Adam-Jackson

I am completely slammed with work after my 6 day vacation. I did want to post one thing about the Proposition 8 decision yesterday. For those not familiar, Proposition 8 was a law that would make gay marriage illegal on a state level in California. Yesterday, the supreme court voted on this law after a storm of controversy regarding this law being a civil rights issue and beyond the simple law of same sex couples having the ability to marriage.

I’m not going to post how I voted but I did want to share something that puts into perspective the argument that “proposition 8 protects the sanctity of marriage.” Here is a quote from a “Yes on Prop 8″ site.

The Bible, America’s fundamental basis for morality, speaks out clearly on homosexuality and on the importance of the sanctity of marriage in both the Old and New Testaments. In Romans 1, Paul writes about sinful desires that men were given over to, including homosexuality.

I’d like to share heterosexual marriage & divorce statistics (possibly a little outdated)

In 1997, there were a total of 1,163,000 divorces granted in the United States. That’s 4.3 per one thousand of the population. There are currently 19,400,000 divorced adults (1998). The median age at divorce is 35.6 for Males and 33.2 for females. The median duration of a marriage is 7.2 years. There are an estimated 1,075,000 children involved in divorce or 16.8 children per one thousand under the age of eighteen who are involved in their parents’ divorce.

Here’s an analogy for you:

1. Raise your hand if you voted for Proposition 8 in California to “preserve the sanctity of marriage”
2. Put your hand down if you have done any of the following

• Had sex before marriage.
• Stolen anything from anyone.
• Ever said “God Damn” out loud.
• Committed Adultery
• Gotten Divorced
• Broken any of the 10 Commandments

Anyone still have their hand up? The two of you in the back that still have your hand up, you can rightfully tell me that your vote was to preserve the sanctity of marriage. The rest of you are hypocrites and your vote was only out of hate, misunderstanding, ignorance or to impose your religious views onto a group of people who are just a little bit different than you.

Every day I realize more and more that Separation of Church and State is basically bullshit.

Added this video which reinforced my point:

I’m sure you’ve seen my constant coverage of the upcoming road trip and at this point you’re just ready for it to be over but it’s my responsibility to ensure everyone gets to be a part of this exciting road trip down the west coast and finally visiting Las Vegas & Lake Tahoe to form a nice solid square (photo of our map).

First of all, you won’t see any coverage of our trip on this blog because this blog is for me to discuss things I’m interested in and share my talks and social media thoughts. A road trip is going to be way too much content for this blog so all of the coverage will be on our travel blog, Adam and Laura Go West and it has its own category. There’s an aggregate page that makes it easy to find all of our content that I’ve created and it’s called “Road Trip 2009″.

What kind of coverage am I going to be doing?
Twitter (#adamroadtrip Hashtag)

• Zannel
• TwitPic
• TweetMic
• FriendFeed
• BrightKite
• FourSquare
• 12Seconds
• Justin.TV
• Flickr

There are more coverage links but just follow these pages and you’ll be fine:

• The blog
• hashtag
• Road trip 2009
• FriendFeed

UPDATED: I have created a custom FriendFeed room called “RoadTrip 2009″ that aggregates all of the tweets mentioning my #adamroadtrip hashtag plus services I’m strictly using on the trip. This is a great way to follow along in one location without the usual Adam Jackson Twitter Posts. You can subscribe HERE or follow it HERE.

I have been extremely fortunate to be invited time and again to conferences, meet ups and other groups as a speaker or panelist. It’s occurred to me that I really enjoy it so I’m committing to growing that and doing more speaking engagements very soon. Anyone can write a blog post or record a podcast. Of course, there are some guys that are great at it and others that really suck and I fall somewhere in between but I’ve been told over and over that I do a pretty good job on stage speaking to people and it’s something that I hope to continue for a long time.

