Noise to Signal

(a passenger deliberately bores her seatmate with stories of a frustrating executive director, to prevent him from boring her with stories about his grandkids)

Pity whoever’s sitting next to me on this flight

March 16, 2011 No Comments

Actually, the guy who sat next to me on the first leg of my flight was an avalanche rescue student, and we had a fascinating conversation (well, I had a fascinating conversation – his mileage probably varied, especially once I started going on about Flash restaurant menus).

I learned that avalanches have a five-stage scale of size: 1 can knock you over, 2 can bury and kill you, 3 can wreck cars, 4 can take out a railway car and 5 can wipe out towns. I learned about the fracture line, where the avalanche separates from the rest of the snow pack. And I learned that it would be a very good idea if I never travel east of, oh, Burnaby ever again unless it’s a safe distance from anything snow-capped-mountain-y. (30,000 feet ought to do it.)

Off to the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference!

March 16, 2011 1 Comment

There’s nothing like getting up while dawn is still having that weird dream where it’s back in high school and completely naked during a surprise math test… and stumbling bleary-eyed from shower into clothing up stairs out the door into taxi and into an airport…

…only to realize the first leg of your flight is domestic, and you could have slept for another hour.

Ah, well. What’s an hour’s sleep when NTC 2011 lies ahead?

Click (and click, and click) to donate

March 14, 2011 No Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

In times of horrific disaster, we want to reach out and help. That’s especially true if we’ve actually seen events unfold in front of us as they happened, whether it’s on live TV or Twitter.

For the organizations and agencies that raise money to provide relief, this is a critical time. Potential donors are seized with the urgency of the situation – and are flocking to their websites.

Which means usability suddenly takes on even greater importance. Add one form field too many, program in an unnecessary intermediate step, put a button here instead of there, and you can lose those donors… and the money they might have given.

That might sound silly and irrational, and it is. Nobody deliberately makes the calculated decision that their compassion for another human being is outweighed by the inconvenience of a poorly-coded pull-down menu.

But unconsciously, that’s exactly what happens: some part of our brain figures we’ve clicked one too many times, and bails on a cause we care about. Maybe that doesn’t speak well of us as a species, but it speaks volumes about the importance of usability testing.

On the other hand, our less rational sides can sometimes make us donate when we perhaps should be taking a step back and looking critically at the recipient. The folks at Charity Navigator have a series of suggestions for you to consider before you make your contribution to help folks in Japan, and it’s well worth reading.

How usability affects online fundraising is just one of the things I’ll be looking to learn more about next week at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, DC. I’ll be cartoon-blogging the event; if you’re coming too, be sure to say hi.

Nonprofit tech types convene in DC. Me, too.

March 11, 2011 No Comments

The Nonprofit Technology Conference is an annual gathering of the nptech community: technology practitioners who work with nonprofit organizations, helping them to organize, communicate and work more effectively.

It’s put together by the Nonprofit Technology Network, and this year, they’re meeting in Washington, DC… and I’ll be with them as the official NTC cartoon-blogger. (By which I mean this sort of thing.)

I’ll post the cartoons here, but you can see them first on the NTC blog – where I’ve drawn a bunch of pre-conference cartoons that they’re posting in the runup to the conference’s launch next Thursday.

If you’re going to NTC, by all means look me up. And if not, you can follow the proceedings on Twitter via the #NTC11 hashtag (and the NTC11 tag everywhere else).

Edge cases of the third kind

March 7, 2011 2 Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb.

Hard to believe it’s already been a year since I posted my farewell to Internet Explorer 6. (By “farewell” I meant “Just frickin’ die already.”)

My post was prompted by the announcement that support was ending for IE6 on Google Apps; since then, IE6’s decline has accelerated, dwindling into low-single-digit percentages of browser visits (if that) on most of the sites I manage.

And this week, the latest heavyweight jumped on the let’s-kill-IE6 bandwagon: Microsoft, which launched the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site. It sets a target of reducing IE6 usage to less than 1% worldwide.

“For the love of god, please stop using our product” is an unusual message, but it’s a welcome one from Redmond. I’ve already been told by one client not to bother supporting it – which is superb news.

So if you haven’t already struck IE6’s installed base off your list of users you have to support, chances are you’ll be doing it sometime in the next few months.

But don’t feel too smug. If there’s anything to the latest sensational headlines from astronomy news(and that might be a big if), we might have a whole new group of use cases to consider.

Maybe start using Get Satisfaction, too

February 28, 2011 No Comments

There’s something about the way people at the top of the heap react when they start to feel the hierarchy shift beneath their feet. It’s as though they go through four of the Kübler-Ross stages simultaneously – denial, bargaining, violent rage and depression (actually, that last one looks a lot more like self-pity). Acceptance only seems to kick in once it’s wheels-down in the luxurious-place-of-exile of the now-former dictator’s choice.

