Entries Tagged 'Cartoons' ↓

When the news about Google Plus broke, I was as cur— Sorry, just a sec. I have to go reload the Google Plus page to see if they're accepting new signups yet.

Nuts. No luck.

Where was I? Right: when the news about Google Plus broke, I was as curious as anyone about— Wait! Someone just tweeted that they're accepting newly invited users at a special URL!

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Dammit. Rickrolled again.

So. When the news about Google+ broke, I was as curious as anyone else about what it would mean. (Other than the inevitable flood of "Why your brand must be on Google Plus right frigging now!!!", "Why Google Plus will kill Facebook" and "Why Google Plus will doom Google to a lingering painful death" blog posts, that is.)

Well, in the 20 minutes it's taken me to write this, I've actually managed to get an invitation to work, and I am inside the walls of the kingdom.

So what's it like? Where's the value? Will it complement, supersede or succumb to Facebook?

I honestly can't tell you, because I'm completely hooked on the little add-friends-to-Circles animation, and I think it'll be weeks before I move on to any other features.

I'll keep you posted.

The other day, I was at a local coffee shop trying to troubleshoot a page on my cartoon site. I didn't have my trusty laptop with me, but I no worries — I had my iPad, which is practically the same thing, right?

Until I opened the page in Safari, and had a look at the source.

Or, rather, didn't. It turns out Safari in iOS – you're going to want to sit down for this – doesn't have a "View Source" command.

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Now, if I'd dug a little, I would have found many others in my position. I would have discovered any number of JavaScript-based bookmarklets for creating an ersatz View Source command in Safari on the iPad. I might even have come across the miracle known as Firebug Lite, a bookmarklet that replicates much of the functionality of that venerable web developer's tool.

Instead, I opened the page in Atomic Browser. Which (ahhhh!) does let you view the source of a web page.

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," sang Joni Mitchell in 1970, which is how I know she had access to very early Firefox and iPhone betas. Because only someone who has had access to View Source, and then lost it, could understand the concept of loss well enough to write those words.

View Source is more than just a menu command; it's the Rosetta Stone to web innovation.

View Source turns "take it into the shop" into "pop open the hood and see what's broken."

View Source turns "How did they do that?" into "So that's how they do that."

View Source turns "I did this once" into "Everyone can do this again and again."

View Source turns a dozen people reinventing the same wheel into a dozen better wheels.

View Source turns a magician revealing her secrets into tens, hundreds or thousands of new magicians.

In short, View Source is a big part of what puts the "write" in the read-write web.

(Credit where it's due: while I made some progress on my own, the solution to my problem ultimately came thanks to Michael Sisk, creator of the free Webcomic WordPress plugin that powers Noise to Signal — as well as the comic I'm launching on Monday.)

Unlike pretty much the rest of Vancouver, I don't watch hockey — even Stanley Cup finals — so I was in a state of media blackout during the seventh game on June 15. The one exception was Twitter, which I was mostly ignoring because the feed had degenerated into nothing but anguished variations on "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUGH!!!!! #canucks".

But by the time the game was due to end, I thought it might be safe to start peeking again. And that's when I started to see the ensuing riot unfold in ASCII: A car overturned. Then another. Then one on fire. Then windows being broken. And then all hell breaking loose.

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Vancouver's been through this before — the last time we lost a Stanley Cup final, in fact. (That riot was smaller, but the injuries then were more serious.) But one key difference this time, 17 years later, was the ubiquity of mobile devices, connected to the social web.

So not only were people live-tweeting from the scene (including some harrowing feeds from reporters in the crowd), but they were shooting photos and video. The police won't have to slap down a warrant to pick up that footage, as they did in 1994 when the people with the cameras were TV crews. Instead, clips and snapshots from ordinary people are flooding into Vancouver Police Department headquarters... heavily enough to crash their server, at one point.

But people aren't just sending their content in privately. They're also posting it to YouTube, Flickr and Facebook — and in some cases, tagging the faces of the people in the shots. In fact, dedicated pages and Tumblr sites were already up and running before the last of the flames were doused on Wednesday night. About an hour or two into the riot, I was seeing calls on Twitter for people to post, identify and, sometimes, publicly shame those involved... or fire them.

