(woman holding unicorn) Now the bad news. You're going to have to find housing in the Bay Area.

Unicorn Hunters

May 24, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

Pitch: “Unicorn Hunters” — This reality show will follow the exciting, thrill-a-minute world of venture capitalists as they pore over income statements, commission reports and conduct hours-long, gruelling interviews with founders and key staff. (Note: we’ll need a LOT of clever camera work to maintain visual interest.)

I wonder just how concerned VCs are about housing affordability in the Bay Area (and in my home city of Vancouver), where both home ownership and rental costs are spiralling to prohibitive levels. The real estate bubble makes it a lot harder to attract those talented creatives that Silicon Valley supposedly values so highly, as they face punishing commutes from the far-flung communities they can still afford to live in. And it risks turning big swaths of urban landscape into deserts of affluence, feasible only for a thin, homogenous slice of the population.

(In lieu of the next two paragraphs, I’ll just say “Richard Florida.”)

Ding!

May 20, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

I’ve railed against notifications before. Some aren’t so bad; I usually want to know about incoming text messages (unless it’s my son demanding clarification and amendment of the household Minecraft rules). But most of them are so awful it’s an affront that the apps have the audacity to ask permission to send them.

I’m happy to report the situation has become incrementally better on my devices. That’s mainly because I’ve developed the habit of automatically refusing any app’s request to deliver the little time-and-attention vampires.

And I don’t just tap “No” when Super Beer Pong Ultra Pro demands the right to get my attention at any time. (God forbid I should miss “Daily challenge! Tap repeatedly on something and get a small piece of imaginary currency! This is certainly not a behavioural experiment being conducted on humanity by aliens!”). I stab at that button with the Index Finger of Righteousness while bellowing “No, screw you!”

This, on reflection, is probably why they won’t let me bring my phone into my daughter’s performances at school concerts any more.

(woman to business partner) I'm beat. Can we just make money today, and disrupt some other time?

Disruption fatigue

May 18, 2016 1 Comment Purchase print

Disruption of established business narratives and shaking the dinosaurs out of their complacency all the time—my god, it must be exhausting.

Take a break from all the disrupting and get some rest, people. You know who else had disruptors? Klingons. Grumpiest bastards in the galaxy, and now you know why.

(writer on Skype call) Yes, yes, I'm aware of the irony of missing my deadline for the piece on task management software.

Wanted: a task manager manager

April 25, 2016 No Comments

Last night, I finally watched the Mythbusters’ finale, in which they revisited one episode’s explosive destruction of a cement truck. The myth they’d been testing: that you can clean off hardened cement inside the truck’s mixing barrel by throwing in a stick of dynamite.

They concluded that you can clear out some debris, but not a big slab. (The episode ended with lots of little pieces of truck scattered across the terrain; the finale used about six times the amount of high explosive and ended with much smaller pieces of truck.)

I think of that when I think of task management software. I have a bad habit of treating it like the stick of dynamite I toss into my congealed pile of to-dos and half-dones. I always hope the detonation will somehow sort them into a cogent framework of tasks that — and this is where the software always lets me down — will then do themselves.

Thing is, you need a methodology. Many tools have one (or more) in mind: a lot of task management software is explicitly built around the Getting Things Done methodology, for instance. With others, a methodology is just assumed. But a lot of it (hello, Apple Reminders) just kind of lets you flail around, unless you impose some kind of order yourself. Even worse, if one of your guilty pleasures happens to be exploring software, you can quickly head down the rabbit hole of trying out every new task manager that comes along.

The things I’ve learned are:

First, no tool is likely save you from yourself.
Second, every tool will require you to make at least minor changes to your workflow so you can capture, track and report tasks as you go.
And third, the right tool for you won’t require you to bend over backward to accommodate its idiosyncrasies.

By the way, in case you’re just dying to know, my weapons of choice these days are Reminders, OmniFocus and Vitamin R. I like using OmniFocus to break big jobs into smaller ones, and Vitamin R to keep me focused on days when I have a whole lot of scattered, discrete tasks.

So today’s cartoon is dedicated to two people who’ve helped me steer clear of the rabbit hole, at least to some degree, and small-g-small-t-small-d get things done:

Alexandra Samuel, whose deep dives into these things put me to shame (and by the way, just assume every cartoon is at least partly dedicated to her), and
and Mike Vardy of Productivityist, whose podcast episodes and blog posts were the carefully-calibrated stick of dynamite I needed a few years ago (the truck survived).

And with that, I can check “publish cartoon” off my to-do list.

Pitch (v.) – to throw out

April 17, 2016 No Comments

Oh, pitches. You get so many as a blogger, yet it’s been so long since I’ve had a good one. And these days it’s rarely even “Here’s an interesting angle on a cool topic”; instead, the pitch is “Post my content” or “Post a link to my content.”

And the stuff is consistently awful content-farmed dreck, created purely to generate leads or sway search engine algorithms—with exactly the amount of heart and soul that implies.

Sometimes it’s a guest post they want me to run, with a few keywords including a link to some site they’re promoting. (“We have posts on a wide range of topics,” they’ll sometimes say. If I want to feel good about humanity, I’ll sometimes pretend that’s their way of apologizing for not researching what my site is actually about.)

Lately the MacGuffin of choice is an infographic, one they’re just so sure my readers will find fascinating. True, I don’t blog about student debt financing and probably never will, but they assure me you’ll be riveted by their collage of stats, charts and stock illustrations.

The high-water mark for pitches so far was one that came to me in my capacity as The NOW Group’s Director of Integrated Communications. “As a Director of Integr, we’re sure you’ll be interested,” the email gushed. Apparently the spammer’s database allocated only a miserly 18 characters to the field “sucker’s job title”.

(Let me make something clear. I take integr very, very seriously. I studied in the School of Integr at Carleton Univer, and being Director of Integr is the fulfilment of a lifelong dr. So kindly don’t use it with such casual disregard, please and thank-you.)

Here’s the sad truth. Unless it’s directly related to the stuff I write about, and unless it’s really useful to the folks who read my blog, I am never going to link to your infographic. Never.

And in response to the spammers’ “Why not share this with your readers?” I offer the same answer Arthur Dent once did: because I want to keep them.

Your honour, the defense pleads YOLO

April 11, 2016 No Comments

“Follow your passion” was a pretty popular piece of advice in the early days of the social web, as a new sense of limitless possibility swept the world. Well, North America. Okay, Silicon Valley. Okay, already-prosperous people in Silicon Valley.

My point is… that now there’s a passion backlash. (Packlash? Backpash?) Some have argued that “follow your passion” is a pretty self-centered way of looking at the world, or that it has little guidance for someone whose passion and skills lie along very divergent paths. (Ask anyone who’s heard me play keyboards.)

Others point out that many of us don’t have that one big passion in life. Just as the fox knows many little things but a hedgehog knows one big thing, your search for that all-consuming passion may lead you to overlook—and miss—the smaller, quieter satisfactions in life.

(Or it may lead you to write Twitter and LinkedIn bios that claim you’re passionate about {{insert sales keywords here}}, which nobody believes about you. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop it.)

Maybe the way we square that circle is by looking not only at our passions for doing, but for the kind of impact we want to have in the world. There are a thousand roads to truth, beauty, love and justice, and you may not be passionate about all of them—but you probably have at least some strong feelings about the destination.