With Mubarak, that process is now complete. With Ghadafi, it’s still underway – and every day, the damage to his country and people multiplies. And while the debate still rages over how large a role social media have played in the past month’s events across the Arab world, there’s no question that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have given the rest of us a window into a remarkable period of potentially profound, historical change.

If you want to see what that looks like, and you haven’t been following Andy Carvin’s Twitter feed, definitely check it out. He has been retweeting tirelessly since the early days of what many are calling the Jasmine Revolution, giving voice to an incredibly diverse range of people.

…and share alike.

February 21, 2011 No Comments

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb with “mastodon” misspelled.

Past generations would be utterly baffled by some of the challenges parents and kids face today.

True, we don’t have to write notes to school like “Dear teacher, Monique won’t be attending classes today because our entire village was wiped out by the Black Plague,” or arrange birthday parties at the mastodon petting zoo without the benefit of Evite or Facebook Events.

But technological advances bring their own unique issues to contend with. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations never had to wonder whether to tweet that cute thing their kid just said, or if they should ask permission first. They never had to worry about their kids’ privacy when half their peers are sharing smartphone photos on Facebook and videos on YouTube. They never had to vet hula hoops and Monopoly games for adult content, security issues or in-app purchases.

In short, sure: maybe they walked to school uphill both ways through three feet of snow nine days a week. But they didn’t have a peer group expecting them to check in on Foursquare when they got there.

Next chapter

February 14, 2011 No Comments

The last few years have seen a pretty serious shakedown in the book world. Bookstores closing their doors, publishers merging or shutting down, and overshadowing it all, Amazon and the Kindle. And now the iPad – with its spectacular adoption rate and the Apple-powered negotiating clout behind the iBook store – promises to turn it all upside down and shake hard.

No wonder, then, that book lovers are wondering if the ink-and-paper era is ending. I haven’t read so many anguished paens to the tactile feel of paper since I stumbled across a alt.sex.fetish.papyrus on Usenet.*

I can relate to that. Thirty-plus years ago, I read Foundation and Empire by flashlight under my comforter cover to cover for what must have been the third time while my parents thought I was asleep. I can remember turning the pages as gingerly as I could, so that the rasp of paper on paper wouldn’t alert my mom and dad to the transgression.

So yeah, tactile experience. Then again, the subtly-rounded back of an iThing filling your palm and the finger-on-glass squeak of a swipe are pretty tactile, too. And I wonder sometimes if books’ days are as numbered as their pages.

But then I see my kids — in a household where Macs, iDevices, gaming platforms and screens outnumber humans by about four to one — putting down the PlayStation controllers and chatting for hours with each other in imaginative play. It takes no effort to get them to abandon the TV in favor of making pancakes together in the kitchen. And with a little prodding, they’ll turn from YouTube to cuddling with one of us as we read them a favorite story… even one they’ve heard dozens of times before.

For them, the war between analog and digital doesn’t really exist. They frankly don’t care about the distinction. What matters to them is the experience, the content, the connection — the story. And sharing it with us and each other.

I honestly don’t know if books as form will survive. But I’m getting more and more hopeful that books as idea will.

And years from now, I’ll still be poking my head into the kids’ room before I go to sleep to watch for the tell-tale glow of a flashlight.

* I completely made that newsgroup up a moment ago. And three of you just tried unsuccessfully to mask your disappointment.

Let’s (all) make a deal

February 7, 2011 No Comments

Originally posted to ReadWriteWeb. This post was written just hours before Groupon’s Super Bowl ad aired. Seems timing is everything.

Writing the caption for this cartoon wasn’t easy for me. Not because the joke needed a particular nuance, or involved any special vocabulary… but because it involves a security keyword.

It’s irrational, I know. But I now have a Pavlovian aversion to mentioning anything remotely connected to terrorism or weaponry, because at some semi-conscious level I worry it could get me plopped onto some agency’s list. “Sure, he’s probably kidding about his 500-foot homicidal robot, but just to be safe — (type, type, type, type, enter).”

Which, let’s face it, is kind of crazy; yes, that could happen, but I’m frankly a lot more vulnerable to ticking off someone at, say, Facebook who worked very hard on that interface tweak, and doesn’t take kindly to a smartass cartoon from someone who might be quite upset if his profile were to, oh, I don’t know, vanish.

Actually, now that I put that in cold hard text, it seems pretty damn terrifying.

Next week’s cartoon will be all about kittens.

Disgruntled actor: Gracious, shmacious. I'm damned if I'm going to applaud when I've been beaten for best actor by an Xtranormal character.

Text-to-(acceptance)-speech

January 31, 2011 1 Comment

(Originally posted to ReadWriteWeb)

The official Oscar nominations are out, and there’s a movie up for best picture that has a lot to say about social media and the online communications revolution sweeping the world.

