A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn‘s somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. (“I vomited on their shoes at the office party” isn’t on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn’s categories.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e55d7425-3050-40ca-982b-54b675bb633b)
Probably no need to mention that this cartoon was inspired by the Web 2.0 Expo debacle involving danah boyd, a Twitter backchannel projected onto a giant screen behind her, a speech that faced an uphill battle from the get-go, and a few audience members with some impulse control (and other) issues.
There’s a fascinating renegotiation going on between audiences and speakers. Twitter and backchannels are part of it, but I suspect something deeper is afoot. There’s a revolution sweeping all forms of communication – ask anyone who works for a newspaper or a record company – and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that even something as seemingly timeless as public speaking would be affected.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be jerks about it.
Is there anything more fun than drawing a rampaging robot intent on destroying civilization? (Answer: being a rampaging robot intent on destroying civilization.) Update: Alex reminds me that the idea for this one came from her recap of Jer Thorpe‘s amazing session last week on Processing. (What she doesn’t mention is that she made the connection, suggesting I do a cartoon about an unclosed parenthesis. xoxo)
Hey, if you’re thinking of getting some nifty Noise to Signal merchandise for holiday gift-giving – and who can fault your marvellous taste? – remember those shipping deadlines. Better order now!
And if you don’t find your favourite cartoon emblazoned on a coffee mug, printed on a greeting card or shaved into the belly of a raccoon (oh, wait – that one’s an invitation-only beta), just let me know and I’ll be happy to add it.
Ooh… this might be a nice one:
</shilling>
MPs from all parties professed to support the idea, including then transport minister Lawrence Cannon.
But behind the scenes, his office was pleading with the airlines to launch a lobby campaign to defeat the motion, according to documents obtained by Canwest News Service.
While Cannon was promising to bring in a travellers’ bill of rights, a key political staffer in his office was telling the airlines the Conservatives really wanted it killed.
Lobby the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, Paul Fitzgerald e-mailed the airlines. “I don’t want us to be forced into regulating passenger protection issues.”
A jaw-dropper from Paul Willcocks. You could be forgiven for seeing this as the Conservative Party (and their Republican mentors) in microcosm: flannel shirts in public, pinstripes once the cameras turn away.
This came to me while reading Dave Eave’s post about the challenges of turning the promise of crowd-sourced quality control in open-source development – the idea that “many eyes make all bugs shallow“. (It turns out the challenges are substantial, whether you’re building software or managing a city.)
By the way, I’m starting to draw the occasional cartoon live on Ustream. Follow me on Twitter (@robcottingham) to find out when I’m doing the next one; meanwhile, here’s what today’s looked like (the sound, unfortunately, got pretty distorted).
With this cartoon, Noise to Signal moves to its new home here at RobCottingham.ca. (Social Signal will continue carrying N2S, but the all-important RSS feed will point here.) We’ll be doing a few renovations in the coming months to make it cozy: a breakfast nook here, some sconces over there. And the posting frequency will probably pick up a little.
Comments are always welcome. Enjoy the toons!
(man holding a baggie, to a prospective customer) I don’t sell nothin’ but primo stuff! You don’t believe me, check my Yelp listing.
For the good of cartooning, we’ll take even small victories. And by small, we mean a mere 7 picas wide.
The Washington Post recently shrank Doonesbury to 34 picas wide. (To put that in perspective, that’s just under six inches. Or just over 14 centimetres.)
Now, shrinkage is already a pretty major annoyance in the comic world. But when you’re dealing with a comic as text-intensive as Doonesbury, that can mean outright illegibility.
With the Post, though, something interesting happened. If I’m reading this right, the newspapers comics blogger, Michael Cavna, went to bat for Doonesbury… and lo and behold, the paper restored it to its previous 41-pica width.
I’m used to seeing in-house newspaper bloggers acting in a variety of roles. But this is the first time I’ve seen one act so successfully as a reader advocate within the paper. It’s kind of cool. (Has anyone out there seen other examples?)
Now if we could just get them to shrink a few strips down to zero picas (yes, you, Blondie), we might really be getting somewhere.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence. Please attribute to Rob Cottingham with a link to the content's original page on this web site. For more information, contact Rob at rob@robcottingham.ca.
Powered by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform
Find out about the other tools this site uses