With that said, there are some people who haven’t seen me speak and don’t really care to so I’ll be bringing the speaking to you directly through videos. I don’t know how often or how good these will be but I do know that I really enjoy speaking and someone out there is going to enjoy watching. Stay tuned because next week, I’ll post the first one and as you can see, there’s now a “videos” category on this blog.

You can view some of my previous videos here on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe. The videos I’m going to be posting for this blog will be hosted on Viddler and you can subscribe to my Viddler stream right here.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled, “Basics of Email Organization” and I promised to post more soon but I never did. Yeah, I’m a bad person but I doubt thousands of people are waiting around for my next post in anticipation for all of the joy & productivity my second post will bring. I did want to discuss something called Inbox Zero. That term was either invented or at least made popular by none other than Merlin Mann. I’ve actually embedded the rather lengthy video below where Merlin explains Inbox Zero to Googlers.

It’s a great video and worth watching but if you’re pressed for time, I’ll simply explain that it’s a level of organization that helps you achieve an inbox free of unread items. Of course, this doesn’t mean the 43 other folders you have don’t have things in them but you know where everything is and the things that must be answered aren’t being ignored. When I send a tweet out that says, “Inbox Zero” I actually have achieved that to the point where even my spam folder has zero unread messages. How in the hell do I do this? That’s a good question and I’m going to tell you how in one paragraph…..

———————–

For starters, don’t use Gmail and invest some time in properly setting up Outlook, Entourage, Eudora or whatever Mail client works for you. Add folders, master rules & actions and then become efficient. Answer email once per hour, learn how to type faster and add contacts to your system’s address book so addresses auto complete with ease. Purge every single piece of BACN and newsletter you receive. Unsubscribe to the point where you don’t even know when you get a new message on Facebook or what movie is coming from Netflix in 2 days. Finally, don’t ignore a single email and finish every day with every single email marked as read. Don’t file for “bankruptcy” and mark it all as read but continue tweaking your system until you can do that. Master tasks either within Outlook or via a shareware app and don’t flag emails that have appointment details, make calendar appointments and invite people that are attending. Setup a few documents with answers to questions you get often. If you get the same question more than once, then setup a draft email with a canned response. It saves hours a week. Finally, be diligent, responsible and happy because body language can’t be described over email and your words need to convey your true feelings. If you suck at this, a lot of people are going to think you’re angry all of the time.

i did all of this in one paragraph. At some point in the future, I’ll elaborate but for the time being, learn it yourself and simply use my recommendations to find the best way that works for you.

Last week, while I was at SDForum [PIC], a very friendly broadcaster named Alison approached me and asked if I wanted to do an audio interview for her web based audio cast. I’m going to call it a “podcast” since that’s the most common term for these shows nowadays. Alison’s show called, “Fresh Dialogues” is a short podcast that features leaders and innovators in Silicon Valley with a strong emphasis on green or clean tech companies / products. Until speaking with her, I hadn’t put much thought into my green contributions to the world but our 10 minute chat was fun and had me answering questions that I was not usually asked which is a breath of “fresh” air.

I’m so accustomed to the standard questions regarding my career, story, recent projects and what I do but not about how my actions affect the world. it’s something I think about daily but never say out loud so I was able to reaffirm my beliefs about being green and leaving a small carbon footprint.

Alison posted part 1 of our interview and promises to post part 2 very soon (which I’ll add below once it’s available). I really enjoy listening to her program and think she has real potential at starting a very positive trend of highlighting the positive contributions people & companies are making toward our environment.

Adam Jackson is social media expert and coauthor of the upcoming style guide for Twitter fans – “140 Characters, A Style Guide For The Short Form” which was recently reviewed in the New York Times

I met him at the energetic SDForum Teens Plugged In Conference at Hewlett Packard on May 13, 2009 and we found a quiet corner to talk about: How to become a green influencer

This is the second in our weekly series: Fresh Green Minute

Look out for the another Fresh Green Minute with Adam, when he discusses how Twitter is going green and how employees use software like Skype to be green.

