So I thought I’d try something. I usually sketch in those minutes between the flight crew saying “Turn off your mobile devices! They are tools of the devil! Yes, you in 24A, I do mean you!” and that sweet moment when they permit us to go back to our productively wired lives (“Buh-CAAWWWWW!” “Oink, oink, oink.”).

Looking at my sketchbook just now, I wondered: could I post all of those sketches using only my iPhone?

It looks very much like the answer is yes… up to the posting part, which will have to wait ’til I’m on the ground. I’m drawing with my trust Pigma Micron (05, if you’re wondering, and if you are, then I love you for it) using JotNot Pro to capture the cartoon and convert it to nice, sharp black and white; SketchBook Mobile to add my URL, and the iOS WordPress app to compose the text and queue up the images.)

About the cartoons, a disclaimer or two:

• I love Bellingham. It’s just that our pilot sounded awfully depressed on the intercom on that flight.
• I have never brought a rack-mounted server array onto a plane. They make me check it Every. Time.
• I think flight attendants work harder than nearly anyone I know. Yeah, airlines are treating passengers like cattle that happen to have credit cards… but that isn’t the fault of the flight crew. Don’t take it out on them, okay, Mr. Guy Several Rows Up From Me A Few Flights Ago ?

While nearly every objective measure suggested the party I was supporting, Vision Vancouver, was about to win the city’s municipal election, a few recent polls suggested the race had tightened up sharply in the last few days. And they suggested the momentum was with the NPA, Vancouver’s right-wing civic party.

The NPA’s campaign had focused on several targets they evidently considered tempting, including the city’s urban agriculture policies, and new separated bike lanes on a few downtown streets.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so worried. One of the NPA’s last public events included someone dressed in a chicken suit holding a sign that said “Homeless Chickens.” Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If, a day or two before an election, you find yourself appearing at press events with people dressed as chickens, chances are the Big Mo is with your opponent.

The TV coverage I saw was on Shaw’s Community Channel 4, which (as far as I could tell) had managed to find a panel of four white male commentators. Come on, people, what is this? A tech conference?

For a brief while, Gregor Robertson’s NPA challenger, Suzanne Anton, was ahead by several hundred votes. But then a few more polling stations reported and their positions flipped. Not long after that, it became clear that every Vision candidate was cruising to victory, and the mood at the party switched from Confidently Hopeful to Awfully Damn Happy.

Once the results were more or less clear, Anton delivered her concession speech. It was classy and gracious, and I liked the part toward the end refuting the idea of politics as a thankless job.

Now, classy and gracious are good. But just once, I’d like to see a defeated candidate really cut loose on the voters.

Speaking of speeches – if you’re ever in the position of writing a victory speech (and here’s hoping you are!), you have one big challenge: the crowd is deliriously happy. That means every line for the first five to ten minutes is an applause line.

Every. Line.

(In my defence, a] I never claimed to be a caricaturist, and b] I was standing up and juggling a sketchpad, a beverage and a Sharpie fine-line marker.)

The final results.

I dropped in on SIGGRAPH on Wednesday and, at Alex’s recommendation, checked out the SANDDE system at the Emily Carr University booth.

SANDDE – which stands for Stereoscopic ANimation Drawing DEvice - bills itself as “the world’s first freehand stereoscopic 3D animation software”. What that boils down to is you sit in front of a sensor, moving a stylus in the air while you view a screen through 3D glasses, and watch as a three-dimensional drawing takes shape.

Munro Ferguson, who demoed the system, walked me through some very basic line drawing. (One fun aspect to all of this: the controller for this insanely sophisticated device is the stylus for a Wacom Bamboo, their consumer-grade drawing tablet.) Between rotating the pen to alter the line width, and moving it forward and backward to achieve depth as well as my usual 2D drawing, I found myself concentrating harder than I have in ages.

But I was also more thoroughly absorbed in the sheer process of drawing than I have been in a long time, too. This feels like a completely new medium, and not one where I feel nearly as sure of myself as I do with a piece of paper and a Pigma Micron.

