One of my favorite producers of late, Maya Jane Coles, is a rising start in the house music arena. She’s been tagged on a number of lists:

• ‘Producer of the Year 2011′ by DJ Mag
• ‘Best Breakthrough DJ 2011′ by Mixmag
• Debuted at No. 9 on the Resident Advisor ’2011 DJ Poll’
• ‘Best Newcomer 2011′ at the Ibiza DJ Awards 2011

via SoundCloud

Tony Zeoli

Wow, where do I begin?

I’m in Miami for my first week as Director of Product Development (Music Services) with Market America, a leading network marketing company based in Greensboro, NC with a global footprint in 7 territories, including the UK, Canada, and Australia. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, as I just accepted the offer on Tuesday and Wednesday I was on a plane to Miami!

My role is to drive product development of music applications and services for Conquer Entertainment, a social music platform developed by its CEO, Amanda Ridinger, and the passionate, talented, and creative team supporting the product to date.

Main Stage at MA World 2012

The Conquer Entertainment platform for artists is a DIY software-as-a-service mechanism to allow artists to maximize the distribution and marketing of the music to fans through social media, while leveraging Market America’s transformational power of the Shop.com’s network of 190,000 direct distributors worldwide. Shop.com associates will have the ability to create and market music they believe in directly to music fans in their networks. Music fans can purchase music directly from the a Shop.com associate’s website, innovative social media widgets for Facebook and other platforms (I’ll be bringing this to WordPress and Drupal for sure!), or through the Conquer Entertaiment portal, which currently redirects to http://myworld.marketamerica.com/. That will certainly change and I’m already working on it.

The first order of business will be to ensure that music fans and artists can discover their music at a Conquer Entertainment domain name, while we prepare for the rollout of Conquer 3.0. In the meantime, we’ll be rolling out a ShopBox widget (patent pending) for social platforms providing artists with a way to publish their tracks to Facebook and sell tracks directly in social media streams. Yes, you’ll be able to complete the transaction AND download directly from a Facebook news feed or band page. It’s pretty awesome. I wish I would have thought of that myself!

Of course, just getting in the door this week, I have tons of ideas. I’ve been meeting with (and partying with) the Conquer team for the past few days, both at their booth on the main concourse of American Airlines arena and at the Market America after-party at the Viceroy 50, a lounge with an outdoor pool on the 50th Floor of the Viceroy Hotel in downtown Miami. Of course, on the way down from the party, we got stuck in the elevator for a few minutes, but it ended up working out. Although my life is dedicated to digital, sometimes digital – especially when running things as important as elevators – can be problematic.

It’s off to my 3rd day here in Miami. I’ll try and post a few more pics and videos of the Conquer team and the conference itself. Time for breakfast!

Yes, I’m one of those liberal tech geeks who want to, oh, um..like, keep the Internet FREE! What I mean by free is free from old media run by the Motional Picture Industry Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, who want to have the right to shut down any website they deem is infringing on their content without due process. That’s like given M&M/Mars the right to shut down every 7-11 in America just because a few 3rd-graders stole a couple of candy bars. Then, 7-11 would have to prove they can prevent all 3rd-graders from stealing M&Ms, before they can open the doors again. How silly would that be?

So, if you like your Google, WikiPedia, YouTube, SoundCloud, or any other service for that matter, which provides a vehicle for free artistic expression, then you’ll call you Senator or Congressperson and tell them you’re certainly against piracy, but not at the expense of taking your liberties away! Many of these sites have gone dark or are taking a stand today against government regulation, which will stifle innovation.

Here’s a quick video on how this all works and why you should be outraged that a few big media companies and their industry organizations are trying to regulate the Internet and block you from using services like Facebook and Twitter, which if passed, could be shut down without due process. This is like saying that you’re guilty until proven innocent. That’s not the America I grew up. I hope that’s not the one you want your kids to grow up in. We might as well move to China or Russia and let the powerful control the powerless.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the past couple of days, I’d gotten a few phone calls from prospective clients who told me they were using the contact form on my Digital Strategy Works website to submit an inquiry about our services, but they hadn’t heard back from me. Huh, I wondered. Really? How could this be?

I did some preliminary investigating and there didn’t seem to be a problem with the Contact Form 7, which I use for my forms. WordPress itself and my server were running normally. After clicking around, it was time to test the form for myself.

I sent myself an email through the form and got back the following (removed the @ symbol to obfuscate address):

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at netmixsupport.co.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<az(at)digitalstrategyworks.com>:
This address no longer accepts mail.