(one woman to another, on board a giant yacht) And to think, none of this would be possible if you hadn’t tried using the Konami Code on your banking app.

The Good Ship UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA

March 22, 2016 1 Comment

Gather round, kids, and I’ll tell you a tale of a time when you had to haul your ass to the bank before they closed if you wanted to make a deposit or get some cash for the weekend, a time without a single debit card, ATM or banking app. (I think I may base a young-adult dystopian science fiction novel in that universe.)

But why would you bank at a bank if you could bank at a credit union instead? And why would you bank at just any credit union if you could bank at Vancity, home of William Azaroff, their VP of Community Investment?

William was one of our first clients during my Social Signal days. He’s a friend and a true visionary, and today’s cartoon goes out to him.

(Never heard of the Konami Code? Here y’go.)

E-book cartoon shows (kid holding paper book) It's okay, I guess. I just miss the tactile experience of swiping to turn the page.

A real page-turner

March 18, 2016 2 Comments

My reading has reached the point now where there are some books I prefer to read on paper (e.g. mystery novels), some on an e-book reader (e.g. science fiction and other novels), and some on a tablet, so I can see the diagrams in glorious colour (e.g. software guides).

And I suspect this may be where we land for quite a while, with our reading spread across several platforms depending on which one does the job we need it to. Print books aren’t dead yet, and won’t be for a long time.

Print newspapers, mind you—I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, in Canada at least, the days of the printed local urban daily newspaper are coming to an end. (The economics in the U.S. are a little different, I know; the legacy of CanWest/Postmedia debt casts a long shadow over the whole industry north of the border.) My wild-ass, irresponsible prediction? The costs of printing and distribution are going to sink them within (takes breath, looks to the ceiling) three years, except for maybe the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

And then in three more years, we’ll all be laughing that we ever thought e-readers and tablets were going to last… and then go back to reading J.K. Rowling’s latest, laser-projected onto our retinal implants.

Making allowances

March 13, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

“Here’s your allowance: 150 lucky coins for Angry Birds Epic, 10 jewels for Playmobil Pirates, and a box of keys for Farmville. Oh, and a ten-dollar bill.” Kid stares at ten-dollar bill: “What the heck do I do with this?”

Okay, we’re not quite there yet. But I give it five years before you start hearing business updates on the news about how Gems are trading against Gold Coins.

💰

I drew this and six other cartoons about parents, kids and tech for Alexandra Samuel’s session at SXSW 2016, The Myth of the Family Tech Market. It’s based on her two-year study of how more than 10,000 North American parents manage their kids’ interactions with digital technology.

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

Drop the Playstation Vita and back away

March 12, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

It’s amazing the stuff that gets into your house despite your best efforts to shape the influences in your kids’ lives. Barbies. Disney. Pokémon. Tambourines.

When my kids were younger, the main vector was well-meaning relatives giving presents. But now that they have a social circle, it’s their friends who act as the conduit for all that’s awful, counter to our values or just unhelpful. Thanks for bringing that Nintendo 3DS over, Miles. Thanks a crapload.

And the truth is, you can’t shield your kids completely, and you can’t shield them forever. Your best, most durable hope is to instill strong values and foster a rapier capacity for media criticism.

And maybe install one of those TSA body scanners at your front door.

🚨

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

Would you code it in the rain? Would you code it on a train?

March 12, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

Commodore PET I love the mania today for teaching kids to code. I’m glad it’s a lot easier than it was when I first started stringing commands together.

When computers (in the form of the venerable Commodore PET) first came to Gloucester High School, I got the impression most of my teachers were scrambling to stay ahead of the geekier students, learning various BASIC commands a few days (or hours) before the more highly-motivated among us did.

I mostly learned it on my own time: staying very late at the school, worrying the hell out of my parents, entering line after line of code from magazines, and then tinkering with it to see what would change. Nearly everyone I know thought it was a little freakish of me. But something about this seemed incredibly compelling, even important—despite the fact that mostly what I was keying in were instructions for playing Hammurabi (“I beg to report to you, in the year 3, 0 people starved, 6 came to the city…”).

But something sticks with me from my Grade 10 Informatics class: a transparency my teacher threw onto the overhead projector that read “The man who knows how will have a job. The man who knows why will be his boss.”

(Okay, two things stick with me, and one of them is just how casual the exclusion of women from language was when I was a kid. )

Coding is very much a how activity. And I think it’s good to get some of that knowledge under your belt, and to understand the core concepts beneath it. If you’re into it, great; go a lot further.

But as Jeff Atwood wrote a few months ago, people drive cars all the time without knowing how fuel injection works; “By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair.”

Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people – well . . . you’ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out. And from my perspective, the sooner you start, the better.

I want my children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically. Where did that Wikipedia page come from? Who wrote it? What is their background? What are their sources?

Learn to investigate. Be critical. Don’t just accept opinions you saw on Facebook or some random web page. Ask for credible data, facts and science.

That, to my mind, helps to get at the why. And with all due respect to my Informatics teacher, that goes a lot further than who gets the corner office. It’s part of being a citizen: not just in the formal sense, and not even just in the civic sense, but in the sense of someone who participates in the world around them – on- and offline – and helps in some small way to shape it.

Teaching our kids about variable scope in Java? That helps them become programmers. Helping them with the “why” – that helps them become adults.

(Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr)

⌨️

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

+3 charisma, +5 combat, -4 academics

March 11, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

When you think about it, doesn’t a really effective guild leader have many of the skills and attributes a good college or university ought to be looking for?

BTW, as I was devising witty banter about how the character sheet should become the new academic transcript, I came across two actual cases of video-gaming scholarships. Okay, so eSports are no threat to the supremacy of the football or basketball scholarship yet. That day could come.

And when it does, I hope it has absolutely nothing to do with the NCAA.

🏈

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

Grounded

March 11, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

There’s a lot of debate, for good reasons, around imposing consequences when kids’ behaviour doesn’t meet parents’ expectations. And when it comes to restricting their access to digital tech, there’s an added wrinkle: our kids may be able to circumvent them.

Sometimes it’s ingenuity on their part. Necessity is the mother of invention, and heaven help the obstacles placed between a child and their Minecraft time. Sometimes it’s just parental sleep-deprivation-induced stupidity… like the time I muttered my iPhone passcode out loud while unlocking the device for my son.

But I can already see that a third factor will soon come into play: the kids just plain knowing more than I do. This whole push to teach kids to code sounds like a great idea until your child roots your laptop from their Speak ‘n’ Spell.

I know, I know: we’re all supposed to be raising our kids in rural communes, and the only “devices” they should ever need are a butter churn and a sheep shear. But I’m more from the parenting school where the only response I expect to “Fetch me the switch” is “16- or 24-port?”

🔐

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

And once you add in our 14-year-old’s ransomware revenue…

March 10, 2016 No Comments Purchase print

Maybe the new “My child is an honour student” bumper sticker reads “My kid charted in the App Store’s Lifestyle category”.

And maybe the new RRSP (or “IRA” for my American friends) is investing in coding lessons for your kids in the hopes that their royalties will allow you to retire sometime before the age of 80.

🤑

Find out more about Alex’s work around digital parenting here.

