from people.  Being a music aficionado, I jumped all over this.  After approximately 100 song suggestions later, we were facebook friends.  Yes, I know, WOW!

I found myself really enjoying the conversations we were having.  I learned she was planning on coming out to Seattle the following week to do some interviewing, and amazingly enough, everybody she planned to meet up with over here (which happened to be a LOT of people) had been organized through twitter.  I asked her if I could be her tour guide for an evening, and to my pleasant surprise, I got a yes.  

Fast forward a week and many more conversations.  After learning what her favorite movie was, I decided to watch it since I had not seen it.  I told her I was going to watch it that the evening of the 3rd, and she suggested we watch it together, but from each other’s homes since she was back in Minnesota.  At approximately 8:30 my time and 10:30 hers, we both started the movie Serendipity at the same time, commencing our first virtual date.  Being social media enthusiasts, we both had our laptops opened up and talked about the movie on facebook chat while we watched.

Social media cannot and will not ever take the place of person to person interaction, but given our current situation, we used it to our advantage and had a great date.  I look forward to many more of them and hopefully some traditional dates when she moves to Seattle and becomes a PR rock star :)

I’m a huge UW Husky fan. It’s my Alma Mater and a source of great pride for me. Over the last couple of years, I’ve enjoyed watching the football take steps to restore it’s prominence which has been awesome. Even better though, has been watching the dominant basketball team that Lorenzo Romar has put together season after season. Husky Basketball is one of the most exciting things to watch in my personal opinion. Last year they went to the Sweet 16 and this year they look like they could go further.

Those projections became questionable this past weekend when some accusations were made. I won’t get into the details, but you can read more about the developing story on the Seattle Times website.

First off, I want to make it clear that IF the person being accused is in fact guilty of the act being alleged, I hope he gets the book thrown at him. I have no tolerance for such crimes. The alarming thing, though, is how the rumors regarding this story have flown around on social media channels.

I actually learned of the issue on my twitter feed Monday evening.  It started to create quite a buzz during the BCS football championship game.  There were links flying around leading to the KIRO Website, a local news affiliate, that contained a copy of the police report that was filed the night of the incident.  The worrisome part was when people started throwing names around.  People were tossing names around, saying they can’t believe that so and so could do something so stupid, and how this person ruined their career and life.  There were even reports on twitter that the person in speculation was kicked off the team for the season.  All of this, and the Police hadn’t made an arrest or filed charges against anyone.  In fact, as I write this early Wednesday morning, there has still been no arrest made and all players have been cleared to travel to California later this week.

It seems at times social media enables people to oh so easily fuel the fire of speculation when they are in question of wrongdoing.  A person’s name has been cast into the public forum and they haven’t even been declared a suspect.  Again, if this person is guilty of crimes, they should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.  It gets a little scary though when people start tossing names around for people who haven’t been named suspects.  Reputations and lives can be ruined from speculation like this.

Would you want your name tossed around twitter for a crime you didn’t do?

This whole mess with the UW Basketball team has just made me realize once again that we need to be careful what we put out there, because once it’s out, you can’t take it back.