The Social Network? Hell, no. I’m talking about The King’s Speech.

Set mostly in the years leading up to the Second World War, The King’s Speech deals with the extraordinary relationship between speech therapist Lionel Logue and Albert, Duke of York. Albert has a persistent stammer, an affliction that might have gone largely unremarked in past generations. But this is the era of radio, and when he ascends (a little relucantly) to the throne as King George VI, he must deliver an address to a nation suffering from grave fear and doubt.

(Spoiler alert: If you have some knowledge of history, you are probably assuming his address was at least good enough to avoid demoralizing the nation and forcing Britain’s capitulation to the Nazis. And you are correct. Also, you were probably a little surprised by the ending of Inglorious Basterds.)

This is the story of a friendship that crosses some very deep divides of class and colonialism. But it’s also a story of entrenched institutions confronting the transformational changes brought about thanks to technological innovation. And it’s a story of the changing relationship between the public and those in power, who have had a long time to become used to deciding when, where and how any communication will take place between them.

That’s a timely theme for anyone watching the past day’s events unfold in Tunisia and Egypt – or, for the matter, the past decade’s events in much of the rest of the world.

Expressionless

January 24, 2011 No Comments

Originally appeared on ReadWriteWeb

There is no greater challenge to my geek credentials, no more damning indictment of my weak kung fu, than the fact that I can’t write a regular expression to save my life.

I know, I know. They’re a command-line ninja’s shuriken* of choice. If Linux is dough, they’re the KitchenAid**. They’re loyal and loving, and they’ll jump up and do tricks for you if you only know how to ask them.

But I don’t know how to ask them, because I only step into the land of regex once or twice a year. Every time the need comes up, I have to re-learn regular expressions more or less from zero. The last time it happened, I broke down and bought an O’Reilly book for my iPad. (This is my usual strategy, based partly on the hope that the knowledge will seep into my brain osmotically through my fingertips while I’m playing Cannibal Bunnies.)

And so I found myself plunging back into the book a few days ago, and thinking that there’s probably a German word for the sensation of learning a piece of information, recognizing that it’s something you used to know, and realizing – with some wistfulness – that you will soon forget it again.

I’d probably know what that word is… if only I spoke German more often.

* N.B.: I know even less about martial arts than I know about regular expressions.

** Wait, that’s a trademark. Instead of “KitchenAid,” I’m supposed to say “KitchenAid™ stand mixer.” I’d do a search-and-replace on it… if only there was some concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters.

Devices and desires

January 17, 2011 No Comments

I realized the other day, in the middle of a conversation with someone, that – for just a moment – I had stopped thinking of them as a human being, and started thinking of them as the thing that stood between me and some quality time with my iPad.

(If you were talking to me in the past few days, and wondering if you’re the person in question, let me assure you that you weren’t. It was someone else. Really.)

And, you know, that happens. At parties, some of us catch ourselves looking over the shoulder of the person we’re talking to, in case there’s someone we actually want to talk with nearby. A friend could be pouring their hearts out to us, and a stray anxiety could drift up from our subconscious long enough to distract us. Even when we give someone our full attention, we’re rehearsing what to say next or wondering how they’re reacting to what we just said.

All of which is to say, let’s cut devices a little slack. They have the reputation of sucking our attention away from other people, but it’s not like there isn’t plenty of competition for that attention already, devices or no devices. Hell, the Cro-Magnon probably had that problem. (“Ogg stalk mammoth for hours. Then mammoth turn and look at Ogg, and – hey! You not listening to Ogg!”)

And one of the nice things about a connected device is that it often connects us to others who aren’tin the room. There’s a terrific Ze Frank TED Talk where he projects a photo of a woman looking down at her iPhone and smiling. (You’ll find it around 6:25.) While this is the stereotypical image of someone zoning out of the real world, he points out that “life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.”

That said, it’s still possible to be a thoughtless jerk about these things, and I’m living proof. We’re still working out the etiquette and sifting through conflicting protocols. And as with nearly everything that really matters, it comes down to human connection.

Or high-velocity connections between pigs and angry birds. Those are fun, too.

How hacktivist of you

January 10, 2011 No Comments

Originally posted to ReadWriteWeb

Agree or disagree with the DDoS attacks attributed to activists affiliated withAnonymous, they’ve put the word “hacktivism” squarely on the radar of the chattering classes.

I’ll cop to a kind of Pavlovian response to hearing “hacktivism”, because Alex wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject and for several months it damn near displaced “What’s Steve Jobs going to announce next?” as our primary topic of conversation. (Thank god for those iPad 2 rumours, or we’d be in danger of it happening all over again.)