(parent to child) Sure, it starts with having your own phone. But soon you're on 4chan, playing the Knockout Game and recruiting other kids for ISIS.

Even worse, it leads to in-app purchases

March 10, 2016 No Comments

Skim the media headlines, and there seem to be only two possibilities when it comes to parents, kids and technology. Either

Parents should shield their kids from all screens until the age of 30, lest they become distracted, lazy and incapable of forming memories more complex than a 140-character message. Or,
Learning to code will solve everything from youth homelessness to the mumps.

(Bonus points if you can find a writer whose byline has appeared under both kinds of headline.)

My wife Alexandra Samuel has studied the way parents tackle their kids’ relationship with technology over several years now. Her two-year study of more than 10,000 North American parents has some fascinating findings that she covered at South by Southwest, in a session dubbed The Myth of the Family Tech Market.

Alex has found that parents tend to fall into one of three broad groups: limiters, who try to minimize their kids’ use of technology; enablers, who give their kids more or less free rein when it comes to screens and devices; and mentors, who take an active role in guiding their kids onto the Internet. (Here’s a handy overview.)

I drew seven new cartoons about parenting in the digital age for her presentation. Drawing is easy; digital parenting is hard &emdash; we’ve found it tremendously challenging with our own kids. Parents have to sift through mountains of wildly conflicting opinions, suggestions, warnings and prescriptions. And there are plenty of people ready to condemn you loudly and publicly for whatever technology choices you end up making.

So I hope it’s clear these cartoons are meant with a lot of love. Parents are making hard choices every day based on incomplete information, being pulled in eighty different directions by people trying to sell them a product, a service or an ideology… and we’re expected to do it with confidence and certainty.

The truth is, confidence is in scarce supply and certainty is just plain dangerous. We’re all stumbling through this, and a little compassion and mutual respect around conflicting choices will go a long way.

You two have to find a better way to communicate than open letters on Medium.

Open season on open letters

March 5, 2016 No Comments

I’m in no position to dump on people for posting open letters. I posted a kind of manifesto (the open letter’s cousin who never acknowledges it at family reunions) yesterday to my blog. (If you’re interested, it’s The Presentation Audience’s Bill of Rights.)

But there sure seem to be a lot of open letters out there, and Medium is the place to post them. Open letters to Twitter, to millennials, to CEOs, to mayors, to fans, even just to people looking for love.

And on their heels—because everything online phenomenon has to spawn its own immediate metashadow—are open letters about open letters.

Many of these letters say a lot more about the people who write them than about the addressees, in ways the writers probably didn’t expect—hello, Tech Bro! Sometimes the brilliant rant that seemed so clever when you pushed “Publish” at 2:30 am suddenly reads as horrifically mean-spirited at 9:00 am over coffee.

Anyway, if you’re writing an open letter trashing someone or some class of people, and you don’t want to be the next mascot for coldhearted pettiness, here’s my advice:

If you’re replying to another open letter, read it. Really read it. Too many open reply writers seem to be strip-mining their source material for vulnerabilities, and ignoring the context around them.
Put yourself in the position of the people you’re addressing. (And that doesn’t mean replying in a snide, high-pitched voice while rolling your eyes.) Dig deep for your most compassionate self, and try to make their case as best you can. Now reread your letter, and rewrite it.
Make it clear to whom you’re addressing it. And don’t address an open letter to a lazy stereotype, like “millennials”, and then go railing against their sense of entitlement, despite the fact that they’re a very diverse group of people facing some of the most daunting…
…—dammit, I feel an open letter coming on.

One last tip for everyone writing these things: you want it to really be open? Use a Creative Commons license. Let people share it.

And good luck, Talia Jane.

(guy in hoodie to devil in business attire) So that's a no, but let's touch base again after I see how the Series A round goes.

Fallen angel investor

February 16, 2016 2 Comments

We’re now inviting a very exclusive circle of investors into Noise to Signal. We’re accepting only those with vision and foresight… the kind of vision that will lead them to embrace, as their sole return on investment, the satisfaction of knowing I spent every dime on art supplies and drawing apps.

(Mom to daughter with sick dog) I know it’s hard. But Rex is very old and sick, and the most humane thing we can do is end his suffering, and let him get acquired by Yahoo.

Yahoothenasia

February 10, 2016 No Comments

“So, Jimmy. Looks like you been a bad boy, rattin’ us out to the cops.”

“It wasn’t me, Pete, I swear—”

“Cut the crap, Jimmy. It was you. And now you’re gonna pay the price.”

“Wh-what are you gonna do? Shoot me?”

“Jimmy, Jimmy. This ain’t New York. We’re the Silicon Valley mafia. Killin’ ya would be too fast. So instead, we’re gonna sell ya to Yahoo.”

“…What? I don’t understand…”

“Then lemme spell it out for ya. First, you’re gonna languish, starved for cash to develop and expand. Then your top talent’s gonna take the hint and start clearin’ out. Pretty soon your user base’ll catch on, and it’s gonna get mighty lonely.

“You’ll die, Jimmy – piece by piece, whether they finally just give you the ol’ pink slip or cut you up and sell you for parts. By the time they’re finished with ya, you’ll be wishin’ to God I’d have just put a bullet in your head.”

“Do I… do I at least get options and a signing bonus?”

“Of course. We ain’t monsters.”

(frustrated parent to teen in kitchen) We've given you every opportunity a kid could want. But have you had even ONE breakout viral hit?"

Pull your weight, kid.

January 26, 2016 No Comments

Let’s be honest. Kids are a pretty big drain economically for the first two decades or so of their lives. It’s the main reason to live well past the age of infirmity: recouping some of that investment.

Someday soon, I’m going to write a guide to the social-media-optimized family, the one geared to maximizing your revenue stream in today’s fast-moving online world. And I’ll spill all my tips: tying allowance to Klout scores, for instance, and how to gently tell an underperformer that they have to either meet this quarter’s targets or find a new family.

(an inspirational speaker, to her audience) I want you to say, Yeah! My life is one big non-semantic div! And I want my life’s code to start validating!

I’m OK, You’re W3C.

January 12, 2016 1 Comment

So. Many (eight) years ago, I drew a cartoon that came to me while I was at Web Directions North. The inspiration was a keynote by one of my web heroes, Molly Holzschlag, titled Crimes Against Web Standards. And it was great.

So I drew that cartoon and posted it, and Molly reposted it on her blog with some very kind words — and the comment “I had this passing thought that the guy should be female and have curly hair, but that’s just me.”

I didn’t take that as criticism at all — there’s a pretty strong implied wink in her comment — but it still stung to realize what I’d done: for the last eight years, I’ve wondered off and on why the hell I drew that speaker as a guy when a woman inspired it. Now, assuming that any speaker at a tech event must be male is not a rare ailment, but I’m not proud that I have the odd flare-up myself.

In the meantime, I’ve followed Molly’s career and web standards advocacy, as well as a grave health crisis (one that should shake anyone’s belief in the robust integrity of Arizona’s health insurance system) with respect and admiration in equal measure.

When I saw Molly pop up in my mentions a while ago, I finally decided that I’ve had enough of that cartoon hanging out there, and I’ve redrawn it. No, the woman in that cartoon isn’t necessarily Molly Holzschlag circa 2007; she’s just a very dynamic, inspiring speaker who is female and has curly hair. (This disclaimer is necessary not because I don’t want to draw Molly, but because my record as a caricaturist is pretty hit-and-miss, which I suspect this cartoon establishes nicely.)