I’m not just talking about technical skill which I gather starts to gel after about a week of using it. I mean the graphic language of 3D compared to 2D, and the way you tell a joke or a story in pictures. Can a gag cartoon – which relies so heavily on that sudden spark of realization and unexpected connection – work as well in a 3D world, which seems to lend itself more to exploration and unfolding?

If you’re in Vancouver for SIGGRAPH, then drop by the Emily Carr booth and see what you think.

1. Anyone know a cheap source of Imodium for birds?
2. Live-tweeting of Spring Migration 2011 not going so well.
3. Just blogged: update on avian flu threat.
4. Memo to self: there are worse things than commuting by transit.
5. Hey, @NikitaFromDivision – got an update on Operation Sparrow.
6. I just became Foursquare Mayor of 5,000 feet above the ground!

Sometimes while the kids are in the bath, I’ll notice a sketchpad and pen nearby. (Little Sweetie is constantly drawing; tonight, she bargained for a delay in bathtime until she finished the left profile, right profile and front-angle views of her drawing of a scowling convict.) And I’ll start doodling, sometimes taking off from an overheard snippet of conversation from the tub, other times just letting the pen go wherever it seems to.

Tonight, the pen was apparently in an… odd mood.

See that cartoon? Does it seem to be missing a certain, I don’t know, something… something your brain is already trying to invent for it?

Excellent. Because it’s time to have some fun… and maybe win a little something for your desk (or cubicle/home office/area of the sewing table that isn’t currently being used for sewing).

The fine folks at Strutta – a Vancouver-based contest platform – called me up to see if I’d like to run a caption contest using their Facebook product. In return, I’ll blog about my experience (warts and all*).

To enter, just suggest a caption (over on the N2S Facebook Page). And if yours tickles me the most, you win:

• a signed print of this cartoon with your caption on it
• and a signed print of any cartoon you like from the Noise to Signal oeuvre
• and a mug of your choice from the Noise to Signal store.

That’s two prints and a mug – easily enough to render the most sterile and unpleasant working space downright livable.

So enter away! The contest runs through May 25th, and I’ll announce the winner soon afterward. Head over here to enter.

Click here to view the embedded video.

* Side effects of Strutta do not include actual warts.

My plan was to offer it for sale on my Zazzle store – not because I expected to retire on the proceeds, but because it was the easiest way I could think of to create and deliver it.

But there’s a part of my brain that’s now been conditioned by the social web and – in no small part – by Chris Anderson’s Free. That part of my brain kicks in every time I’m about to set a price, and asks, “Suppose the price was zero?”

I’ve done that a few times (a short e-book about getting value from your blog was one example). Open SoSi has been my company’s most ambitious free project. And of course people don’t have to pay to read the cartoon itself, and there’s a Creative Commons license on it.

So I created a PDF version of the calendar. It required some extra work, because I didn’t have Zazzle’s built-in calendar template to create the calendar grids themselves. And after a fruitless search for public domain calendar grids that would work, I created them in Word. (This step was frankly a wee bit tedious and should have been a lot more automated than they make it. Memo to Apple’s Pages app development team: a calendar template would be much appreciated.)

If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’m guessing I would have sold a handful of calendars. Instead, several thousand people viewed the calendar on SlideShare or visited the calendar post on Noise to Signal inside of a few days (and that, during the pre-Christmas traffic slump). Hundreds downloaded the PDF. The calendar made the front page of SlideShare as their Presentation of the Day as well as their “Hot on Twitter” and “Hot on Facebook” lists.

In short, instead of making what would have amounted to pocket change from a handful of people, I reached thousands of people who are new to Noise to Signal, and offered something valuable to the cartoon’s fans. That, to my way of thinking, is a pretty solid argument in favour of free.

Of course, the calendar’s available on Zazzle if you’d like a nicely printed version (they do a great job). And I’m releasing the calendar grids themselves to the public domain (PDF, 280KB).

