Check out my Dopplr listings for the future (not much planned right now).

Republic/Springfield, MO*
Boston, MA*
Des Moines, IA*
Sacramento, CA
San Francisco, CA
East Hampton, NY
New London, CT
Wilmington, DE
Philadelphia, PA
Easton, PA
Providence, RI
Minneapolis, MN
White Plains, NY
Austin, MN
Osage, IA

Previous Lists:
[2008]

Dallas, TX
Las Vegas, NV
St. Louis, MO*
Columbia, MO*
Republic, MO*
Springfield, MO
Long Beach, CA
New York, NY*
Boston, MA*
Rochester, MN
Austin, MN
Chicago, IL
Atlanta, GA
Stamford, CT

The asterisk denotes cities I visited more than once and the bold cities are ones I have lived in at some point this year.

Check out my Dopplr listings for the future (not much planned right now).

In the meantime, I’m starting to get back into regular posting on my design blog: “Hey, I just found this…” and check out my New York Photoblog at Andrew in the City. It is a work in progress from a design and content standpoint, but like I said, I’ve been a bit busy.

If you are around NYC, lets get together… drop me a line.

I have had an awesome stint here at Outrider with some great people forging social media mindsets in the midst of an agency-controlled industry that is just starting to accept the idea of social media as an important aspect of the future of online engagement.  Before joining the team here I had never been exposed to the world of search marketing and SEO but I come away now with a few more tools in my belt.  Building a team from scratch is never easy and the importance and challenges of internal evangelism coupled with external justification of this ‘newfangled social stuff’ has presented the social team at Outrider with a few impressive hurdles.  I think we made progress on a great many fronts and I have great confidence the team here will do nothing but grow as a contender in the agency landscape.  I leave a great team of people, not just on the social side of the fence but throughout the company as a whole.

That being said, I leave one trove of excellence for another.  The great people over at Ripple6 have created an amazing social media platform that enables content management, social marketing, user engagement and insightful analytics in one integrated system.  This new position will allow me to evolve my role in the social media space to be more client-centric, working with clients to develop effective and comprehensive strategies to fit their needs while also providing the bridge between those needs and our development teams at Ripple6.  Essentially I get to be the translation service between ‘code-speak’ and ‘business-lingo’ with a little bit of statistics and brainstorming mixed in.  I feel it will be a great hybrid position that will allow me to integrate my eclectic background of experience and learn quite a bit along the way.

Not only does it feel like a great fit, but I will also be relocating to New York, which is promising to be quite the life change for me, considering I’ve spent my entire life in states on the Mississippi River.  Despite my recent frantic preparation and planning for this move, I am actually very excited about the prospect of being more central to the social media and cultural worlds.  The most distinct way moving has affected me so far is when I realized that I might actually be able to attend some of these events I keep coming across in my RSS reader… A Mashable event next month with Gary Vaynerchuck and the Social Times 1 Year Anniversary in Washington DC in December are the first two social events I realized I can actually attend now that I will be ‘in the neighborhood’.  And all the NYC art and gallery walks I keep seeing plugged on swissmiss (see the blogroll)… I can now check my calendar rather than whimsically say ‘That would be cool…”

So, I’m incredibly excited to move to Manhattan and join the Ripple6 team next week, though a little bit of me will always want the openness of a cornfield and the shade of a tree-lined street that can only be found in the Midwest…but I think its time to venture to the Coast for a few years.  See you in the city…
-ac

Anyhow, with this new tool at my disposal, I’ve decided that as a way to force myself into posting more often here on my site, I will be doing a weekly (possible bi-weekly) post of my week told via photos from my iPhone.  So that being said, here we go. (I haven’t decided yet whether to offer captions/explanations for these photos…we’ll see how it goes)

UPDATE: In order to avoid confusion, I ill say right now that the last photo is NOT any kind of smoking apparatus.

I saw the above maintenance page for StumbleUpon which says "We’ll be right back! In the mean time why don’t you go outside and play for awhile" just a moment ago and thought "Ha, that is kind of funny…playing outside rather than on the internet!" And then I realized that earlier today I had posted a short list of the sites I am addicted to on the internet…and it occurred to me that StumbleUpon is talking to me: the guy who lives in front of the computer.

Well Stumble, thank you for your concern, perhaps I will go get some exercise now. In the meantime, get your site back up so I can go find some more awesome stuff on the internet.

1. Gmail – Seriously, who doesn’t have Gmail open in a tab all day long?
2. Facebook – Friend stalking made easy.
3. Twitter – When it is working, it is either always popping up from a desktop app or I am constantly hitting F5
4. Tumblr – Not only to I love quickly posting stuff I come across, but being able to follow other people’s tumblrs with one click is amazing.
5. Google Reader – This addiction is getting harder and harder to manage with 200+ feeds on my primary account, a separate account for design blogs and another for client monitoring.
6. StumbleUpon – Install the StumbleUpon toolbar, click the ‘Stumble!’ button…a few dozen times. Try doing it just once. I dare you. It is a feat that has yet to be done by a human being.
7. del.icio.us – The stream of popular sites on the homepage is just nerdy enough to suite me perfectly.
8. Hulu – I was first very critical of this site, but then I discovered Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Arrested Development… and now I watch at least an hour of Hulu video content every night before bed.
9. Google Maps – This does not seem like a site that is very addicting but according to my firefox monitors, it is my 6th most visited site…I find myself using it at least a half dozen times a day.
10. I don’t want to add a non-addicted site just to round out the list because changing data to fit nicely into a pre-packaged envelope never works out well for anyone.

A couple weeks ago, I came across this logo created as a protest logo for the suppression of Tibet and posted it on my Tumblr . But I think the precipitating events lead its importance to the day so I am reposting it here.

This is the original message from the co-artist M.Parisi :

I f you feel as I do, art can be a powerful tool for raising social awareness. My friend Rebecca and myself collaborated to make this graphic to be used to remind people of the struggle in Tibet. Please distribute it freely, and hopefully we will see many other like it as we approach the dishonorable 2008 Olympics.

from Protest Beijing 2008

Events in the course of human history require the unabashed support of a global community. Oppression in Tibet , genocide in Darfur , the Dalits in India and even the homeless here in the US . All things with global implications, undeniable moral positions and a voiceless caste subjected to tyrannical, murderous and unforgiving oppression. What are you doing right now? Spread the word.