Thanks for all you’ve done for the web, Molly. This cartoon may be eight years late, but your work is no less timely.

(two people looking at a burning iPhone) All I did was ask Siri whether Ancillary Justice passes the Bechdel Test, and then my phone started getting warm, and then...

AppleCare never saw Ann Leckie coming

January 6, 2016 No Comments

If you’ve read Ancillary Justice and enjoyed the hell out of it, then yay: you’re my kind of people. Maybe you’ll enjoy this little parody I wrote a while ago.

If you haven’t read the Nebula and Hugo award-winning novel Ancillary Justice and its sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, then a) this cartoon won’t make a lot of sense, and b) do I ever have a treat waiting for you, especially if you like brilliantly imagined literary entertaining-as-hell space opera.

This cartoon has been bopping around in my mind (and more recently my sketchbook) for a while now. I was kind of delighted, kind of chagrined, when I saw that author Ann Leckie tweeted pretty much the same joke yesterday. But then…

https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/684436984060854273

https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/684440806590164992

Awfully decent of you, citizen.

And now, a few tweaks to the cartoon idea later, here we are.

Quick briefing if none of this makes sense to you: Ancillary Justice‘s narrator usually refers the story’s characters as “she” regardless of their gender. And the Bechdel Test (or Bechdel-Wallace Test) arose from a great Alison Bechdel comic where one character says she only sees movies that have at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man. Oh, and iPhones get warm if they work hard.

By the way, I do believe this cartoon passes the Bechdel-Wallace Test. :)

(USS Enterprise being pulled into a vortex) It's no use, Captain - we're caught in a sales funnel.

Dammit, Jim.

November 23, 2015 No Comments

The most pernicious thing about marketing these days is how the lines of commerce and social interaction have blurred. You may think you’re having a pleasant online conversation with someone; they think you’re agreeing to be bombarded with email offers until you succumb and hand over a credit card number.

My wife and I have had this happen with salespeople before, where we’d all spend time together talking about anything and everything other than the transaction at hand because they felt a real connection with us, a genuine, human meeting of the min—… oh, wait, you aren’t ready to make a purchase? Ciao. Out of the sales funnel you go.

We should have known better. As a Toyota sales rep told us as he ushered us out the door once it became clear their lack of competitive financing was a deal-breaker, “getting coffee together sometime” doesn’t pay his mortgage. Fair enough.

But we weren’t any more naive than the countless folks out there interacting with brands and their happy, chatty online personas. All that banter is great, but at the end of the day, it had better convert enough of the banterers to justify itself. For many brands, conversation is Scheherezade, staving off its execution with sales instead of stories.

There’s nothing wrong with that, except we consumers forget that, and most businesses are perfectly happy to let us. And then once in a while we catch a jarring glimpse of the skull beneath the skin. All it takes is an obtusely crass use of sales copy or an unartful bit of fake urgency, and for a moment we remember that we only imagine we’re friends — that the relationship goes contact, lead, customer; not acquaintance, friend, BFF.

That’s when you realize you aren’t in a virtual coffee shop or digital agora, but instead in the cold, rapidly narrowing confines of a sales funnel, being pulled headline toward conversion. That term has always struck me as the kind of euphemism for “painful disintegration” that some authoritarian alien civilization would use—right up to the point where Kirk overthrew them and remolded their government into something more like the Riverside, Iowa town council.

I’d actually wonder how Kirk would react to the discovery that a relationship had all been an elaborate charade, except we already know: he’d cure the ambassador’s daughter of Vegan choriomeningitis. I like to think he’d also then unfollow the ambassador and delete his GideonNet profile.

(hiker in forest discovers Promoted tag, and thinks...) Well, shit.

Wait – why don’t we have DEmoted tweets?

October 27, 2015 No Comments

We’re really working hard to avoid saying the word “ad,” aren’t we? Promoted posts, tweets, accounts and hashtags; sponsored content; “Suggested for you” links…

And we aren’t just looking for euphemisms — we’re camouflaging ads as “native content,” with tiny little disclaimers engineered to be as easy as possible to miss while still providing plausible deniability to platforms and publishers.

The goal is to make advertising look as much as possible like authentic conversation. And when we get taken in — when we think we’re having a genuine conversation with someone, only to discover we’re being led down a sales funnel — then it diminishes our trust in conversation across the board.

That’s happened to me even in the BSM* Era.

My girlfriend (this was also the BWGM** Era) and I struck up a conversation with another couple in a bookstore, seemed to hit it off, and made a dinner date.

A few nights later, we arrived at the restaurant (Vij’s, by the way — if you’re ever in Vancouver, you have to go). First sign something was up: only the guy showed up.

Second sign: he brought out logotized binders with dividers five minutes into the conversation.

Here’s a pro tip about logos, binders and dividers: not one of them augurs well for a nascent friendship. Together, they sound alarm claxons.

Sure enough, out came the pitch for his multi-level marketing company. I don’t think he’d quite reached the part about downstream revenue before we’d knocked back our fizzy lemon drinks (be sure to order them, they’re transcendent) and headed for the door.

When the subject of sponsored content comes up, I often think of our dinner companion and the bereft expression on his face as we explained why we were leaving. I think he was genuinely hurt.

But so were we. If we’d known from the start what kind of conversation he wanted to have, that would have been one thing. But we’d been deceived, and no amount of rationalization (the tiny “Sponsored link” text is the 2015 version of “I just wanted to share this marvellous opportunity with you lovely people!”) can convince us otherwise.

Rescuing authenticity from the clutches of commercial exploitation is a big task… but maybe as a tiny first step, advertisers and publishers could bump the disclaimer text up a little. Increase the contrast. And make sure their audience knows just what garden path they’re about to stroll down.

Who knows? They might even go willingly, if it’s worth the walk.

Huh! Geekiness aside, I apparently have a Romantic-era sensibility bubbling away in my subconscious. This isn’t the first time I’ve juxtaposed the wonders of nature with the blandishments of civilization, whether it’s with sunsets, hikes or kayaking.

* Before Social Media
** Before We Got Married

(A barefoot woman and man, both without noses. The woman is speaking.) Apparently there's been another huge data breach. They got users' names, passwords, noses and shoes.

Once more unto the breach

October 24, 2015 No Comments

Another day, another data breach —this time with a British teleco called TalkTalk. Unlike the Ashley Madison breach, the very fact that someone’s profile is in their database isn’t damaging, but the personal information attached to that profile could be.

There’s a ton of good common-sense security advice out there for users (the folks we used to call “consumers”). Use a different password on every site. Use hard-to-guess passwords. Be careful of public Wi-Fi. Don’t have children.

That’s fine for locking up our own front doors. But how to protect ourselves when someone breaks into the bank vault and raids our safe deposit boxes? In terms of defending ourselves from third-party security breaches, there isn’t a lot of advice out there — other than “don’t share any more information than you have to.”

Unfortunately, many of the companies we deal with make sharing more data than necessary part of the price of doing business with them. And that’s not just the data they gather in a registration form; they track how we use their services relentlessly, and cross-reference that data with information from other services.

