I don’t mean to brag, but I’m in a hotel room without tracing paper, my Cintiq or a scanner. And yet I just pulled off the ReadWriteWeb weekend cartoon by turning my MacBook Pro on its back and using the display as a lightbox, tracing over the rough sketch, and then shooting the finished drawing with my camera, and cleaning it up in Photoshop.

I believe what I’m saying is, I ROCK.

You’ll see the results (and judge for yourself) on Sunday!

Amigas and amigos, Noise to Signal finally has its very own home. And in lieu of a 55-inch LED TV, there’s a brand new Noise to Signal video front and centre.

And now the details.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and the holidays (plus huge assists from Mike Kelly and Alex) gave me the time I needed to finally put the finishing touches on it. I’ve used the Webcomic plugin for WordPress, which should make it a lot easier to find your favourite cartoons and keep up with the latest ones. (There’s a fair amount I still want to do to polish the site up, but I take to heart the saying that if you launch with your site in perfect shape, you probably waited too long.)

And as a reverse-housewarming present of sorts, I’ve drawn a 2009 social-media-year-in-review… and Alex has turned it into Noise to Signal’s very first kick-ass video. Have a look and let me know what you like.

‘Tis the season and all that, and this time of year I find myself thinking a lot about my parents. This is exactly the sort of thing they’d have said (if my childhood had been, oh, 20 or 30 years later), and it would have driven me CRA-ZEE.

Funny thing: It’s also exactly the sort of thing I find myself saying to my own kids.

And speaking of ’tis the season, thanks and all the best to all of you who’ve read, tweeted, forwarded and commented on Noise to Signal this year. Have a great holiday if you’re celebrating, and just have a lovely week or two if you aren’t.

The debate rages on over whether social networks (and Twitter, and YouTube, and, and, and) have any legitimacy in the workplace, fueled in no small part by people who sell tools to block them.

But employers who turn their noses up at Facebook et al. may well discover that their coveted Millennials (a.k.a. Generation Y, a.k.a. those damn kids who won’t get off your lawn) are happy to return the favour when recruiting time rolls around. Blocking access to Facebook looks a lot like those IT departments that wouldn’t install web browsers on your computer a decade ago… or external email access a few years earlier.

And like those tools before them, the social web today is increasingly being used by companies and organizations for productive, collaborative work. So it’s not just a question of denying your HR department a hiring pool of cool kids. Blocking social media from your company can mean cutting yourself off from an important potential source of productivity, innovation and increased efficiency.

Of course, that’s an argument I like to make to people who haven’t just received a dozen Farmville notifications.

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

Here’s one for all you holiday shoppers out there, fresh from ReadWriteWeb. I said over there that stores have good reason to worry about customers walking in clutching their iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys:

Which means customers are bringing the competition into the bricks-and-mortar stores with them — and they can switch allegiance as easily as point, click, swipe, call up the keyboard, tap tap tap, dammit, backspace, no, that wasn’t it, tap tap (repeat eight or nine times)… submit.

So maybe stores should think twice this holiday season about trying to trim costs by thinning their staff. Longer lineups don’t just discourage shoppers, they give them the means, motive and opportunity to shop elsewhere.

That said, just abandoning your cart would be kind of a dickish thing to do. Forcing those overworked staff to restock all the stuff you took off the shelves – that just isn’t in the Festivus spirit.

And since we’re in a retail frame of mind, for a limited time only, this cartoon comes FREE with a live video capture of its rendering:

…AND with the alternate version of the caption, which I just never did quite make work:

October’s cartoon-blogging at the Real-Time Web Summit was a well-received experiment in innovative event coverage. The response was overwhelmingly positive, the Twitter stream showed people appreciated the added dimension to the event, and the organizers were more than pleased.

Now, two things:

First, the ReadWriteWeb report, The Real-Time Web and its Future, is now on sale. Edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick – one of the smartest guys I know – the report sells for $300, and distills interviews with more than 50 real-time web honchos along with insights from the over 300 folks who attended the summit. Plus there are 10 case studies, 20 profiles of leaders in the field… and a package deal on the report plus RWW’s guide to online community management. Details (and a free sample chapter) here.

And second, I just came across some notes I took on the experience, and I thought they’d be worth sharing. As with most experiments, this one held a few surprises for me – and some useful lessons. Since I want to offer cartoon-blogging as one of our Social Signal offerings, those lessons take on a special significance.

