Who’s Got the Title of “Most Digital”?

The most digital city in the country has been identified by thinktank Scarborough Research. Using a survey, the company picked out eighteen purchasing behaviors and traits that they isolated as indicative of “early adopters” and “techy.” Then it tracked those behaviors to different metro areas to determine the country’s most digital city.

“Most Digital City” Methodology

The behaviors and traits they selected were related to three digital domains:

• geeky toys owned by the subjects, like DVRs, Garmin GPS units and VoIP digital devices,
• uses of the internet, such as blogging, web searching and online banking,
• and style of cellphone usage, like messaging, websurfing and downloading.

Unsurprisingly, two of the top four “most digital cities” were found to be in California. Also in the top four were cities in Nevada and Texas. Got any guesses yet at the most digital city nearest you?

If you guessed San Francisco or San Jose, like we did, well, no digital brownie points for you. Neither of these tech powerhouses showed up anywhere in Scarborough’s results. Either Scarborough’s “most digital cities” data is flawed, or perhaps Northern Californians are thriftier than we thought.

Most Digital Cities

So, without further ado, the runner-up most digital cities (according to the study) are Las Vegas, Sacramento, San Diego.

At the top of the Most Digital City heap is our own Austin, Texas. The study says the concentration of digital-savvy consumers in Austin is at a lofty 12%. Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles get digital honorable mentions, presumably delivered virtually via avatar in Second Life.

Most Digital Means Most Credit Card Debt?

The study also found an association between the “most digital city” behaviors and extravagant consumption. Apparently, 54% of the “most digital” consumers spent over $500 in online shopping in the past year, and each is 56% more likely to own or lease a luxury car and 49% more likely to own a second home. Austin residents can pull this off a little easier than San Diegans, so we can sorta see the connection.

If you’re a resident of the Most Digital City in America, like we are, we hope you’re watching your account balances. All that digital tomfoolery can burn a hole in your finances pretty swiftly.

Changing Identity in Adobe Acrobat Professional Isn’t Impossible!

Adobe Acrobat Professional is one of the important SEO tools we use in the office, but it can be frustrating as hell. I ran into one particular bugaboo today when preparing a web page review for a client.

The problem? You can’t change your identity in Acrobat Professional, so all of your comments appear under your Windows login name instead of a name that’s appropriate for your document. You can see at this Adobe Acrobat Professional forum that this problem has stumped the pros.

So if you whimsically login as “huggybear” on your computer, every comment you create in Adobe Acrobat Professional is going to show up as huggybear. Not so hot when you’re trying to impress those humorless clients from Chicago.

It’s Not Your Acrobat Identity - It’s Your Author Name

SEO wunderkind Brian heard about my problem and assured me it could be fixed. “Sure,” I told him. “I’m uninstalling Adobe Acrobat Professional right now, and I’m going to change my Windows login name before I reinstall it.”

So I went off and did my Adobe Acrobat Professional install/reinstall mambo. No joy. Apparently Acrobat was emotionally attached to my original Windows login name (no, it’s not huggybear), and it wasn’t letting go.

Since I work at a search engine marketing company, I resorted to “the Google” and turned up the aforementioned Adobe Acrobat forum, replete with frustrated Acrobat users. No joy.

How to Change the Name on Your Adobe Acrobat Professional Comments

So finally I had Brian come over to my workstation and whack on Adobe Acrobat for awhile. It was a pain to figure out which prefs needed to be edited but it is doable.

First, go to Edit > Preferences > Commenting and uncheck “Always use Log-in Name for Author name.” This means that Adobe Acrobat’s no longer going to use that original huggybear identity name anymore.

Great. Now where the heck is the Author name changed? Well, of course, Adobe managed to hide this deep in the bowels of Acrobat Professional.

First, create a new comment. Right-click on it to bring up the Sticky Note Properties and click on the General tab. There! The author name!

And yet we’re still not done. Before you close the dialog box, you MUST hit the “Make Properties Default” checkbox at the bottom. That will apply the Author Name to all of your Adobe Acrobat Professional comments, rather than just this single instance. Nice UI design, Adobe.

So there you go, people. You can’t change your identity in Adobe Acrobat Professional — but you can change the name that appears on all of your Acrobat Professional comments. Thanks, Brian!