By the way, here’s the SlideShare version:

And I got to illustrate it, with a half-dozen or so original cartoons. So I’m pretty psyched. And to celebrate, next week will be Open Community week on Noise to Signal, with a new cartoon from the book every day.

I hope you enjoy them. And I also hope you check out their book – it’s terrific. If you’re already convinced, and you’d like to lay your hands on a copy, the order page is right here.

Nearly all of it was on the iPad, using a Griffin stylus and Autodesk‘s SketchBook Pro. It’s a powerful combination, and the turnaround time can be incredibly short: once I’ve drawn the cartoon, I export it to iTunes on the iPad, sync it to my laptop, drop it into a Photoshop template, play with the text, export it to a PNG file, and post it via WordPress. That’s maybe 15 minutes from putting down my stylus to posting the finished image.

Could it be faster and better? Yes, actually:

• The process of exporting to iTunes and syncing to my MacBook Pro is unusually convoluted for Apple. I’m hoping iOS 4.2 will finally bring a more streamlined, rational file management system to the iPad.
• SketchBook Pro is wonderful, but adding a text tool would make it painfully cool. Add in a template feature and the ability to import fonts from my MBP, and I could circumvent Photoshop completely.
• While we’re on the topic of SketchBook Pro, two or three more features that would make a huge difference:
  • Scrollbars or something similar when you’re zoomed in, so you have some idea of where you’re drawing, and how much room you have left
  • A larger canvas, so I could actually start creating something that approaches print resolution
  • Palm exclusion, so I can rest my hand on the surface when I’m drawing with a stylus
• If I could figure out a way to upload the image to WordPress from my iPad (for the time being, hosting it elsewhere doesn’t really work), along with these other steps, I could skip the laptop completely. Some kind of “upload from DropBox” plugin for WordPress, perhaps?

But set aside that wishlist for now. I had a great time, I cartooned like a madman, and I met some terrific people as a result. Thanks for having me, BlogWorld!

And if you aren’t here because of Matt Asay’s column on The Register – it’s about the recent lawsuit by Paul Allen’s firm Interval Research - then by all means give it a read. Then check him out on GigaOM and consider following him on Twitter – he’s a smart guy with a lot to say. (Thanks for sharing the cartoon, Matt!)

Open Source Living – a terrific directory of open-source software – ran a blog post a few weeks ago that aimed to capture the essence of open-source culture through 20 cartoons. And two of them were from Noise to Signal.

From the blog post:

Much of the challenge in convincing companies and individuals to adopt OSS lies in demystifying deep-seated stereotypes that have typically framed OSS as an affront to closed source alternatives. It goes something like this…

How could a project run by a geek in his (gender-stereotyping is rife in the OSS world) spare time, updated on an ad-hoc basis, free for all to use and manipulate (even repackage and resell!), housed on a pre-Web 2.0 site, how could this possibly be anything other than a hobby at best?

Ok, I exaggerate, but regardless, these fears and concerns do exist and do contribute to an OSS sub culture; an online currency of jokes and jibes coupled with more serious aspirations to the ideals of OSS. Part of this culture has filtered through to an increasingly wide range of tech-oriented comic strips.

By all means read the post. You’ll find some great cartoons from Scott McCloud, Randall Munroe, Jorge Cham and more. (Pretty cool to have a day when one of your cartoons is bumping up against Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome book.)

P.S. – Yes, I noticed the all-male thing too. I’m sorry to admit that my own tech-cartoonist feeds are woefully short on women; suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

NETS has produced a tool kit for organizations that want to take part in DSWW. And they asked me if they could use one of my cartoons.

The kit is impressively thorough: sample messages, posters, banners – even a daily activity sheet. (My cartoon appears on the sheet for Thursday, Oct. 7.) If you want to participate, just fill out a short survey and you’ll get a download link. (You can also follow the NTES on Twitter.)