The interview was recorded on May 13,2009

You can download the MP3 right here or stream the file on FreshDialogues.com.

Below, is a trailer on a new independent film called, “Food, Inc.” and I was lucky enough to be invited to a screening of this movie last night.

The movie was based on the commercialization of our food and focused on the American food supply chain without much mention of the situation in other countries. It covered topics as parts explaining seeds, meat, produce, fast food, disease and other issues all centered around how we get our food today. To be honest, it wasn’t anything that I wasn’t already aware of and I won’t be adding any spoilers but I had some thoughts after seeing this movie that I wanted to discuss.

First of all, I spent a large part of my childhood years on a farm in central Florida (just south of Georgia). Our family has a dairy farm with over 2,000 cows. We also had a dozen horses, 10-50 bulls, some pigs and even a goat. I grew up riding horses and feeding cows but there was another aspect of this that really shaped my life and how I consume food. I was there for every step of the food process. For a while, we had some beef cows and to this day I honestly don’t know the difference between dairy and beef cows aside from one is black & white and the other is brown. I was there when a baby calf was pulled using a pulley system from its mother’s uterus. The pulley system was used because streroids made the babies too large for most births.

I was there when the small cattle was left in cages and you’d come by with a bottle to feed them milk and clean them up and I was there when the baby was either sold or introduced in with the rest of the herd. One day, that female cow would be artificially inseminated with cow sperm that was frozen in liquid nitrogen. The process involved this plastic glove that covered your whole arm, putting that arm inside of the cow and then placing the seminal fluid inside the cow. Once the baby was born, that cow would give milk for 18 months (I think) and then that cow was putting into a “dry pasture” where it waited a few months before being impregnated again. It was a cycle that went on for years until that cow was killed or died naturally and yes there was “cow graveyard” that you could smell for miles.

I was there when we harvested our own corn, fed it to the cows and sometimes we’d actually buy cows from Pennsylvania that would arrive by truck and you had to use a “hot shot” which is an electric pole to get the cows where you want them to go. When cows got sick, I helped the vet and when cows died, I used the front end loader to pick them up and move the cow to the graveyard. It was fun, interesting and exciting but I also saw the demands of the industry on my family and how more output forced us to grow and expand until the dairy was a 24 hour operation with milking going on 24/7 (even holidays) and “legal” immigrant workers from Mexico did most of the work, which by the way is when I fell in love with Mexican food. There’s nothing better than lamb meat cooked in a 10 foot deep pit on top of a home made corn tortilla with habanero peppers and rice.

Across from our farm was 8 chicken houses all owned by Tyson chicken and the stench you’ll never forget. That farmer expressed to my grandfather just how much the industry was changing and how demanding Tyson was for more volume, larger chickens and more of them and he profits actually decreased as chickens had more health problems from the steroids and horrible living conditions.

I know this post is completely out of the ordinary from my normal talk of social media but I really value that time I spent as a kid on the farm. It was fun, exciting and real and I remember seeing cows being butchered (the old fashion way) when I eat a hamburger but what I wasn’t expecting in this movie is how it is done now. Thirteen plants in the US produce 90% of the hamburger meat we consume. Thousands of cows are shipped in and forced into the pit (even if they can’t walk from disease) and all of the meat is ground up and pressed in plastic for consumption. This system was invented simply out of demand. Americans want more meat and they don’t want to pay for it and that’s how we get to the situation today.

The same goes for seeds. A company makes a pesticide that kills insects and bacteria but it also makes the soybeans fatal so they engineer a soybean that isn’t affected by the pesticide so now you have to buy the pesticide and the seed from the same company. What wasn’t surprising but still amazing was that those in Washington who make the laws to protect us from corporations are the same people advising the bad guys. The guy that basically runs the FDA was once working for the largest meat company in America. it’s amazing and a bit scary.

The solution? The movie lays it out in plain sight.

Following these steps will make you healthier and enrich your life and you don’t have to see the movie to understand and embrace these very simple steps.