All of that has raised the question of whether we've crossed a line between an involved citizenry and what my wife Alexandra Samuel calls citizen surveillance. (She has no issue with the police soliciting photos and videos from the public; her concern is once it goes networked, social and large-scale — not to mention public.)

Alex wrote a post in the Harvard Business Review and a follow-up on her own blog that have sparked a lively conversation: What's the difference between individuals sending police raw information and networks of people publicly identifying possible miscreants? And is there a meaningful distinction between using social media to turn a spotlight on abuses by those in power, and using it to identify (and publicly shame) individuals?

More Noise to Signal.

There are times when it seems like the economics of the web seem to boil down to:

1: Find some white space on your site.
2: Fill it with an ad.
3: There is no number three. Check out these great discount air fares!

It starts innocently enough, with a few AdSense text placements. But before you know it, you have one of those Flash-based monstrosities lurking in your sidebar - the kind you don't dare roll over, because if you do it spawns some demonic window that extends outside the boundaries of your monitor and knocks over furniture in your family room, while playing The Macarena at 130% volume.

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It's kind of nice, then, when a player in the — oh, god, what do we call it nowadays? ah, yes: the content industry — manages to come up with a revenue stream that's a little more win-win than just hurling ads in readers' faces. This week I stumbled across The Washington Post's Master Class series: online courses that put the expertise of Post writers at your disposal.

It launched last month, and the tuition fees aren't small; they're along the lines of what you'd pay for a decent continuing ed class at your local college or university. That puts them in a different price bracket from most of the approaches I've seen newspapers take to finding a new source of income, like subscriptions or pay-per-article fees.

I wish them luck. Anything to avoid another banner ad.

More Noise to Signal.

In a week where U.S. news coverage was dominated by an inappropriate tweet from a congressperson's Twitter account, maybe it's worth taking a moment or two to think about your own personal social media policy. What are you doing to avoid landing in the same soup that Rep. Anthony Weiner has been sloshing around in for the past several days?

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For instance, do you consciously avoid tweeting or blogging after you've had a few drinks? (I've had an idea for a smartphone breathalyzer. Blow anything over 0.08%, and it wouldn't let you tweet. Or, optionally, it switches you over to a special Twitter account you've created that consists only of drunk tweets.) Do you have a policy of running anything that seems iffy past a trusted colleague or a loved one?

Or is the occasional I-can't-believe-my-elected-representative-just-tweeted-that (or I-can't-believe-my-favorite-clothing-designer-just-tweeted-that) the price we pay for a free-wheeling, spontaneous Web?

More Noise to Signal.

Herein, a brief rant. It may be bubbling up from the fact that I'm turning 48 tomorrow, and therefore approaching curmudgeon status. It may be from the past week's news: an eG8 summit that looked more like a circling of wagons against the open Web; an attempt in Washington to conscript DNS into the intellectual property wars.

Whatever the cause, I'm entering my 49th year with a deep, burning anger over the forces arrayed against the open Web.

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The open Web is under assault from hilariously broad and ill-conceived patents, from the push to hand conversation and online identity over to closed, unaccountable platforms, and from the incessant effort to separate the network's capacity into first-class and economy...and from much more.

I'm not going to say the open Web is the greatest creation in human civilization...but it's one of them, right up there with antibiotics, written language and Better Off Ted. Yeah, we use it for LOLcats and Farmville, but we also use it to bring people together in ways our ancestors could never have dreamed of, to achieve feats of collaboration, conversation and creativity that constantly push new boundaries of ingenuity and impact.

Sometimes that impact is commercial or economic; sometimes it's social or civic; sometimes it's artistic or expressive. And even when you strip away the layers of hype and evangelizing, you're still left with something breathtaking...and worth fighting for.

End rant. Cue cake.

More Noise to Signal.

This week is Noise to Signal's fourth birthday. On May 27, 2007, I scanned and posted the first cartoon I'd published in years... and I haven't stopped since.

I'm celebrating with a caption contest and I'll think of something else fun to do on the actual day. (It may involve a cocktail with such ingredients as gin, vermouth and Koh-I-Noor drawing ink, with a Pigma Micron marker instead of a swizzle stick.)

The cartoon's changed a lot since then. I used to rough out a cartoon in pencil, draw it in ink, scan it in and retouch it. Today my workflow is most always all-digital. And my iPad is now my tool of choice for sketching ideas on the fly. (Thank you, SketchBook Pro.)