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <tonyzeoli(at)me.com>
Received: (qmail 25887 invoked by uid 110); 13 Jan 2012 21:47:22 -0500
Delivered-To: 1-admin(at)netmix.co
Received: (qmail 25882 invoked by uid 10001); 13 Jan 2012 21:47:22 -0500
To: admin(at)netmix.co
Subject: tonyzeoli(at)me.com
X-PHP-Originating-Script: 10001:class-phpmailer.php
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:47:22 +0000
From: "tonyzeoli(at)me.com" <tonyzeoli(at)me.com>
Message-ID: <4742bf2ae62bb12327fd973a8fd9380c@netmix.co>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.1 (phpmailer.sourceforge.net)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

From: tonyzeoli(at)me.com <tonyzeoli(at)me.com>
Subject: test

Message Body:
test
--
This mail is sent via contact form on Digital Strategy Works http://netmix.co/digitalstrategyworks

I though, that’s odd. The qmail-send program should be sending an email from the server to the email address I’d set in the admin panel of the Contact Form 7 plugin. But, I was getting a bounce back to the email address I’d tested in the form, saying that the address I was sending to was undeliverable. Why was it undeliverable, when I get email to my digitalstrategyworks.com address all the time?

There were a couple of reasons. First, I am using Google’s hosted mail service to handle mail for a couple of my domains: netmix.com and digitalstrategyworks.com. Second, when I set up my WordPress network on MediaTemple VPS, I needed to add a “domain alias” for each domain name that would be included in the network. While I added Netmix.com and DigitalStrategyWorks.com to the MediaTemple administration panel, you’re required to access the root domain of your WordPress network and add those domain aliases.

My root domain is netmix.co and my domain aliases were added to that account in my control panel. The image below is a screenshot of the control panel. Under “Websites and Domains,” click the “Show Advanced Operations” text link at the mid point of the page, which will drop down an extended set of options. Highlighted in the red square is the link to “Domain Aliases,” where you can add or manage all of the alias domains you’re going to use in your WordPress network. Remember, just because you’ve added them in your MediaTemple account center, does not mean that they will work. They must be added as a domain alias in your primary domain’s control panel or none of your domains will resolve correctly in your network.

Websites and Domains admin in Plesk Cpanel

After you have clicked on the Domain Alias link, you can add the domain aliases. In the image below, you can see a list of domain aliases that I have added so that the domain mapping plugin for WordPress can redirect to each domain alias assigned under the primary domain.

Plesk CPanel Domain Aliases administration panel

Now, here’s what I found that was causing the inadvertent mail issue. Since I’m using Gmail hosted mail services for two of my domains, netmix.com and digitalstrategyworks.com, I am not using the qmail feature of the server to send email directly from the server. The two domains in question, netmix.com and digitalstrategyworks.com inherit the local functionality of the qmail server, but we don’t want that, because my email DNS entries are listed as Google’s and not MediaTemple’s. Aha! Therein lies the problem. The domains are not accepting mail, because they are set to use the local mail server and not the 3rd party Google hosted mail server!

If you are hosting your email through a 3rd party service and not using the local mail feature, you’re going to get this issue where mail cannot be delivered to the domain, because the server is trying to use local mail and not the Gmail system. How do you fix that? Easy, just click on any one of the domains that you’re hosting mail for using Google or another service, and then turn off the local mail service. Problem solved!

Netmix Mail Service Off

Over the Christmas break, I got the chance to check out the Newseum in Washington D.C. Two very powerful exhibits are remnants from of the Berlin Wall and the damaged antennae that sat atop one of the World Trade Center towers. The two extraordinary artifacts represent two of the most powerful, life-changing news events of the three decades.

The Newseum is a necessary stop for anyone interested in journalism or working as a journalist. There is much more to the museum than just these few snapshots, but I hope they spur on inspiration to check it out for yourself next time you’re in Washington D.C.

For me, seeing the World Trade Center antennae was very emotional, as I had stood on the roof of one of the “Twin Towers” many years ago and I watched both towers burn when I was living in New York City. On the wall behind the antennae the front page of newspaper from all over the country and around the world. It definitely brought back memories of that fateful day. When I see others viewing these sorts of exhibits or memorials, I always think to myself if they can really understand the impact of the tragedy simply by viewing photos? I doubt they can, but I’m glad there is something left to observe and reflect on.