I’ve always considered myself a person who is very adventurous but lately, I’ve been sitting still (geographically speaking) and have only explored the web and business. It’s time for a vacation and recently the constant workload has gotten me a little down and burned out. Every year since I was 15, I would spend Spring Break in the woods camping and away from all technology (even a cell phone) and this has been the longest I’ve gone without that escape and I desperately need it. In April, a PR firm contacted me about test driving a Ford vehicle and they asked what kind of car I would prefer and I specifically said, “the most cutting edge and technologically advanced car you have.” They responded and it blew me away! Laura and I are going to embark on an adventure worthy of The Internet.

Ford Motor Company came back and offered a few days with a 2010 Lincoln MKS. The MKS is a full-size luxury sedan from Lincoln (A Division of Ford Motor Company). I’m not a car guy but during my research on this model, I became VERY EXCITED to have the chance to drive this vehicle extensively and explore all of the cutting edge features. I encourage you to read about the Lincoln MKS on the links below.

• Lincoln.com MKS Homepage
• Wikipedia.org Lincoln MKS
• Jalopnik discusses Ford’s new EcoBoost System in the MKS

Here are the most notable features that I’m extremely excited about:

• EcoBoost which delivers the power of a V8 engine with the advantages of V6 fuel economy (read more)
• Active Park Assist which is a system that allows the car to self-park itself with the push of a button (read more)
• SYNC which is Microsoft’s system in many of this year’s Ford vehicles. It’s a futuristic control center for your MP3 Player with maps, directory assistant, SIRIUS and more. (read more)
• Collision Warning is a system that notifies you when you’re nearing a front end collision with a car in front of you. If you don’t respond, MKS hits the brakes for you to avoid collision (read more)

Additional Features that make this car an amazingly cool vehicle to drive:

• Virtual Key less keypad with buttons that only appear when touched in a certain place on the car
• Capless fuel filter so you never forget to screw the gas cap back on the car
• 6-Speaker THX II 600 Watt Sound System
• Dual Zone Climate Control & 12 way heated seats
• Automatic rain detecting wipers
• Automatic rear sun shield
• and about 40 other features that blow me away!

Where are we going to go? Great question. I created this map which is a general idea of where we’ll be going but half of the stops on our trip are optional and I have a feeling we’ll scrap a few of these in favor of being able to enjoy ourselves. Below is a map of my “like to do” map but all of this is unconfirmed.

This sounds like fun but how am I going to put some Adam Jackson flare on it? Well, everyone is being taken along for the ride! I’m going to cover the entire trip over at Adam and Laura Go West in the form of CONSTANT BLOG UPDATES and I’ve also created a special page that will let you follow every move that I make. if you prefer the old fashion way of links to each point of interest, here it is.

• AdamAndLauraGoWest.com (The Primary Aggregate for all of our adventures)
• Zannel.com/AdamJackson (Photos & Updates)
• Twitter.com/AdamJackson
• Twitter.com/LauraW
• Flickr.com/Photos/AdamJackson (Best of the best photos)
• TwitPic.com/Photos/AdamJackson (Random Photos)
• Justin.TV/AdamJacksonLive (Live Streaming from OUR CAR)
• YouTube.com/AdamJackson1984 (Daily Videos)
• FriendFeed.com/AdamJackson (Aggregation of every single update)
• 12Seconds.TV (Posting photo / audio updates)
• TweetMic.com (Allows me to post auto updates to Twitter view an easy to use 99 cent iPhone app)

That’s right, every day, we’ll have fantastic photos from our adventures posted instantly and we’ll be editing and posting the good photos on Flickr too. There will be instant streaming video using Justin.TV and higher quality videos posted to YouTube. Our Tweets, Zannels and TwitPics will keep a constant stream of info flowing and you can go to our blog to see blog posts around what we did that day.