By the way, the campaign has been blogged by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Five years ago, the idea of a member of the U.S. federal cabinet blogging would have blown my mind. Today, it seems perfectly normal.

The bottom line: Chances are you’re looking for the cartoon. It’s over here.

The second-to-bottom line: You can follow Noise to Signal on Twitter and on Facebook.

The background: I’ve been drawing Noise to Signal since 2007, and cartooning at ReadWriteWeb since 2008. (One of the things I love about this business is the fact that, despite the fact that ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are competitors, they link to each other – and each other’s contributors – without apparent hesitation.) Much of the drive to joke about social media comes from the fact that I work in it professionally, as one of the two principals of social media strategy firm Social Signal.

The venal pitch: You can support the rise and expansion of the Noise to Signal empire by buying things.

The immense gratitude: Many thanks to Mashable’s Amy-Mae Elliott… both for including N2S in her roundup (and making it the featured image, he added shamelessly), and for introducing me to a few great cartoons I hadn’t been known about. If you haven’t read her post, please do: it’s right here.

And then check out the other four cartoons: Tony Gigov’s twitter nonsense, the ever-popular Geek and Poke, my online pal Andrew Fowler, aka Guhmshoo, and Andrew Jones’ Status: This. (Update: And Dharmesh Shaw’s cartoons on the HubSpot blog; they’re the special bonus cartoon in the list – sorry I missed them!)

But you don’t have to draw on it for too long to start cursing the iPad’s limitations, even as you marvel at its abilities. And high on my wishlist for the iPad are two items: 1) pressure-sensitivity and 2) being able to draw while resting my palm on the iPad’s surface.

It turns out those two issues are pretty high priorities over at Ten One Designs, too. They make the Pogo Sketch, the handy little stylus I’ve used on most of my iPad cartoons. But they also develop software, and they now have a demo that shows you can have both pressure sensitivity and what they call “palm rejection” (where the iPad distinguishes between your hand and the stylus when you’re drawing, and ignores your hand).

Click here to view the embedded video.

They can’t make those features available yet, though:

We plan to release this capability as a free software library so it can be included in any application. However, this may not be possible for a while as the library now uses a private function call to access the required information.

We hope the UIKit framework can be updated to make the required information available, but there are no guarantees this will ever happen. In the meantime, we hope the video provides some insight into what is possible on this amazing piece of hardware.

I have a cramped wrist that’s eagerly awaiting word that Apple’s willing to either accommodate Ten One or release their own solution.

(Thanks to Mike Kelly for pointing me to this!)

Postscript: There’s a darkly funny irony that a new feature of the iPad – the successor to Apple’s failed Newton, the original PDA – might be called “Palm rejection.”

You get them on your doorstep every year, whether you’ve asked for them or not. They’re possibly the world’s biggest piece of physical spam (in the unsolicited marketing sense).

And for a growing number of people, they’re useless, because an online search is easier, faster and – if you’re using a service like Yelp – social, drawing on recommendations from your personal network.

The only way to stop receiving the Yellow Pages is via their opt-out web service. It only takes a minute, and you’ll be free of them for the next two years. In support of Dave’s campaign, I whipped up this cartoon on my iPhone. Feel free to share and repost (and if you wanted to include a credit to me, that would be ducky).

By the way, if you’re American, that opt-out link won’t work for you… but you may find this list of contact info useful.

In the three years since then, I think I’ve improved steadily. Certainly I’ve become more confident, and today I’ll tackle visual ideas that would have scared the bejeezus out of me back in 2007. I’m using colour from time to time, I’m experimenting with light, and I’m having fun.

So I’ve learned to answer the “am I good enough?” voice with a “Yes.” (It’s no accident that the voice asks “Am I good enough?” and not “Is this cartoon good enough?” But that’s a subject for another blog post. Or a therapy session.)

I am good enough.

But I want to be better. I want to be really good. I want to be great.

