When I was twenty years old, I made up a couple of outgoing greetings for my answering machine based on an old TV show theme song and a showtune from Bye Bye Birdie. The TV show theme song was from I Love Lucy and the song from Bye Bye Birdie was “Talk to Me” which is originally sung from a telephone booth. Anyway, I created these outgoing greetings and I left them on my answering machine for a little while, and then I felt sort of silly about them and afraid of what people might think, so I took them off. But now here we are in the Age of YouTube, and it’s—gosh—almost twenty-five years later, and I figured, “Why not? Just for fun, share them with the world.” So, here are my silly outgoing greeting songs that I created in 1988. Hope you enjoy!

Talk to me. Don’t hang up. Please talk to me.
I don’t care what you say. Talk to me.
Leave your name and telephone—
Gratefully, when I come home,
I will listen very near.
Then I’ll call you, dear.
Talk to me. Leave a message. Talk to me!
And I’ll get back to you— talk to me.

This is Daniel, and I’m not home.
If I were, I’d pick up the phone.
Just leave your name and a message—
I’ll call you before you can rhyme “message.”
Keep it simple and not too long.
If you’d like, you can sing a song!
Just leave your name and number,
And then, you have yourself a wonderful day!
Ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-Ba-ba-bah Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bah!

Original music for “Talk to Me” written by Charles Strouse with lyrics by Lee Adams; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.
Original music for I Love Lucy theme song written by Eliot Daniel; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.

Sometimes I want to talk with people in person about how we talk with people on the Internet. I know I can get very “meta”– I mean, look at my website, where I sometimes blog about blogging—but I think it’s very important that we take some time to talk about how we’re talking. When I say “blogging” and “talking” I’m talking about any kind of media that you share with people on the Internet. Whatever you put out there, you are in effect “talking” to people. When you write comments, fave or “Like” something, rate something, etc., you’re talking to people. You produce and consume enough of these social media (photos, videos, stories, updates, links, comments, etc.), and you’re talking with people. But you’re not talking with them in real life, and you’re not even talking with them in real time. The communication is abstracted and asynchronous.

This evening, I went out with my husband Andy to a local brewery for something called #evfn, or East Valley Friday Night. As the description says, “Some folks calls it a tweetup. I calls it an #evfn. Remember the agenda: no agenda. Have fun. Meet people. Party on!” I’ve been to several of these, well, I calls ‘em Tweetups, and sometimes they can get pretty meta about social media. How do we share updates? Photos? Videos? Personal stuff? Work stuff? What kinds of relationships are made, bettered, or broken online? How do we bring those online relationships offline and vice versa? I love talking about that kind of stuff. In fact, no matter what I’m doing at the moment, I have an intense need to talk about it with others who are doing the same thing and are willing to talk it all out.

“Remember the agenda: no agenda.” I can accept that. I know that some of these people work in social media and Internet industries, so they might be tired of talking about their work. I understand that. People need loosely structured milieux where they can just relax, mingle, and–in the words of Auntie Mame–”Circulate, Patrick, circulate.” And sometimes, sometimes, to “circulate” is just what I want to do. But other times I want a rap group– a structured, moderated discussion. That’s what I wanted tonight.

I did get a bit of what I wanted. When I first got there, we sat around a table and talked about various things including employment, health care, spousal benefits, and how unfair it is that I have to pay a “Domestic Partnership Offset Tax” to keep Andy on my health care plan. We all talked for a while at that one table, and somehow the conversation got around to social media, though I don’t remember whether I steered it in that direction or not. People talked a bit about whether they feed their updates to Facebook from Twitter, whether they share personal updates on Facebook or keep it acceptable for business associates, whether to have a separate Twitter account for protected tweets, etc.

Then I brought up my dilemma about the photo I asked the waiter to take of us (shown above). I said, “Nowadays I could post every bit of media I create to so many channels that I sit there with something for a few minutes thinking, ‘should I post it to my Facebook personal profile, my Facebook Page, Flickr, Twitpic…??’” One person gave an answer in the form of, “This is what you do…” and I felt like it was a move to lay the question to rest. Then more people showed up and the conversation got dropped. I tried to pick it up again and the person who had answered before gave me a card and wrote on it “Read [with three underlines] convinceandconvert.com Jay Baer.” That was the end of the conversation. I felt shut down. I really can’t complain, though. I was probably “holding them hostage” on a topic they no longer wanted to talk about. I was probably the one who was out of order, trying to create an agenda when there was no agenda.

I get that people want the freedom to talk about whatever they want to talk about with whoever they want to talk about it with. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with is that I read and read and read but I don’t get a chance talk and talk and talk.

I need a forum for discussion– a structured, moderated, real life, real time conversation about social media. I need to listen to people’s personal experiences with social media and I need to talk about mine. I don’t want the conversation to be about how to “drive traffic” and “target markets” and “strengthen your brand.” I just want to sit around with people who create and share a lot of stuff on the Internet not because they want to make money but just because they want to share. The question for me is: how do we share things with other people. I don’t think that reading another article or attending a social media lecture or listening to a panel discussion is going to satisfy me. I want a rap group with an agenda. Anybody know of one?

[P.S. I spent two hours working on this post last night until my husband literally whined (it's our thing, we mimic our dogs) for me to come to bed at 11. I thought I clicked "Publish" but I actually clicked "Save Draft" which is just as well because I lay in bed worried about what I had written and whether it would hurt anyone's feelings or hurt my standing with the group. I just kept replaying the post over and over in my head while Adam Young's voice singing Alaska played over and over in my head. Tormented, I am. This morning, I woke up early and could not get back to sleep. Again with the blog post and song tormenting me. So I got up to look at this blog post and realized I hadn't published it. Great! Gives me more time to make it right. Now I'm sitting here on the sofa with my laptop over my legs and our dog Buxley swatting my arm with his paw to get my attention. And now it's an hour-and-a-half later and I think I might just be ready to publish this thing whether it's perfect or not and whether or not it ruffles any feathers.]

As I was saying, anybody know of a real life, real time rap group about social media? What ways do you find to have meaningful and satisfying conversations with people who are doing what you are doing and learning to do it well? Can you give me an example of how one of these conversations changed you and made your life easier?

I registered my own Facebook Page the other day and, after I got 25 fans, reserved the username danieljamesgreene (I had already secured danielgreene on June 12, 2009 for my personal profile). The reason I got a Facebook Page is that readers, students, viewers, clients, etc. wanted to Friend me on Facebook, but I only Friend family & friends on my personal profile. I felt bad denying my “customers” access to me on Facebook, yet I wanted to keep my profile a safe place for me to share personal things with the people closest to me.

I had resisted setting up a Facebook Page because I thought it might be considered “conceited” to set up my own “fan” page; however, I finally decided that there wasn’t anything wrong with creating a Page for my public life. After all, I am a “public figure” in the sense that I am a writer, performing artist, photographer, interpreter trainer, et cetera. I do create a lot of work for public consumption. My Facebook Page gives me a chance to be more accessible to people I don’t know well and feel comfortable with how much of my personal life I share with them.

Do you have a Facebook Page? Do you “Like” certain Facebook Pages? How has the Facebook Page helped the relationship between producer and consumer, performer and audience, writer and readership, etc.? How have Pages helped the relationships among fans? I am very interested in hearing about your experience with Facebook Pages as I embark on this new venture.

I would love to hear from people who have prepared for oral exams, board exams, etc. What did you do the day before the test to get yourself ready to excel?

Posted from WordPress for Android

My HTC Nexus One Car Dock broke only a few months after I got it. I searched the Internet about this, and found that I was not alone. One man suggested a way to handle it with care and I am now following his advice with my replacement dock. I am providing this video to give you a visual tutorial about how to baby your fragile car dock. Hope it works for you!

In case your car dock breaks, I recommend that you do what I did: call HTC Repair and tell them that your Nexus One Car Dock broke and you want them to send you a replacement under the one-year warranty. If they give you any trouble, tell them that you know of other people whose car docks broke and who received replacements. They should email you an RMA label. You will have to box up your broken car dock and drop it off at a FedEx with the provided shipping label. HTC Repair should receive it within a couple of days, process the replacement in a couple of days, and ship it back to you via FedEx in a couple of days; i.e., you “should” have a new one in your hands within a week.

What happened in my case is they dropped the ball on processing the replacement, and I didn’t call and bug them about it until three weeks after my tracking number said they received it. I recommend that you call them as soon as you see from your tracking number that they have received it and ask them to confirm receipt of your old one and provide a tracking number for delivery of your new one. Be the squeaky wheel, and good luck!

The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:

• It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
• It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
• Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
• I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.

Typekit Web Fonts

I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because:

• Frank Lloyd Wright is associated with the Valley of the Sun because of his Taliesin West architectural school and the Arizona Biltmore, the latter of which he did not design but did inspire. To me, Wright’s letter forms are emblematic of the southwest region I live in. (The letters that inspired the Eaglefeather font were from the Eagle Rock project in Los Angeles, California– still a part of the “southwest.”)
• The southwestern themed font ties in with my blog’s current title, “Just Singin’ & Signin’ in the Sun,” which itself is a takeoff on the lyric “Just singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” from the show Singin’ in the Rain. I’m singin’ and signin’ (American Sign Language interpreting) in the [Valley of the] Sun. Get it? I know. I’m so clever.
• This is a full-featured font with real italics, bold, and bold italics.The font’s swash S’s and distinct forms capture the viewer’s attention and have a certain “wow” factor. When you see a blog in a font you don’t have on your computer, you think, “how did he do that?” and the answer is Web fonts.

Typekit Revisited

If you remember when I wrote why I wasn’t using Typekit Web Fonts yet, you might wonder why I changed my mind. Well, it’s basically because I learned from Matt McInerney, the designer of the font I tried, that his font looked bad bolded and italicized because it was a regular-only font. I should know all about regular-only fonts and why they don’t look good bolded or italicized, but I experienced some temporary synaptic leakage.

Once I tried fonts that had a complement of regular, italic, bold, and bold italic variants, I was quite happy with the way they looked on my blog. And the problem with the CSS selectors was mostly solved by David W. Bole’s list of CSS selectors for the Twenty Ten theme. I’m now happy with the way this and my family blog look with Typekit fonts.

Related Posts from Daniel Greene

• Choosing the right font styles & variants
• Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
• The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)

content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

UPDATED:  July 4, 2010 I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn't simple or intuitive and since there really isn't any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You star … Read More

via United Stage

I am not writing this blog post as a paid advertiser of MacJournal, but I did write it in MacJournal and upload it to my blog through the MacJournal Share > Send to Blog function. Regardless of which software you use, I recommend that you find one that allows you to download your blog into a readable form that you can have on your computer and backup to a storage drive. You might even want to use a software that enables you to compose blog entries in the application so they are already on your hard drive before you publish them to your blog. Just another helpful hint from yours truly!

Happy blogging.

You may have heard the jazz standard “My Satin Doll” written by Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn. Well, I learned that song when I was in high school and I attended the Fullerton Jazz Festival music contest— singing contest. It was adjudicated, and we got to go up there are do our stuff and get some feedback from the adjudicators. Well, I remember when I learned that song it just struck me as a little odd, like why would you call her your satin doll, and why would she speak Latin?

Well, a few years went by, and I learned a little bit more about the Jazz Age, and Harlem, and the different people that hung out there, and some of the lingo. And it really struck me that maybe the song was originally written “My Latin Doll.” Meaning, like, my “Latina” doll. Because if you think about the lyrics, there’s all kinds of Spanish in there, like “careful amigo, you’re flippin’” and, uh… “doin’ my rhumbas with uno.” So there’s at least three “Latin”—Spanish—words in there. And think about it— who “speaks” Latin, anyway? I mean, maybe people read Latin, or they can write Latin (or sing or recite Latin), but Latin’s a dead language. Nobody really “speaks” Latin. And even if there are some academicians that meet at, like, some special conference once a year and maybe they speak a little Latin with each other? Eh, I’m not buyin’ it. I don’t see how that’s a sexy thing, that “I’m going out with this girl who speaks Latin.” Okay?

So, at the risk of questioning the lyrics of the great songwriters, I just want to sing it the way it makes sense to me. Think about it. I would love to hear your comments, and I would love it if anyone knew any historical facts about this song and if there were some way to know what the intention was originally. ‘Cause I’m wondering if there was a little political correctness going on where they had to change it from what it originally was.

Anyway, here’s the way it makes sense to me:

Cigarette holder
Which wigs me
Over her shoulder
She digs me
Out cattin’ that Latin doll

Baby shall we go
Out skippin’?
Careful amigo, you’re flippin’
Wears satin, that Latin doll

She’s nobody’s fool so I’m playing it cool as can be
I’ll give it a whirl but I ain’t for no girl catching me

Swticheroonie!

Telephone numbers
Well you know
Doing my rhumbas
With uno
And that’n my Latin doll
And that’n my Latin doll
Wears satin, my Latin doll

Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.

Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)

I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.

The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this:

[tweetmeme source="yourtwittername" only_single=false]

For example, my twitter name is danielgreene, so my shortcode for “_# of_ tweets / retweet” button would be

[tweetmeme source="danielgreene" only_single=false]

It’s really quite easy. Facebook “Like” buttons, on the other hand, are not so easy. There is no shortcode for Facebook links that I know of yet. There are a few ways to get that “Like” button on your WordPress.com blog posts, but these services, such as GetSocial Live, require you to individually enter blog post titles and URLs into a web form to get a different button for each blog post. Then these buttons send the visitor who clicks them to a different page where they have to click something else. Sorry, but no. Not easy and seamless enough for me. I will wait until WordPress comes up with a Facebook shortcode; until then, I’m happy with the TweetMeme shortcode for Twitter.

Do you have a favorite method of helping your visitors spread the word about your blog posts?