Everything they have on us is there on their servers, ready for an enterprising hacker to swoop in and harvest if the company fails to mount an adequate defence. There isn’t a lot you can do about that; we don’t even have a good sense of how well the companies we deal with are protecting our data, because they’re notoriously tight-lipped about their security practices, citing security concerns.

The key message is just “Trust us,” which doesn’t inspire confidence with the mounting pile of headlines suggesting many data warehouses aren’t impregnable fortresses so much as all-you-can-download buffets. That’s especially frustrating if you’re otherwise careful about protecting your privacy. It doesn’t do you a lot of good to cover your tracks if your partner in crime (or data) sings like a canary.

Worse yet, you don’t have to be a customer to run afoul of a company’s disregard for your privacy and security. In their quest for ever-harder-to-ignore ads, companies have embraced Flash-based tools that expose browsers to gaping security holes.

Which is why the breaches we’ve seen so far are probably just prologue. As Cory Doctorow put it, “Ashley Madison and the Office of Personnel Management weren’t the big leak-quake: they were the tremors that warned of the coming tsunami. Every day, every week, every month, there will be a mounting drumbeat of privacy disasters. By this time next year, it’s very likely that someone you know will have suffered real, catastrophic harm due to privacy breaches. Maybe it’ll be you.”

(CIA agent to assassin) We were going to give this job to Rabinovitch. But then we heard your podcast about untraceable fast-acting neurotoxins...

The Business of Podcasting 8: Killer episode

October 13, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the last in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin.

This is the final cartoon from The Business of Podcasting, and it’s a day past the usual Monday cycle. That’s because 1) Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada and while I normally wouldn’t not let that stop me, I thought it important to give Donna (a fellow Canuck) her day of rest; and 2) I really didn’t want it to end.

I loved drawing these, I loved sharing them with you — and I love podcasting.

Again, check out the book. Donna and Steve won’t claim it’ll launch you into an exciting (if brief) new career as a covert assassin, but I am 100% happy to guarantee it.

(Student in detention class, speaking into a microphone) Welcome to episode 67 of DetentionCast. I'm your host, Susie, and with me as always is Vice-Principal Weasel-Face.

The Business of Podcasting 7: After-school special

October 5, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the seventh in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

There isn’t necessarily a great business model for speaking truth to power, Susie, but podcasting at least makes it a lot less expensive.

One of my favourite podcasts on that count is Women at Warp, “a twice-monthly podcast where four women talk about Star Trek, its representations of women, contributions of women behind the scenes, and other fun Trek topics.” If you’re on the geekier side of the fence (heck, you’re here, right?), and you’ve been looking for a podcast that’s great fun while treating issues like underrepresentation, exclusion and overt misogyny seriously, I hope you’ll give it a listen.

(And I’m not just saying because I have an outstanding debt of a Trek-themed cartoon to co-host Jarrah Hodge. That said, I do indeed have an outstanding debt of a Trek-themed cartoon to co-host Jarrah Hodge.)

👭⭐🚀

We’re getting down to the wire on this run of cartoons; I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I did drawing them. This was my second-favorite of the bunch. Next week: my personal fave!

(two people watching a mushroom cloud) This is probably our very last chance to check our Klout scores.

You’re now the most influential person in the world. Briefly.

September 30, 2015 No Comments

I was a baby in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, a young child when Nixon floated Madman Theory, a high school student when I first learned just how many nuclear weapons there were in the world, and a university student when Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative threatened to destabilize the nuclear balance… and my first full-time job was with a pro-disarmament NGO.

Funny that I don’t often think about the threat of global nuclear war as a formative influence in my life. (Maybe kids today will be a little more self-aware, and able to see how the prospect of catastrophic climate change shaped their lives.) But there’s no question it was.

One happy side effect is that it means I find end-of-the-world scenarios intriguing, and that led me to read The Last Policeman trilogy. (That wording looks weird, but less so than “the The Last Policeman trilogy.”) Humanity discovers the Earth is about to get shmucked by a comet, and the three novels trace the six months before impact, as seen through the eyes of a police detective who insists on solving crimes even though, dude, comet.

It’s terrific, and if you like really good procedurals plus a dose of impending doom, wow, is this the series for you.

And while it isn’t apocalyptic, I’m excited as hell for October 6 and the release of Ancillary Mercy, the final novel in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. This is wildly inventive stuff that raises some fascinating questions about identity and what it means to be alive… when it isn’t diving into nerve-gnawing suspense and gripping action, with a protagonist unlike any I’ve ever encountered.

If I had time to read just one last book before the world ended (and couldn’t spend the time with Alex and the kids because, I don’t know, I was in another city, and all the planes were grounded and communications were down — try not to overthink this, Rob), this would be the one.

Got some recommendations of your own? Just published a haunting trilogy set in the waning hours of civilization’s twilight? Plug away in the comments.

Podcast consultant to client: It's a standard per-produced-minute rate. Unless you let me put a cool Darth Vader effect on your voice, in which case I do it for free.

The Business of Podcasting 6: Rate sheet

September 28, 2015

Here’s the sixth in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

I don’t believe so much in the I’m-dying-to-do-this discount as I do in the I’d-rather-eat-ground-glass-than-do-this premium. Basically, if a project looks like it’ll be a soul-crushing slog from start to finish, then add enough to the estimate to cover the costs of therapy, a few weeks off and a holiday in Kaua‘i, including carbon offsets.

Let me know if that works for you, and I’ll try it too.

Meanwhile… I’ve been doing a ton of blogging about speechwriting lately. (You may have heard of this hot new “public speaking” phenomenon. It’s like podcasting, except with a live audience and usually no sound effects, unless they’ve miked you badly and you have indigestion — speaking purely hypothetically.) If it’s something you do, or something you’ve thought you might want to try, then by all means have a gander and let me know what you think.

(dog in front of a microphone, to another dog) You know how on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog? Not the case with podcasting.

The Business of Podcasting #5: Subwoofer

September 21, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the fifth in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

The biggest challenge with this cartoon was choosing from the many possible dogs-and-podcasting headlines. Dogcasting! Pood(le)casting! Hi-Fido! (Feel free to keep going in the comments.)

And it is, of course, a nod to Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon.

(large number of lawyers with binders and briefcases, to a single worried-looking podcaster) Our legal team has jusssst a few changes to suggest.

The Business of Podcasting #4: Oh, good. The lawyers are here.

September 14, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the fourth in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

We have a funny relationship with lawyers, don’t we? They’re the profession everyone loves to hate… until you really need one. And then you’re all “Am I going to lose my house just because I posted this cartoon of Donald Trump doing [[ REDACTED ON ADVICE OF COUNSEL ]] with a manatee?” and they’re all “Not if we can prove he actually did it. Kalinda, could you step in here?” and you think, hey, this is going to be okay, but then it turns out Peter Florrick’s first campaign for State’s Attorney took some money from Trump’s PAC and Wendy Scott-Carr has the cancelled cheques, so Eli is on your case to take a dive so you can take some of the heat off Peter because this is a really tricky time what with them getting so much blowback from the gaming commission appointment but then, at the last minute, Grace’s ChumHum search unearths the critical piece of evidence you need and boom, you’re having celebratory cocktails with Alicia and damned if there isn’t a little chemistry there but, no, you can see in her eyes that there’s still some unfinished business with Peter, even after all that’s happened, and you have your own life to live and you are not going to spend it as the consolation prize, Alicia, good night—

Enough about me. How was your week?