Here is a taste of a few things we’ll be doing:

• Yosemite National Park
• Santa Cruz for Surfing
• Santa Monica for beach side dining
• Venice Beach for a BBQ with my So-Cal Friends
• Disneyland in Anaheim
• Hollywood for celebrity sightseeing
• Newport Beach & Laguna Beach because we’re fans of “The OC Show”
• San Diego cause I hear the zoo is AMAZING!
• Las Vegas for Cirque, Blue Man Group, Gambling, Sightseeing
• Also, Tiesto is playing at The Bellagio and he rarely comes to The US
• Skiing in Lake Tahoe
• Wine Tasting in Napa Valley
• Back to San Francisco

You’re probably asking yourself, “how in the hell are Adam and Laura going to do all of this in a few days? Well, that’s why 50% of this is optional and we’re not planning ANYTHING! I did book hotel rooms in Vegas but that’s it. When are we doing this? GOOD QUESTION!

Laura and I pickup the Lincoln MKS on Friday, May 22nd at 9AM. Actually, Ford is dropping it off at my apartment which is even cooler! We leave town ASAP and we don’t come back to town until Wednesday the 27th. Here’s my proposed schedule:

• 22nd: Drive through Yosemite OR Santa Cruz and take the scenic drive to Santa Monica
• 23rd: Disneyland, Hollywood and BBQ with Friends
• 23rd: (evening) Clubbing in downtown LA
• 24th: Newport Beach, San Diego Zoo, Laguna Beach
• 24th: (evening) Arrive in Las Vegas and check into New York, NY Hotel and see shows + gamble
• 25th: Check out of hotel and drive to the Hoover Damn. Rent an UZI and an AK-47 at The Gun Store
• 25th: (evening) Check into The Bellagio Hotel, see more shows, gamble more.
• 26th: Checkout of hotel and drive to Lake Tahoe and do some fun things in Reno Area
• 27th: Ski, snowboard and hang out on the mountains, Drive to Napa afterward for wine tasting.
• 27th: (evening) Return the car back to Ford.

My estimated mileage for these days: 2,000 Miles if we do all 80% of all of these activities.

I’d like to also add that I never take vacations so when I do take off I have to make it something that I can later add to my resume and I can’t just sit still. Laura is the same way so trust me when I say we’ll stay very busy. A perfect example of this is:

when Laura and I wanted to go to Six Flags in Atlanta, Georgia. We wanted to go on a Sunday so I got out of work Saturday night and we drove 7 hours from our Jacksonville apartment to Atlanta and arrived right before the park opened. We stayed until the park closed and drove 7 hours back home, arriving in Jacksonville at 4AM Monday morning. I had to be at work at 8AM. That’s just how Laura and I take vacations and it’s always worked well for us!

So, this is my plan and Ford is in love with this marketing idea. Basically, I take their most technologically equipped car out in the wild for a few days, travel across the west coast on their dime but in return I produce hours and hours of marketing not because I have to but because I REALLY WANT TO and I love what I do. I’m lucky to have been asked to do this and can’t wait to see what this car can do!

If you have any additional recommendations for our trip just paste them below in the comments and in the meantime, bookmark our blog for updates.

On May 1st, I announced that I was invited to speak at this month’s SDForum and I was pretty excited about it. It’s not TED or Macworld but I am lucky that anyone wants to hear what I have to say and of course I didn’t turn down the opportunity.

First of all, the day conference was larger than I thought, very well organized and the staff was professional, friendly and they knew exactly what was going on so I really enjoyed being involved. The food & coffee was fantastic and the session before mine was excellent as well. I didn’t stay all day but I think I’ll be going to more SDForums when if my schedule allows for it.

The panel was great and I was in between two individuals who really knew their stuff! I always have a problem telling people what I do for work. I try to be broad and then it just sounds confusing but if I tell people what I do on a basic level, people scratch their heads and ask, “why is this guy on a panel?” Despite always having a disappointing opening line, I always find myself making up for it with answers to questions that I myself stop and go, “damn Adam; that was a good answer.”

I had a Flip Ultra Camera with me which only records standard video and the audio wasn’t perfect but I like putting something up to prove that I was there (like this clip from SMC 4/09) and there might be a couple of quotable items in there if anyone wants to sit through it. Furthermore, the panel was an hour long but I just edited it down to just me talking. No I didn’t do it to be a complete jerk face. I did this because I can’t cut up a video into 6 parts, wait for it to upload and then embed all 6 clips.

I put the two parts below. thanks and enjoy!

I wanted to quickly post this and tease you with a few things that are coming up.

1. Yoono is coming out with a brand new version of their sidebar and I’ll be posting the first review right here. I can’t wait to share it with you. Yoono 6 will be a radical change and upgrade that will make it the best social add-on for your web browser and you’re going to love it!
2. I’m going to formally announce “140 Lessons” which is a new project I’m working on that is exciting, cool, fun and powerful.
3. I have a few partners on an upcoming road trip for Laura and I. We’re doing nearly 7 days on the road and it’s going to be a fun & exciting trip that will take over this blog for an entire week with updates. I’ll announce this on Friday.
4. My one year anniversary of living in San Francisco is coming up on May 31st. Locals call this, “San Franniversary” and I’m devoting an entire week of blog entries following this celebration that will showcase what I’ve learned after living here for one year. It’s a series of posts dedicated to helping people just like me, move across country and dive head first into the startup and web economy.

I can’t wait to post all of this but I’ve been doing 4 hours or more of meetings every day for the past 3 weeks and I’m working on a ton of cool things that I think all of you  will enjoy. Thanks for reading and for your support.

Today, I found a post written by John Siracusa called “Hypercritical”. The two page piece explains how design and art relate to critics and how the two are so closely related. I’ve had to be my own critic for years as I started my own blog ten years ago and how I’ve started companies and failed numerous times but the problem with acting as your own critic is  you’re never hard enough on yourself and this is why social media has helped me. I’m able to bounce ideas off a group of thousands of people and receive instant feedback. My only complaint with using the web for feedback is the cynical anonymous trolls generally give their opinion in the form of hurtful and hateful feedback instead of honest feedback. I’d like to share a section from John’s post.

“…criticism, for lack of a better word, is good. Criticism is right. Criticism works. Criticism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…

Okay, let me try that again. Actually, I’m on the same page as Gordon Gekko in one important respect. Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with.

This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent. Is a preternatural ability to find fault enough on its own to make something great? Probably not, but it can help amplify mundane competencies and produce results well beyond what you could have achieved with your creative skills alone.

No, we can’t all be Steve Jobs, but there’s room in life for both the grand and the prosaic. Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better (“I am the Steve Jobs of this sandwich!”), to find something wrong with what you’re doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it. If this is not your natural proclivity, you may have to work at it a bit. I think you’ll be pleased with the results…but not completely, I hope.”

John nails it on the head by summing up exactly how criticism helps to breed and influence the creatives and I admit that my reception to feedback has been slim. My goal with creating a barrier around my thoughts and opinions is to discourage those that are only in it to leave negative feedback and it’s worked so far but now the only comments and feedback I’m getting are from those who praise my ideas and thoughts. This leaves me in an awkward situation as I want to hear your honest thoughts on my projects and ideas but I’m stuck. A friend of mine said to me, “you just have a bunch of web 2.0 fanboys who are kissing your ass all of the time.” I don’t feel it’s that bad but I starve for additional feedback that’s constructive even when it hurts.

What’s the missing formula? Should I take down the barriers and let the trolls in or keep barriers up and surround myself with hyper-attentive fanboys? For now, I’m only openly admitting that I need to be harder on myself and I need to take feedback better. I get defensive sometimes but its the critics who help me refine and perfect my art so I owe it to everyone to listen and apply their feedback.

The full post from John is two pages but is a great read. You can find it on Ars Technica.