According to a study cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, true greatness requires an investment of at least 10,000 hours.

I’m always suspicious of rules like this, but provided they’re taken with a fist-sized grain of salt, they can be a pretty useful spur to action. So with the 10,000-hour rule, we’re looking at the equivalent of 250 40-hour weeks… or five solid years of full-time activity. (I picture the point where you complete your 10,000th hour as kind of like levelling up in a good video game. I hope the cinematic is worth it.)

It’s hard to think of many areas where I’ve put in those kind of hours. Fretting: definitely. Social web: I must be getting close.

Cartooning: …Well, let’s find out.

Here are some very rough estimates from different periods in my life:

• Middle school: I started cartooning for the first time, spurred by a friend’s cartoons of a skateboarder who defeated evil teachers and vice-principals alike. But it was sporadic. Let’s say… 20 hours.
• Grade 9: I started to cartoon in earnest. (Here, too, a friend played a role – my only real cartooning buddy, who lived up Bearbrook Road from me. We shared a common conviction that the 2B pencil was the only worthy instrument for any true artist.) Even then, though, I probably averaged two hours a week. Call it… 100 hours.
• Grades 10-13: I cartooned every chance I had. Larry Kry, my physics teacher, gave me a Koh-i-Noor technical pen to encourage me (and used my cartoons in some of his lessons). I probably cartooned an hour or more a day, less during the summer holidays. Let’s say… five hours a week, over two hundred weeks. That’s… 1,000 hours.
• University: Probably the same pace, especially for the year I was running cartoons in the Carleton U student newspaper, The Charlatan. That’s six years… 1,500 hours.
• Journalism school: A lot less free time for that year. Say… 100 hours.
• Operation Dismantle: My first job out of university involved very little cartooning, although I did some on the side. Let’s call it… 100 hours.
• Parliament Hill: Three and a half years, some cartooning. Maybe an hour a week. To be conservative… 150 hours.
• Queen’s Park: One and a half years, virtually no cartooning. Seriously. Ditto my years in Victoria, and my freelance and NOW Communications years. Let’s be conservative and call it zero.
• Noise to Signal: Three years, starting slow and with some lulls along the way, probably averaging four hours a week. That’s… 600 hours.

The final total: just north of 3,500 hours.

Say I want to reach that 10,000-hour mark in the next three years. That’s about 2,150 hours per year… or more than a 40-hour work week, with no lunch breaks and no vacations. If I want to do that in the next decade, it’s 650 hours per year, or 13 hours a week. That sounds more likely. (So for everyone who’s planning on sticking with me and the cartoon through to 2020, good news: it’s going to be great.)

How about you? Have you hit the 10,000-hour mark on something you want to be great at?

I’d imagined a lot of things 30 years ago when I was cartooning in high school. But this really wasn’t one of them.

And the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association has announced the nominees for their annual Joe Shuster Awards (named, one assumes, for comedian Frank Shuster’s cousin… oh, wait…).

The Canadians, forward-thinking folks that we are, have a webcomic category. And the nominees are:

Attila Adorjany – Metaphysical Neuroma
Kate Beaton – Hark! A Vagrant
Andy Belanger – Bottle of Awesome and Raising Hell
Rene Engström – Anders Loves Maria
Karl Kerschl – The Abominable Charles Christopher
Gisèle Lagacé and David Lumsdon – Eerie Cuties and Ménage à 3
Tara Tallan – Galaxion
Steve Wolfhard – Cat Rackham

I intend to check all of them out; I hope you’ll do the same – especially Kate and Rene, who broke my heart with the conclusion of ALM last month.

(Glass ceiling alert: Note that the Shusters’ webcomics is the only category nearing gender parity; only a handful of women are scattered through the others in either list. Look at the lists of juries, jury chairs and directors, and you’ll get a picture of a still-overwhelmingly male-dominated world. I’m kind of stunned.)

I believe what I’m saying is, I ROCK.

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

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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

“Clean” coal holiday card

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