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What hasn't changed is what makes drawing Noise to Signal so satisfying: the response it gets, and the conversation it generates. I owe a hell of a lot to the folks who've encouraged me along the way: friends, fans of the cartoon, and the great folks here at ReadWriteWeb who've been running it since Noise to Signal was barely a toddler.

You've all helped make this one of the most worthwhile things I do. Thank you. And see you next week.

More Noise to Signal.

Okay, so my mother wasn't in any position to leave me a social graph in her will. When she died in early 2004, Friendster was the domain of the young'uns, MySpace was barely out the door and Facebook was still a month from launching.

But for someone who never saw used the word "friend" as a verb in her life, Mom taught me an awful lot about social networking.

Things like being of service, and giving instead of taking. Mom volunteered on everything from the local community association to the church. (It got to the point where someone witnessed a break-in at our home - the burglar walked in through the unlocked front door - and thought nothing of it except "Poor JoAnne; people aren't even bothering to knock any more when they walk in with more work for her to do.")

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Or like offering something of value when you invite people over. Mom would cook and bake for days before a party, stuffing the fridge and freezer with a parade of treats that would then reappear, tray by delicious tray, over the course of the evening.

Or like finding a niche and filling it. When they moved to a small rural community, one where news coverage was next to non-existent, Mom and Dad started a local newspaper. It was a labour of love, not profit; a month where their revenue exceeded their printing and distribution costs was a pretty good month. But they kept it going for years.

And when I'm having my greatest impact online, it's almost always when I'm doing one of those things I saw Mom do so often in the offline world.

And while she didn't have analytics to track their progress, or an ROI measurement strategy so she could tell if what she was doing was worthwhile, she did have a clear reward for her efforts: a large, broad circle of friends. As Mom and Dad's kids, we were often beneficiaries of the goodwill they earned, with warmth and friendliness automatically extended to us by virtue of our parents' contributions. And toward the end of their lives, when they had to draw on that community more than they were able to give to it, those people were there for them.

What did your mother teach you about social networking?

More Noise to Signal.

This one's for the engineers, the programmers, the database administrators, the sysadmins, the networking gurus, and the rest of that army of people that gets deployed when a major outage happens.

While the rest of us grouse that we can't check in at our local haunts, or log on with our Twitter app of choice, or vote a story up or down on Reddit - or even do something a little more directly tied to social or economic productivity - those folks are working brutal hours under intense pressure to get everything back up again.

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And while we're firing off #fail hashtags and loudly musing about how we're seriously considering competitors and alternatives, they're closing off issues, squashing bugs, rooting out corrupted files or finding that one fried capacitor that brought everything down.

Yes, someone or some group of people out there was responsible for the decisions or actions - or lack thereof - that led to the latest outage, and they should be held accountable. But every once in a while, it's nice to shift the recrimination generators into idle, and thank the people who get us all back up and running again.

(And while we're at it, say a nice word or two to the folks whose web apps are affected by those outages, and who keep fielding the "Why the hell isn't MyFavoriteTrendyOnlineService.com running?" calls from people who think cloud computing is how the weather service gives such accurate forecasts.)

More Noise to Signal.

This one's for the engineers, the programmers, the database administrators, the sysadmins, the networking gurus, and the rest of that army of people that gets deployed when a major outage happens.

While the rest of us grouse that we can't check in at our local haunts, or log on with our Twitter app of choice, or vote a story up or down on Reddit - or even do something a little more directly tied to social or economic productivity - those folks are working brutal hours under intense pressure to get everything back up again.

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And while we're firing off #fail hashtags and loudly musing about how we're seriously considering competitors and alternatives, they're closing off issues, squashing bugs, rooting out corrupted files or finding that one fried capacitor that brought everything down.

Yes, someone or some group of people out there was responsible for the decisions or actions - or lack thereof - that led to the latest outage, and they should be held accountable. But every once in a while, it's nice to shift the recrimination generators into idle, and thank the people who get us all back up and running again.

(And while we're at it, say a nice word or two to the folks whose web apps are affected by those outages, and who keep fielding the "Why the hell isn't MyFavoriteTrendyOnlineService.com running?" calls from people who think cloud computing is how the weather service gives such accurate forecasts.)

More Noise to Signal.