(guy holding t-shirt that says Bob Is Awesome!) Hi! You don't know me, but I'm Bob. Could you please wear this shirt everywhere you go?

Influencer outreach

September 9, 2015 No Comments

This cartoon was inspired by a great talk today at Inbound 2015 by HubSpot’s Laura Fitton on the role of humility in influencer outreach.

Some great insights from @Pistachio this morning at #INBOUND15 on influencer outreach! pic.twitter.com/4IVLnRAbVB

— Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) September 9, 2015

And if you social media influencer humor (who doesn’t?!), you might like this one, too.

An airplane in-seat entertainment center filled with movies you don't want to see

Fly the meh skies

September 8, 2015 No Comments

I know, powered flight is a modern miracle, and I should spend the few hours it takes to whisk me from one coast of North America to another suffused in wonder and awe. But when I get up at 4:00 am for a 6:00 am flight, that level of presence and centeredness is a little out of reach. Even at 20,000 feet. So permit me the quintessentially First-World Problem of meh-level in-flight movies.

In fairness to Air Canada, there’s one category of in-flight movies not listed here: I Would Be Betraying Alex If I Watched This Without Her. (Which is why I passed up Spy this morning when it became clear sleeping wasn’t an option. You’re welcome, honey.)

(I drew this somewhere over Saskatchewan. I’m in Toronto right now, on my way to Boston for Inbound 2015. Wave and say hi if you’re there, too!)

There are so many pieces to weigh: Rashmi's phone call to Mark. Vince's missing keycard records. Dani's movements on that afternoon in April. After 29 episodes, I feel like I'm no closer to figuring out who's really been taking my yogurt from the staff lunchroom.

The Business of Podcasting #3: Yogurt and Serial

September 7, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the third in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

When the history of podcasting is written twenty years from now, it may be that every date is described as BSP and ASP: Before the Serial Podcast, and After the Serial Podcast.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Serial in the resurgence of podcasting over the last year — from bringing a whole new audience to the medium, to winning podcasting’s first-ever Peabody Award, to inspiring storytellers with its mix of smart reportage and beautiful sound design.

But podcasting was hardly on its way out before Serial came onto the scene. There was a thriving audience for all kinds of podcasts: storytelling, teaching, marketing, news, straight-up entertainment and much more.

One of the earliest podcasts I subscribed to was For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report. Week in and week out, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz faithfully delivered news and insights about organizational communications in the digital era. FIR has since blossomed into a network of two dozen podcasts, serving communicators of all stripes.

Today, Neville steps away from the mic after recording the last episode of Hobson & Holtz. I can’t begin to say how grateful I am for the past decade of podcasts — from those early years when us communicators who thought blogs might have some legs were regarded as bat-spit crazy, to today when a healthy Facebook and Twitter presence are table stakes for most organizations.

Thanks, Neville. Today’s cartoon is for you. And Shel, I can’t wait for September 21 to hear the new For Immediate Release.

(dad with daughter playing cymbals and drums while mom records a podcast) Oh, riiiight. You're recording. But you can just fix that in Audacity, right?

The Business of Podcasting #2: Sheer Audacity

August 31, 2015 No Comments

Here’s the second in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. Check back every Monday for the latest one!

And one of the tools that has been making podcasting so easy for so long is Audacity, the open-source audio editing software. True, it could be easier to use (case in point: for license-compliance reasons, you need to separately install a geeky program or two so you can import and export audio formats like MP3). But the sheer power of the thing is crazy.

Ditto The Levelator, a simple utility to optimize audio files. For thousands of podcast creators who didn’t have the technical chops to tweak their levels in something like Audacity, and more to the point, for their listeners, The Levelator was a lifesaver.

And now for a quick game of six degrees of separation.

The Levelator was created in part by Bruce and Malcolm Sharpe.
Bruce Sharpe oversaw the video recording and editing of keynotes at the 2009 Northern Voice blogging conference.
One of the keynotes he edited together was mine.
And in my keynote, I talked about… podcasting!

Yes, there is video. The podcasting stuff starts at the 5:00 mark.

The Business of Podcasting #1: Storytime

August 24, 2015 1 Comment

Here’s the first in a series of eight cartoons from the fab new podcasting book, The Business of Podcasting by Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin. (You’ll find a new one here every Monday for the next eight weeks.)

Whether you’re a podcasting veteran hoping to channel your passion into an income, or a newbie to the mic who’s excited about the medium’s possibilities, this book could be your new best friend. The focus is on solid practical advice, grounded in the wealth of experience offered by its authors. And that’s a lot of experience: you just won’t find a broader, deeper background in podcasting.

I damn near jumped out of my chair when Donna asked if I’d like to cartoon for The Business of Podcasting, because a) I have tremendous respect for her and the work she’s done over the years, and b) I have a longstanding love of podcasting (and, you won’t be surprised, radio).

A few years ago, I created a limited-run series called The Social Speech Podcast (about using social media to extend the impact of your public speaking). And as much fun as it was to talk with smart folks like Nancy Duarte about public speaking, I enjoyed the audio work—the recording, the editing, the polishing—just as much. Storytelling with sound and speech is a joy, and I hope this book helps a lot of people couple that joy to their professional success.

The Business of Podcasting is available in paperback and for Kindle. Check out the book’s website here.

You must enable java to proceed

August 17, 2015 No Comments

Man next to giant cup of coffee says "I said 'large.'" And I thought Vancouver was obsessed by coffee. This summer, my family spent two weeks in San Francisco, where java-worship has reached levels anthropologists might want to start examining. (So might cult researchers.)

About the only thing poised to knock the mighty bean off its perch down there is kombucha, which seems to be what would happen if beer drinkers and tea drinkers reached an alliance unsatisfying to both.

Maybe I’m being unfair; I have a stronger-than-normal vinegar-in-my-beverage aversion. Maybe I’m just grumpy; I’m still on my first cup of… oh, yeah.

☕️

In case you’re interested in what goes on behind the scenes here in our sprawling cartoon-making complex: I wrestled a little with this caption. It was going to start with something like “AeroPress, French press, pourover, siphon coffee— pfft.” Then I decided to resist my usual impulse to make things longer and more ornate, and simplify instead.

Kind of like having my coffee black.

IFTTT 2016!

August 15, 2015 No Comments

As long as algorithms are going to run our lives, we might as well have a chance to vote for the damn things.

And if that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much time you spend on, say, Facebook. And the fact that what you can and can’t see in your newsfeed is governed by an extremely complex (and proprietary, and secret) algorithm — including whether you see a prompt to vote on election day. So is whether your account gets suspended.

Ditto Google Search, which is how a whole lot of people find things on the web. Google’s search algorithm can turn one page into an overnight star, while causing another one to sink into obscurity. The same degree of analysis and necromancy that used to go into studying the workings of the Kremlin is now focused on trying to reverse-engineer (and then game) that algorithm, which in turn constantly mutates like the Enterprise rotating shield frequencies to deflect Borg attacks.

One change in that algorithm, and entire sites can disappear, forgotten overnight as though they’d never existed. Or entire countries. Just ask the one-time citizens of Magnitoccia, a nation that made the mistake of accepting guest blog posts two months ago. One moment, the world’s leading exporter of blister packs; the next, poof.

🎤📖

Hey, Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin’s new book is out — featuring all-new Noise to Signal cartoons!

✏️☑️

The Canadian federal election is in full swing. So while much of the world focuses on the Donald Trump clown show, we get to focus on much more high-minded stuff. Like a Netflix tax that absolutely no party in the campaign is supporting, but which our Prime Minister insists is imminent unless we re-elect him.

I realize that few people come to a tech-and-society gag cartoon for Canadian election endorsements and recommendations (yay Mira!), so I’ll try to confine my commentary here to snark. (“Hey, speaking of algorithms, how about that Justin Trudeau? x = audience.WantsToHear; say (x), amirite?”)

(Dad with baby son introduces himself) I'm an email marketer. My name's Jerry, and this here's %FIRSTNAME%.

%CARTOONFILENAME%

July 11, 2015 No Comments

There’s a difference between “personal” and “personalized.”

Those of us in communications have a habit of throwing around terms like “engagement,” “conversation” and “relationship” – when what we really mean is “clicks and Likes,” “getting bombarded with our bumpf” and “database record.” We should stop, unless we’re willing to put the work into backing up those words with meaning. People can usually tell the inside of a conversation from the inside of a sales funnel.

* * *

This one goes out to Scott Stratten, of Unmarketing fame, who inspired it with a Facebook post a few days ago.

* * *

The title for today’s cartoon may owe just a little to [title of show]. If you’ve never checked it out, you’re missing a treat.

Shazam! charges a mobile phone by holding it in the air and getting struck by lightning

Lightning adapter

July 9, 2015 No Comments

I’m seriously going to have to turn in my geek credentials. I honestly thought he was still called Captain Marvel. Turns out he’s now going by Shazam—because apparently the only thing more powerful than Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury is a Marvel Comics trademark lawyer.

* * *

Hey! There’s a book coming out from two of the sharpest minds in podcasting, Donna Papacosta and Steve Lubetkin, with a slew of new cartoons from yours truly. The Business of Podcasting hits the Kindle bookshelves on July 31—more on this soon!

One woman holding another's hand, saying: And then it hit me: when I checked out who had liked, shared, retweeted or favourited my posts, it wasn’t Marcia’s name I was looking for. It was yours, Ava. It’s always been yours.

It had to be you, +1derful you

June 29, 2015 No Comments

“Love doesn’t mean you retweet everything your significant other says. It means having the honesty to retweet only when you mean it. That’s the difference between love and Like.” From my forthcoming advice book on relationships and social media, I’m OK; You’re— Wait, You’re Only a 22 on Klout So I’m Afraid It’s Over.

—

Love was in the air this week. And in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision on marriage equality, I was struck by the celebratory mood online. (Well, outside of Bryan Fischer’s railing on Twitter, but even his hate had a kind of festive, rainbow lining to it. He brought his A game… where “A” stands for “absolutely unhinged.”)

And not just my circle of friends and other individuals. Facebook, for instance, had its rainbow-hued profile generator (see image, right). And Twitter created custom emoji that appeared if you hashtagged a tweet “#lovewins” or “#pride”.

On their own, those were nice corporate gestures. But what brought them to life was the number of people who took that and ran with it. Those profile pics and icons served as beacons, as my streams lit up with shared joy.

We often shine the spotlight on the foul behaviour that the social web makes possible: public shaming, bullying, harassment, misinformation. But it also makes visible these moments of shared jubilation. And here’s to everyone who works to ensure more of those moments.

One person hands a fitness tracker to another, who is standing in front of a sign that reads I Will Walk Around All Day Wearing Your Fitness Tracker: $50

Collaborative Economy, meet the Internet of Things

June 25, 2015 No Comments

As I’m typing this — literally as I’m typing this — I’m realizing my Fitbit Flex has fallen off. (I’ll admit, I noticed the strap was showing some strain, and I failed to act on it.) (Update: Alex found it!)

Pity, because if I could make this kind of business work, I’d do it in a heartbeat. (And I would then track that heartbeat.) I love walking. I’m starting to get tedious at work with my constant suggestions that we turn everything into a walking meeting: brainstorming, strategic planning, repairing the printer—whatever.

(woman to man taking up three transit seats with all of his gadgets) Dude, you're totally techspreading.

I need my space

June 11, 2015 2 Comments

You’ve probably come across complaints about manspreading: guys taking up more than their allotted space on crowded buses and trains by sitting with their knees apart. Not just apart, but way apart.

Some men have tried to justify this by explaining that our external plumbing needs a generous allotment of space. Bring our knees too close together, and things get squeezed. Hell, if we tried to take up only one of those little seats, something would probably burst.

This is, of course, nonsense. (Men have concealed this for centuries, but our secret is that we can actually retract the whole kit and kaboodle away into our abdominal cavities when we need to. At will! Really! It’s like watching a hermit crab retreat into its shell. If you’ve never seen it, ask a man you’re intimate with to show you — it’s quite something! Oh, he’ll look at you like you’re insane and tell you it’s impossible, while making a big show of backing away slowly and looking for the exits, but don’t take no for an answer.)

We do this not out of anatomical necessity but from natural temperament. We’re territorial, and we take up as much space as we can. Hell, it takes extraordinary self-control just to keep ourselves from peeing in the corner of every transit vehicle we enter. (And excuse me if that self-control isn’t always forthcoming… officer.)

Thing is, we’re also pretty competitive. If one guy takes up two seats, I have to take up three. And the guy across from me noticing this has to somehow take up four. And so on.

Physiology being what it is, there’s a hard limit to the number of seats one guy can take up… or so you’d think. But we’re nothing if not resourceful, and if you know the right surgeon, you’re just four severed tendons away from separating your femurs from their hip sockets the same way a boa constrictor unhinges its jaw to eat a wild boar.

And at the point, you’re ready for the big leagues. Manspreading’s slated to be a demonstration sport at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, and Russia’s rumoured to have a guy who can manspread two entire subway cars. But don’t count Canada out: our team works out at Bombardier’s rail vehicle manufacturing facility in La Pocatière, Québec, on specially-designed cars 40 per cent larger than Olympic standards.

When you meet one of these guys, you stand in awe of them.

You have to. There’s nowhere to sit.

Nice to get so much feedback on this cartoon! Techspreading, people: it’s going to be a thing. Start talking it up. Spread the word, not your tech!

A cartoon depicting a sad work anniversary

RubbedIn

May 28, 2015 No Comments

Not every anniversary is a cause for celebration. And while the narrative LinkedIn would like you to believe in is career success upon success, a lot of stories are less Horatio Alger rags-to-riches and more Henry David Thoreau lives-of-quiet-desperation.

Similarly, Facebook’s marketing promotes a story that’s all about moments of joy, large and small. But algorithms based on overly cheerful assumptions tend to bring those contradictions to the surface – sometimes pretty roughly, as Facebook users keep discovering.

Thing is, many of the times my online social networks have proven most important to me have been the hard moments – the stumbles, tragedies, failures, disappointments. Sharing the pain, finding a shoulder, getting advice and encouragement: these are every bit as valuable as the likes and smiley-face stickers you get for a cute video of your kid, or a humblebrag about a professional triumph.

