A cartoon about how we live & work in a digital world
It was the okay-est of times, it was the meh-est of times.
From the election of the first American social media president… to a nod to social media from the mainstreamiest of mainstream media (Oxford Dictionary, for god’s sake!)… it’s been a big, tumultuous sprawling toddler of a year, prone to tantrums and potty accidents but adorable nonetheless.
Here, then, is 2009 the way it was meant to be remembered… in doodles.
‘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.
I’ll easily spend more time hunting for a discount code than I will thinking about the thing I’m actually buying.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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>
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!
Also, my page on TripAdvisor.
There are organizations out there embracing social media with open arms, open hearts and open minds.
But others aren’t nearly as welcoming. And if you’re working for such an organization, you’ve probably felt a little like a space alien when you try to advance even the most modest of social media projects: “See, if we had a Twitter feed, then we could monitor customer service issues and resp-” “Twitter?! Why, it’s full of viruses, spam, pornography and Ashton Kutcher! Speak to me no more of this apostasy!” Which means you, my friend, are what I’ve come to call a stranded evangelist: a stranger in a strange land.
Chances are you spend your days banging your head against the brick wall of an organizational culture of fear, hierarchy and entrenched power, and your nights tweeting your frustration to friends living with the same pain.
There are ways of changing your stranded status: building trust and alliances within your organization, going for the smallest of small wins and expanding from there, gaining insight into your organization’s strategic goals so you can find both pain points and sweet spots where social media can help. But while you’re waiting for those efforts to take off, you can at least take some comfort in the knowledge that you have company.
So the next time you’re proposing a Facebook Page or a blogger outreach initiative, and getting the kind of reaction usually reserved for stories of alien abduction (or, worse, getting the same kind of probing often featured prominently in those stories), then just smile, nod, and remember:
We are not alone.
Oh! Oh! And Second Life’s point-click-and-buff-up feature!
I’d feel better about this cartoon if not for the fact that it was my only contribution to Blogger Action Day.
I drew this one in honour of our launch of Open SoSi – the open-sourcing of Social Signal’s intellectual property.
The new FTC guidelines for disclosure by bloggers have stirred up some anger among bloggers accustomed to getting free stuff and blogging about it without the heavy hand of governmental Big Brother yadda yadda – oh, you can finish the sentence yourself.
I can respect that it might get people’s backs up to suggest that their integrity is for sale, especially for such low prices. (Although, the last time I checked the exchange rate, integrity was down sharply against the dollar… and against the free chewing gum.) Then again, I’ve seen enough obviously feigned enthusiasm in some “reviews” to convince me that at least a few bloggers are happy to rent their voices – and readers – to any marketing department with a gift card and blogger outreach program.
All easy enough for me to say, of course; I have a job and make a pretty good living (touch wood). I can imagine that I might be tempted to modify my views if money was short and a blog review could put another meal on the table for my kids. Then again, for every blogger out there who’s struggling to make ends meet, there are countless more blog readers – the people the marketers are really trying to reach. Don’t they deserve to know about the relationship between product and blogger when they assess what they’re reading?
I’m a fan of disclosure, and while I haven’t examined the FTC guidelines in detail, I support the idea in principle.
But it’s interesting that the FTC went after bloggers rather than, say, entertainment writers who don’t mention the expensive junkets that movie studios take them on. A blogger who has to disclose that she or he received a free package of hot dog weiners has every right to feel burned after dropping fifty bucks to take the family to the latest “THRILLING!” “FANTASTIC!” “SURE-FIRE WINNER!”
I’m packing up my Wacom Cintiq, some Pigma Micron markers, a whack of paper and my camera… and I’m off to the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on Thursday in Mountain View. (Full disclosure: Oh, god, where to begin?)
I’ll be cartoon-blogging about it in not-quite-real-time (unless I wind up doing something clever with, say, UStream), and uploading doodles as fast as the wireless connection will let me.
Note: this week’s cartoon is in full glorious color. We spare no expense to bring you the very latest in technology here at ReadWriteWeb’s cartoon corner. Think this RGB thing could catch on?
I’m not sure what it is about social media. Here we are in this field that’s still emerging/exploding (or “explerging”, to use the trademarked term from my upcoming book, premium podcast, and $4,000-a-seat webinar) and constantly morphing. Yet there seems to be this powerful drive to lay down absolute laws about what works and what doesn’t.
Blogging? You should be posting twice a day. No, actually that’s too often; it abuses people’s attention. Wait, actually that’s not often enough; other people will eat your lunch. Actually, blogging’s dead, so move to Twitter, where you absolutely must follow everyone who follows you, unless you absolutely mustn’t, so don’t, unless you do. And when they do follow you, sending them an automatic direct message will either lift you into the Twitter elite or damn you to eternal ridicule. Possibly both.
I’ve fallen prey to this temptation myself, so I say all of this with a certain amount of chagrin. But I hope I’m on the road to reform: embracing my uncertainty, and vacillating with confidence.
(By the way, the title of Chris Brogan’s smashing blog post inspired the Neanderthal’s line in this cartoon.)
Wow: a furry, a dominatrix and a browser rendering joke. I can’t wait to see what Adsense throws up for this one.