I’m enjoying hacktivism’s time in the sun, but part of me knows it can’t last. Already I’m hearing commentators stretching its meaning so they, too, can be using the word du jour: “Meanwhile, Biffixcor restated their third-quarter earnings for the second time. That’s what I call hacktivism. Right, Carol?” “That’s right, Jim. Coming up, weather and traffic – with our hacktivist eye in the sky, Monty. We’ll be right back.”

2010 in review: Think of it as a raw club sandwich

January 7, 2011 No Comments

And that’s the final cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media! I hope you’ve enjoyed it – and if you want, you can catch the whole thing in video. (Hey – did you check out the free 2011 calendar yet?)

2010 in review: Tumbld

January 7, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the last of the individual cartoons today – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video. (Hey – did you check out the free 2011 calendar yet?)

2010 in review: 140 characters, without possibility of parole

January 7, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. (You may remember a sneak preview of this one from the weekend.)

I’ll be posting the last of the individual cartoons today – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video. (Hey – did you check out the free 2011 calendar yet?)

2010 in review: A medium DDoS with extra cheese

January 7, 2011 No Comments

2010 in review: Delicious but indigestible

January 6, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: WikiEEK!

January 6, 2011 No Comments

2010 in review: Announcing that things are dead is dead

January 5, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: You say goodbye, and I say hello

January 5, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: Hiccups

January 4, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: World Cup

January 4, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: Palination

January 3, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: Google Instant

January 3, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. I’ll be posting the individual cartoons all week – but meanwhile, here’s the whole thing in video.

2010 in review: Chatroulette

January 2, 2011 No Comments

Here’s the next cartoon in my retrospective of 2010 in social media. Chatroulette was an object lesson in not believing media hype about the Next Big Thing. (It’s also a pretty interesting experiment.)

2010 in review: Gamification

January 1, 2011 5 Comments

In these early days of 2011, I’m going to be posting my cartoon retrospective of 2010 in social media. Buckle up – that’s 14 cartoons headed your way in the next few days!

140 characters without possibility of parole

December 27, 2010 No Comments

As 2010 dies down, a lot of us are looking back over the past year. This cartoon was inspired – indirectly – by one of the year’s less-reported stories: the collision between the informal, off-the-cuff culture of Twitter and the rigid world of law. That conflict runs the gamut from totalitarian regimes to liberal democracies:

In China, Cheng Jianping’s mildly ironic tweet earned her a year in re-education camp.
In the United Kingdom, Paul Chambers’ frustration at an airport closure led him to tweet a joking threat to blow it up – culminating in a conviction and a £1,000-fine under Britain’s Communications Act 2003.

True, China has long repressed dissent – often brutally – and airports around the world are notorious for frowning on even casual jokes about explosives, violence or hijacking. But Twitter brings a new combination of persistence, reach and spontaneity that we haven’t really grappled with yet.

No matter which you think needs to adapt more – the law, or the way we use social media – we enter 2011 facing a new level of accountability for our spontaneous comments. And the kind of idle conversation that could pass without comment in a pub is now part of the permanent, searchable record.

By the way, this cartoon is part of a 2010 year-in-review I’m putting together. Look for it later this week… and in the meantime, remember to get your Noise to Signal 2011 wall calendar, free for the downloading. Happy holidays!

Noise to Signal’s gift for you

December 21, 2010 2 Comments

Introducing the 2011 Noise to Signal calendar!

This is for everyone:

who encouraged me to create a Noise to Signal calendar, or
who needs a calendar of their own, or
who is about to walk into an office gift exchange party empty-handed, and desperately needs something.

Update: It’s also for all you nice folks coming over from Kim Komando’s site. Welcome aboard! And check out the 2010 year in review.

It’s a free downloadable PDF. So just print that puppy out double-sided, then take it to your corner print shop and ask them to spiral-bind it, and my friend, you have a wall calendar. Update: Okay, let’s have some fun. Share a picture of the calendar hanging on your wall, and you could score a signed cartoon print! The details.

Here’s the download link (PDF, 10 MB). (If you’re sharing it – and I hope you will! – please link to this post rather than the PDF itself. Thanks!)

I’ve also posted it on SlideShare:

A free cartoon calendar for 2011

View more presentations from Rob Cottingham.

If you don’t have the time or means to print it out, and don’t mind waiting for shipping, I’ve also created a version on the Zazzle store:

Thanks for all the support and kind words over the year. And happy holidays from Noise to Signal!

(By the way, I discovered while I was making this that there’s a real shortage of decent-looking free calendar templates out there. So while the calendar as a whole is Creative Commons licensed, I’m releasing the actual calendar grids into the public domain.)

Updated with shameless bragging: This just in – Last night, SlideShare made the calendar its Presentation of the Day. And then a few minutes ago, this email came in:

“A free cartoon calendar for 2011” is being talked about on Facebook more than anything else on SlideShare right now. So we’ve put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the “Hot on Facebook” section).

Well done!

– SlideShare Team

And if you’re enjoying looking forward to 2011, maybe you might like taking a look back at 2010:

The Bourne Connectivity

December 20, 2010 2 Comments

This one came to me while I was watching an episode of Burn Notice (please hold your applause until the end of the post), where Michael, Fiona, Sam and Jesse have realized they have a piece of unspeakably important information in their hands. And maybe a decade ago, I would have found their dilemma compelling.

But today? In a few minutes, they could post it to Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, 4chan and – just for the hell of it – Plenty of Fish, with plenty of time left over for Michael and Fiona to agonize over their relationship, for Sam and Fiona to explore their rivalry for Michael’s attention (I suspect they each had emotionally distant parents), and for Michael and Jesse to finally acknowledge the sexual tension between them.

It’s possible I’m overreaching. That may have to be a two-parter.

My point is this: time was when a screenwriter’s greatest enemies were the studio system, writer’s block and, well, other screenwriters. But now writers working in the action/adventure/suspense/blowing-stuff-up genre also have to contrive ways to deprive a character of connectivity.

So to the action movie clichés of which wire to cut and cars slamming into fruit carts, you can soon add batteries running low, cell phone jammers, and “Why did I choose AT&T?”

Delicious: and we all helped!

December 17, 2010 1 Comment

Maybe this is why they let rumours swirl for a day before announcing they’re trying to find a home for it.

Although, as Alex says, that could be along the same lines as your parents saying “We send Scruffy to live on a nice farm…”

True just by looking at it

December 14, 2010 No Comments

So… was it false before you saw it? Discuss.

Left parenthesis, hyphen, colon

December 13, 2010 2 Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb.

So now I know. And I have to live with the knowledge.

I’m married to someone who… (okay, deep breaths; bring down the pulse)… who keys in smileys… without a hyphen.

Ten years of marriage, and it’s only yesterday that I discover Alex is perfectly willing to deprive her emoticon-people of a critical facial feature. “A smiley? Really? Exactly how freakin’ happy are they going to be without a nose?!”

Maybe we’ll move past this somehow, and one day we’ll move from :-( to :-) again. Maybe.

…Hey, wait a minute – losing the hyphen gains me an extra character in Twitter, doesn’t it?

Awesome. Marriage saved. :)

(N.B.: Today’s cartoon is inspired in large part by my seven-year-old daughter, who’s been drawing these amazing people with smileys as faces. Props, Li’l Sweetie.)

Non-profit giving: is there an app for that?

December 6, 2010 No Comments

(My thanks to Beth Kanter for spurring this cartoon and post!)

If you think of Apple, you may well think of great design, fantastic usability, innovation and just plain coolness. But one thing you probably don’t think of is philanthropy.

Steve Jobs and Apple have come under frequent fire for a lack of visible generosity in charitable contributions. But let’s leave the debate over whether their reputation is well-deserved or not for another time. (“Dammit, Rob, they gave the world the one-button mouse – isn’t that enough?!”)

Instead, let’s talk about Apple’s less-than-open attitude toward charitable giving on the iPhone. (Can I call it iPhilanthropy? No?)

You would think that charitable giving would be a no-brainer. A built-in payment mechanism, beautifully simple UI, countless ways to creatively employ things like location… it should add up to a huge leap forward for non-profits hoping to raise funds.

But before an app can raise any money, it has to clear a hurdle: the iPhone App Store. Only approved applications can make it onto iPhones (at least, the ones that haven’t been jailbroken), and approval hasn’t been forthcoming for charitable apps. The restrictions on just what kind of pitch you can make, and how, are remarkable.

You can’t promise to do anything outside the app itself (as an organization that promised to plant a tree for every app they sold discovered). And you can’t have in-app donations… so there goes nearly all of the benefit of using the iPhone for fundraising. The 30-per-cent cut Apple takes from any transaction through the store is just the coup de grace in deterring iPhone-enabled donations.

Non-profit tech visionary Beth Kanter has taken up the cause of convincing Apple to change its tune. (She’s also announced her intention to bail on her iPhone once the contract expires, and make the jump to Google Android, if things don’t change.) An online petition backing that position has already garnered more than 1,300 signatures.

In fairness to Apple, the company wants to ensure its customers don’t get scammed. But as developer Jake Shapiro pointed out in June, “The excuse that ‘Apple doesn’t want to be held responsible for ensuring that the charitable funds make it to the final destination‘ is a cop-out. Google Grants has tackled this already, and organizations like TechSoup and Guidestar do a sophisticated job of authenticating nonprofits and charities worldwide. Apple, of all companies, can’t credibly say it’s not up to the technical and logistical challenge.”

Apple is, after all, the company of cool… and what’s more, the company of helping people do amazing things with extraordinary tools. Imagine if making charitable giving possible was just their first step… and if Apple brought the same degree of imagination and brilliance that gave us the simplicity and power of OS X, iMovie and iOS to bear on philanthropy.

Conspicuous Me

December 6, 2010 2 Comments

Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

I can directly thank two people for today’s cartoon. One is Deb Ng, who tweeted this a few days ago:

If I were to propose a day where no one tweeted links to their own stuff, would you laugh at me, or think “hmmm. That’s a good idea?”

And the other is my wife and Social Signal partner, Alexandra Samuel, whose take on those tweetswas:

I’m in an exotic location, contributing brilliant, world-changing insights to a conversation among important, influential people.

No question, there’s a lot of “Look at me, look at me!” on Twitter. It ranges from the routine status updates that are the meat-and-potatoes of dismissive media coverage of Twitter (“That last burrito isn’t sitting too well”), to the kind of self-promotion that can land you a front-page slot on Tweeting Too Hard.

But take a closer look at Tweeting Too Hard. Most of the tweets on the front page aren’t just expressions of self-absorbed vanity – they’re over-the-top parodies of self-absorbed vanity. They’re deliberately produced entertainment.

And while I see a lot of tweets that read like cries for help from people who couldn’t get their parents’ attention when they were kids, I also see plenty that alert me to the fact that the writer actually has created or shared something brilliant. Or wonderful. Or just worthwhile.

Sometimes self-aggrandizing is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly hope so; I do more than my share of come-look-at-the-thing-I-just-posted tweeting. And Alex ultimately revisited the scolding tone of some of her tweets.

Maybe what’s really in order is a penetrating emotional inventory of the needs and motivations behind our self-focused conversations, about once every month or so. (Those of you who meditate regularly may increase the dosage.) Are we aiming to share something worthwhile, or just bask in a little adulation? And at the end of the day, have we contributed something meaningful to the conversation?

That said, I think Deb’s prescription is worth considering. A regular break from linking to our own stuff could be a healthy way to step back from the brink of becoming the Me Channel… not to mention an impetus to finding other voices and creations worth sharing. Or even reaching for the “@” key now and again.

Just another Cyber Monday

November 29, 2010 1 Comment

Enjoy!

What they’re really looking for

November 29, 2010 1 Comment

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

You may have noticed the home pages of your favourite torrent-tracking sites look a little different today: fewer search fields and options than you’re used to, and maybe a few more U.S. Department of Homeland Security crests and seizure notices than before.

I for one had no idea that the same superagency charged with keeping American skies free from explosive devices was also responsible for keeping American hard drives free from bootleg copies of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. (To the movie and recording industries, I’m sure that seems entirely appropriate – their only misgiving being that DMCA violations aren’t punishable with extraordinary rendition.)

The whole idea behind the DHS was to break down siloing and integrate security efforts. Reviews of the agency’s success on that count have been mixed. But maybe we should be careful what we wish for…

I’m just a 34 dressed up as a 68

November 24, 2010 No Comments

Klout is an intriguing service, one that aims to measure your influence on Twitter (and now on Facebook). It’s admittedly far from perfect; “I can get people to retweet things” is pretty minor influence compared to “I can get people to consider certain ideas” or “I can sway people’s voting habits”. But until the Twitter API is hooked up to some of the machinery from Inception – or unless you’re willing to pay for some far more intensive and probably more manual analysis – we work with what we have.

And if you take “influence” to mean “reach of voice” or “ability to direct others’ attention at least for a moment”, then Klout (and cousins like Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, Tweetlevel and my very own Influ-a-rama-matic – what it lacks in reliability it makes up for in ego-boosting) can be pretty useful. Just remember it’s a starting point… and that the raw Klout score is a pretty blunt instrument. (“How influential are you?” “64.”) Diving in and looking at some of the more detailed metrics can take you further, and tell you, for instance, that person x has a lot of followers but doesn’t often engage them, while person y has a smaller audience but much more vigorous engagement.

Even then, though, you’ll need to figure out for yourself what subjects they’re most “influential” on, and with whom. (Klout takes a stab at it with a topic summary at the bottom of each profile, and it’s not a bad starting point. Also, I had no idea that Alex was so influential about the Vancouver Canucks.)

So why, then, do I check Klout obsessively?

Badges. They have badges.
To make up for what happened in high school. (Yes, I know.) Dammit, people do love me, and I can quantify it.
Badges and personal validation… do I really need a third reason?

Please wait for cartoon to load (55%…60%…65%….)

November 22, 2010 1 Comment

(Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb)

This week’s cartoon is inspired by working at a lot of cafés this week – cafés with very… slow… Wi-Fi.

I’m finding that decent broadband is common enough these days to make slower connections feel extra frustrating. I’m used to being able to download hundred-megabyte software upgrades in the time it takes the barista to pull shots for my Americano. And I’ve grown accustomed to genuinely streaming video; I’ll grind my molars to powder if that TED talk on the Western world’s addiction to speed has to pause for a few seconds midway through to buffer.

The folks at Angus Reid Public Opinion actually released a study back in June suggesting the majority of high-school and post-secondary students suffer stress because of sluggish computers. So I’m clearly not the only one.

Which is why I wish I could drop by the joint depicted below and knock back one of their signature cocktails, the Spinning Beachball. (Depending on your OS, you could also get straight vodka, served in an hourglass.) Their motto could be “Get loaded while you’re loading.”

Got a cocktail recipe of your own?

Fly the friend-me skies

October 12, 2010 1 Comment

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

Okay, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea from a security standpoint. But don’t you think a little social profile vetting is in order before they seat people on an aircraft?

Show me a passenger whose Twitter profile is larded up with multi-level marketing come-ons, and I’ll show you someone who’s going to pester their seat mate about exciting affiliate opportunities in the exotic berry juice industry. Check someone’s Facebook profile for a deluge of Farmville notifications and invitations, and you’ll have a pretty good idea if they’re likely to natter non-stop from LAX to LGA.

And I challenge you to find a better technique than looking through someone’s commenting record on Disqus or IntenseDebate for telling whether they’re likely to hog both armrests and kick the seat of the person in front of them.

At the very least, let’s get a few smart people together to develop an algorithm that can quickly sift through the information in your profile and match you with seatmates you’re going to find – if not riveting – then at least tolerable company. (Unless the airlines are already doing that, only to match you with people you’ll find so annoying that you’ll order more drinks. It would explain a lot.)

By the way, I’ll be in the air next week heading to BlogWorld in Las Vegas, sketchpad in hand. See you there?

P.S. – Here’s a version just for you OAuth fans.

But do tell my agent

October 4, 2010 No Comments

First published on ReadWriteWeb

So it’s happened again: another Twitter feed is making its way to network television. And props to Steve Roommate for getting the green light for Shh, Don’t Tell Steve.

And yet I can’t be the only one who’s starting to feel a little inadequate. If the social web has a shortage of anything, it sure isn’t ways to keep score – from site metrics to Alexa to PageRank to Facebook likes to Feedburner subscribers to the gazillion Web apps offering to measure your influence. (Say, have you tried mine lately?)

But once you add And just how many book deals did your site close today? to Google Analytics, it gets a little demoralizing.

If this keeps up, I may have to go back to blogging for the sheer pleasure of it.

So THAT’S why you have all those words after the headline

September 28, 2010 No Comments

(Cartoon first appeared yesterday on Blogworld)

Yes, I’ve done it too. Always with the best of intentions. Here’s a sample of my internal monologue: “Gosh, that looks like an interesting headline. I’ll retweet it… [Click!] And now to go read the po-… Hey! Liza Donnelly just posted another cartoon!”

You may have noticed this happening with your own posts (in which case, I swear I’ll get around to reading them). If you’re using an URL-shortener like bit.ly, you can track statistics… and from time to time, you’ll see the number of retweets substantially outstrip the number of clickthroughs.

I haven’t done any real study of the issue (to some lucky doctoral student reading this: you’ve just found the topic for your thesis) but I have a few guesses about underlying causes: distraction, a headline that seems to say it all, posts that people don’t want to read themselves but figure would be good for their users. (This is how I feel about eating vegan.) And maybe I just write better tweets than blog posts.

Can you keep a secret?

September 27, 2010 No Comments

Published yesterday on ReadWriteWeb

Don’t you worry – we’ll get to the cartoon in a moment. But first, would you mind signing this standard document?

It simply says you won’t give away the joke to the cartoon. And that you won’t tell any jokes with the same punchline, or a similar punchline. Ever.

Oh, that section? That’s just boilerplate. It means you acknowledge that anything you create from this point forward is a derivative work of this cartoon, and is therefore our property. Purely standard wording.

Um, yes, that next passage would appear, on the surface, to obligate you to buy a set of encyclopedias and four Magic Bullet food processors. Here, let’s just strike that out.

Look, can I level with you? Somewhere along the line, our lawyers… well, they went kind of… well, you don’t want to say “crazy”, because that’s potentially actionable. Let’s say “overzealous.”

Once they finished drafting contracts and handling the incorporation, I think they had some time on their hands. And they started thinking of ways to fill it.

Suddenly, we had to sign a liability waiver to use the coffee machine. You couldn’t use the photocopier without a notarized affidavit that you weren’t violating anyone’s IP. I found Terms of Use agreements posted above the urinals in the men’s room.

Look, you seem like a decent enough person. And the cartoon’s Creative Commons-licensed anyway. So go ahead and read it – knock yourself out.

Um, although in case you do knock yourself out, I’m going to need you to sign this waiver…

Continue reading Can you keep a secret?

Turns on a dime. Whether you want it to or not.

September 20, 2010 4 Comments

Also, it would yell loudly about who you were, where you were going and who you were going to meet there. There’d be a switch to turn that off. It would be located behind the catalytic converter on the underside of the car, and would be functional only when the car was moving at freeway speeds.

* * *

An interesting conversation unfolded after this first appeared on ReadWriteWeb. Here’s what I wrote there:

For those of us who develop apps or manage engagement strategy, is there any platform more infuriating, any terrain less stable, any regime more prone to arbitrary and capricious rule changes than Facebook?

Goodbye “fans”; hello “like”. Goodbye boxes; hello profile tabs. Goodbye contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize; hello you-can’t-have-contests-with-dairy-products-as-a-prize.

I’ll say this much: My work in Facebook has allowed me to better embrace the impermanence of all things.

A commenter suggested this is a radical field, change is to be expected, and (to paraphrase) roll with it, dude. I replied (grumpily) that “constant incremental Agile-style change, I can cope with. More significant change based on some kind of rationale or, better yet, roadmap, I can embrace. But for years, Facebook has been notorious for dropping bombshells from out of the blue, and making unannounced or poorly document under-the-hood changes that break apps and make developers’ lives hell.”

Can you tell I carry a grudge from the promotion guidelines fiasco?

Anyway, what do you think? Do I need to lighten up and embrace Facebook’s turbulence, even when clients’ budgets are on the line? Or is that just giving in to (quote from that same reply) to “disregard for customer, user and developer communities”?

(one person attacked by a monster, to another person) Remind me - which bucket does this kind of situation belong in?

Getting Things Do-… Arrrrgh!

September 15, 2010 1 Comment

You know, I couldn’t really say. Definitely not “Maybe/Someday.” Possibly “Delegate.”

Of course, if you can kill or disable it within two minutes, then hey: no bucket needed. Except afterward, because something tells me this thing will be messy.

(No idea what the hell I’m talking about? Welcome to the world of Getting Things Done.)

Misty-coloured memories…

September 14, 2010 2 Comments

It was a more innocent time, wasn’t it? A time when conversation could flow through pings and trackbacks… when Bloglines was the newsreader to beat… when all the cool kids were talking about Del.icio.us and folksonomies.

In retrospect, it was too good to last. Oh, well… I guess it goes to show: you can’t go ∼ again.

Meanwhile, congratulations and a certain amount of awe to SMBC’s Zach Weiner, who posted his 2000th cartoon today. Tsk – kids these days. Way too much work ethic.

Cartoon originally posted on BlogWorld.com.

It’s not cheating if…

September 13, 2010 3 Comments

Before we get to the cartoon, two announcements for my Vancouver friends.

Morgan Brayton’s show Raccoonery at the Vancouver Fringe Festival on Granville Island is funny as hell, brilliantly performed and just generally entertaining. There are three more shows – September 16, 17 and 19 – and tickets are $17, including a Fringe membership. Go, go, go.
I’m teaching The Art of Social Media starting Wednesday evening, September 15 at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (also on Granville Island). This six-session course looks at social media basics, with a special focus on the arts, self-expression and marketing. There are still a few spaces left – more info here (and more social media courses here).

I’ve posted a few times about how my unease at the way social media can help a marketing mentality shape our self-expression and online relationships. Obsessing over metrics and follower counts is the beginning; before you know it, you’re thinking of romantic dinners and late-night liaisons as “conversions.”

But give marketing – especially online marketing – its due. The same thing has happened with marketing that happened with video, audio and many other fields: tools that were priced far out of our reach only a few years ago are suddenly cheap (or even free) and readily available.

Google Analytics is probably the best-known of those tools, now joined by innovators likeChartbeat. You’ll also find everything from keyword analysis… to Facebook demographic numbers (a Facebook Ads account opens up a huge window into the makeup of their users, even if you never buy a single ad)… to sophisticated e-mailing list services like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp… to simple A/B testing plugins for your blog.

But there’s a cautionary note to sound here. Case in point: if you’re old enough to remember the advent of desktop publishing, then 1) I hope you can read this through your bifocals, and 2) you’ll also remember the eyeball-searing newsletters and posters pumped out by folks who could read the PageMaker manual but didn’t have a clue about design. (Sixty different typefaces on one page! Cool!)

The point is that a tool might be easy to use, but it isn’t necessarily easy to use well. And reading even a few books about, say, analytics – I’m a fan of Avinash Kaushik‘s, for example – will put you head and shoulders above most of the rest of us.

And once you know how to use a tool well, you’ll be in a much better position to use it (or when not to) to achieve the things that really matter to you, whether it’s valuable business conversions or meaningful personal connections.

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