I wouldn’t mind seeing an ad campaign for Facebook or LinkedIn that played up those benefits as well. At the very least, let’s acknowledge that everyone’s life is a lot messier than it looks in our profiles and timelines.

(Captain Renaud from Casablanca) Major Strasser has launched a social media strategy. Round up the usual metrics.

I came to Casablanca for the retweets. I was misinformed.

May 27, 2015 No Comments

Some of the advice I’ve seen around social media measurement boils down to “Don’t pay attention to x. You should be measuring y.”

Don’t pay attention to retweets; you should be measuring follower growth. Don’t pay attention to follower growth; you should be measuring post likes. Don’t pay attention to post likes; you should be measuring FlegmaRank, our proprietary new index based on a secret algorithm that boils eighty thousand different variables into a single integer between 0 and 1.

It’s enough to drive an online campaigner to drink… or, more productively, to the bookshelf. This stuff is why I was so pleased to draw the cartoons for Beth Kanter and K.D. Paine’s Measuring the Networked Nonprofit. And why I loved reading Katie’s Measure What Matters. And (this’ll take you back) Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. (I’d link to it, but he has a more recent follow-up, Web Analytics 2.0.)

What all that advice really should boil down to is this: what do you want your online efforts to achieve? How do you believe they’ll do it? (That is, what’s your theory of change?) How can you measure each stage of the mechanism underlying your theory? How can you benchmark against peers, competitors and past performance? And how can your measurements help you assess your model against real-world results, and adjust accordingly?

Answer those questions, and you’ll know which metrics matter. (They may be the usual suspects. They may not. Chances are they’ll be some of each.) Everything else is noise.

Greetings from #VanCAF!

May 23, 2015 No Comments

If you’re in Vancouver this weekend, I can’t urge you strongly enough to check out the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival at the Roundhouse in Yaletown. Open Sunday from 11 to 6 — drop by table H2 and say hi!

(Woman reviewing another woman's resume) Look, your C++ and Node.js skills are all well and good. But what the market's really looking for right now is redstone.

Minecraft-y

May 9, 2015 No Comments

We’ve opened the door to Minecraft in our family. That may sound pretty unmomentous… but a lot of families have discovered it can impose a pretty big footprint. Stories abound of kids developing obsessive levels of enthusiasm for the game, and even for the gameplay videos it inspires. (In some parenting circles, you have only to mention the name “Stampy” to provoke bared teeth and hissing.)

But despite a symphony of cautionary notes, there’s a lot to be said for Minecraft. It can be insanely creative; there’s nothing quite like the moment your kid walks you through an intricate build representing hours of their focused attention. Add in the engineering functionality of “redstone” (a mineral that allows users to create complex circuitry), and you have the virtual equivalent of Lego Mindstorms.

(Also, Stampy eschews swearing and verbal abuse, and keeps things kid-friendly. FWIW.)

Here, hands-down, is the best book I’ve found on the subject for parents.

Of course, I was bullish on Second Life, so take what I’m saying with a few grains of salt. But there’s remarkable depth and subtlety in the low-res, blocky world of Minecraft.

Hey, Vancouver types: if you want a job that can put those legacy pre-redstone skills to good use, check out Thursday’s Tech Fest Vancouver, brought to you by Techvibes! (Not a sponsored link—I just think it looks like a dandy event.)

Woman with smart watch: In the long run, I want to hack it to deflect bullets. For now, it just plays the Wonder Woman theme.

Invisible airplane sold separately

May 6, 2015 No Comments

Yesterday was Alex‘s birthday, and inveterate early adopter that she is, I figure she’s probably the kind of person who could push an Apple Watch (or any smartwatch) to its limits.

More to the point, she’s the kind of person who recognizes that whatever smartwatches are now, they’ll probably be something very different in a few years—not just in features, but in the uses we’ll have found and the ways we’ll integrate them into our daily lives. (The fact that “iPhone” still has the word “phone” in it already feels kind of like an artifact of history.)

Right now, of course, both price and availability are restricting this newest Apple product to early adopters and people who just must own the latest and greatest. (These are distinct groups, but a lot of eye-rolling directed at the latter is deflecting onto the former.) The same happened with the iPhone and Google Glass; the iPhone ended up with some much more affordable options, and although Glass is getting a revamp, it’s far from dead. For all the ribbing new Apple Watch owners are getting, chances are that a lot of us will be joining them sooner or later—if not with the Apple offering, then with something similar.

Are you taking the plunge? And are you going Apple, Android, Pebble… or something else?

Gone g-URL

April 19, 2015 No Comments

They’re calling Tuesday, April 21, 2015 “mobilegeddon”: an update to Google’s search algorithm that will give pride of place to mobile-friendly websites (and punish mobile-hostile ones).

This site is, ahh, not all that mobile-friendly. (Don’t take my word for it.) So it’s been nice knowing you; remember me fondly.

A combination of a webcomic plugin that isn’t upgrading as happily as it should be and a lack of time and (cough) MySQL savvy has kept me from making the changes that could give this that mobile oomph Google and I would like to see. I’ll aim to change that soon… but in the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see how big a hit I take.

Then again, it’s not like I’ve been an SEO monster with Noise to Signal. I’ll happily choose a funny headline devoid of keywords over a pedestrian headline stuffed with them. And I’ll admit, I haven’t gone in much for clickbait, either. Which is why this cartoon isn’t headed “Six ways Google’s mobile-friendly search algorithm change will eat your site on Tuesday. Number four will make you cry.”

Updated: An important clarification from Search Engine Land: they say the changes affect mobile search results only. Which, given the number of searches coming from mobile these days, is mighty big… but it’s not everything.

Further updated: Thanks to a dandy plugin called Duplicator, I decided to give upgrading this ol’ site – and in particular, the Webcomic plugin – one more try. And whaddaya know: Michael Sisk had just updated Webcomic with, among other things, “minor legacy upgrade fixes.” Whether one of those fixes did the job or the stars just happened to align properly, I’ve updated this site to the latest hotness… including mobile compatibility. Google, come and get me.

(developer with one eye stacked on top of the other) What's with all these people complaining that our app only offers portrait-mode video?

One explanation for portrait mode

March 29, 2015 1 Comment

The release of live-video-streaming apps Meerkat and Periscope has led a lot of people to ask why neither of them supports landscape-mode video (think rectangle-lying-down instead of rectangle-standing-up).

One of the apps’ developers has said it’s because people are used to holding their smartphones vertically, which I suppose makes sense. I still prefer my theory (Fig. 1, above).

By the way, I’ve learned a metric crap-tonne of stuff about web video from the great Steve Garfield. He’s kind of your advance scout in that world, reporting back from ten minutes into the future of video. If you’re at all interested in the field, he’s well worth following.

Updated: Just had a Twitter exchange with John Bowman that gave me a chance to encapsulate just how I feel about the portrait-versus-landscape thing:

@johnbowman I have close relationships with people who shoot vertical. I’ve made my peace with it… (1/2)

— Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) March 30, 2015

@johnbowman …but you can have my landscape video when you rotate my cold, dead hand 90º. (2/2)

— Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) March 30, 2015

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