Here’s how it unfolded, and how I’ll fine-tune my approach next time:

• I arrived with my MacBook Pro and Cintiq, and settled in at a table. Handy tip: bring a power bar. Conferences usually max out their electrical outlets, and being able to turn one outlet into many is a valued skill (and a not-bad way to make friends). I have a nice little Belkin that also happens to have USB ports, which can be handy if you want to charge, say, an iPhone. As it turned out, I needed to.
• I had hoped to live-stream my cartooning on Justin.tv (one of the event sponsors). It worked fine on both the Vancouver International Airport and Holiday Inn wireless networks, neither of which was especially fast. But conference WiFi is notoriously unreliable, and bottlenecks and signal dropouts made live-streaming impossible. If live-streaming is anything other than a nice-to-have for you, make absolutely sure there’s a rock-solid Internet connection.
• If WiFi fails, you’ll want to have a Plan B ready to go so you can at least upload your cartoons – or email them to comeone who can. In my case, it was tethering: connecting my computer to the net via my iPhone. (Given the cost of data roaming for this itinerant Canadian, my Plan B would also have involved a second mortgage and possibly a night job.) As it turned out, the wireless connection was reliable enough that I stuck with it.

Now, what I’ll do differently:

• While the main room for the event had plenty of electrical outlets, the same wasn’t true for the breakout sessions. And for that matter, the Cintiq isn’t exactly a mobile device; picking up, moving and setting back up was a time-consuming effort. Next time I’ll take my sketchbook into breakout sessions.
• My digital SLR broke down right before the conference, which meant that when I did use my sketchbook, I was shooting with my iPhone camera. That required a lot of Photoshop work… which I ended up abandoning: the quality just wasn’t good enough. Instead, I wound up redoing the sketchbook in the Cintiq, which doesn’t take as long as you might think but took longer than I’d have liked. Next time, if this comes up, I’ll do bigger, simpler drawings, and shoot them under bright, even light.
• This was a day that relied largely on breakout groups rather than keynotes or panels. Since most of the ones I attended were facilitated rather than led, they were certainly interesting… but they lacked the narrative coherence that can make for good cartoons. Next time I’ll choose more carefully (admittedly, a little harder with the spontaneity of unconferences.) And when a session has me completely out of my technical depth (a debate over whether a particular app has a RESTful API is a solid clue), next time I’ll have the humility to smile and leave.
• There were several sponsors there, and a few made it into one of the cartoons… but most didn’t. I wasn’t playing favourites, but I wouldn’t want to inadvertently put the conference convenors into an awkward position. Next time I’ll clarify with the organizers in advance how to handle sponsors.
• I learned a lot about my own workflow in cranking out cartoons and getting them web-ready. I discovered, for example, that it’s a lot more efficient for me to work in batches: do several sketches, then polish them, and then fire them off. But I’d made some assumptions about how things would go on ReadWriteWeb’s end (through no fault of their’s) and when those proved to be mistaken, I had some scrambling to do. It all turned out fine, but next time I’ll make sure I understand clearly how the workflow will go, establish the organizers’ expectations for the pace and volume of cartoons, and make a personal plan for the day.
• We could have done more to think about presentation: whether the cartoons would have a stream of their own, and where they’d live. As it turned out, they did perfectly well as part of the ReadWriteWeb blog flow, but if I’d cranked up my pace, the day’s blog posts might have been lost in a cartoon sea. (We could have done more to feature them on the Social Signal site too, but as it happened we had a little competing news that day.) Next time, I’ll work with the organizers to suggest ways of presenting the cartoons in a way that enriches the conference experience without detracting from other communications.

The fact I took away some important lessons doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, of course – I had a great time, learned a lot and, I think, contributed something of real value. And I can’t wait for a chance to do this again.

Do people actually do this in bars, and not just on TV?

This is the first cartoon posted on our sweet new webserver (all hail the mighty Linode!). I’m getting plenty of hand-holding on the sysadmin front, and wanted to mention: if you’re looking for top-flight folks in that department, you can’t go wrong with Mike Kelly and Natasha Scott. Xs and Os to ‘em (we miss you at SoSi, Nat!).

And here’s the cartoon being drawnified: