A cartoon about how we live & work in a digital world
Noise to Signal
It’s the same heartbreaking story of any civil war. Sister divided against brother. Neighbour against neighbour. Parents against children. Dev teams against clients. Customers against mobile providers – okay, so no love lost there.
My point is this: can’t we all just get along? Failing that, can we at least get restaurant web sites to offer their menus in plain ol’ HTML?
Dedicated to my amigos at Nitobi!
Warning: bee-in-bonnet mode ON.
You know me. I’m a democratic, community-sourced, wisdom-of-crowds kinda guy. (Exhibit A: my company.)
But there’s a lot of truth in the saying “Ask a stupid question; get a stupid answer.” Just throwing out a “What do you think?” to the world probably won’t get you some high-quality feedback… especially if you’re asking about something that people haven’t thought about before, or something that requires hard-core specialized knowledge.
Yet I keep seeing that from news media: on phone-in shows, in streeters (aka person-on-the-street interviews), in opinion polls. Last week, I listened as my favourite local radio station took calls from the public over a dispute between a publicly-owned utility (disclosure: one of our clients) and a local business. At issue: whether a hook-up at the local business met safety specifications. The utility’s engineers said it didn’t; the business said it did.
And the station opened its phone lines, asking “Who’s right?”
For 99.9% of the population, the only honest answer possible is “How the hell should I know? Why are you asking me? I don’t have an engineering background.”
That, needless to say, was not the answer that came in over the phone lines. Callers divided neatly between the the-business-is-being-reckless-and-bad camp and the the-utility-is-being-bureaucratic-and-bad camp. Nobody started their contribution with “Well, I’ve examined the specs on the hookup, and compared them with utility’s technical requirements, and here’s what I’ve found…” It was all snap judgements based on worldviews and a side order of ecological fallacy.
(Actually, there was a third camp: a middle ground of people who said that no matter who’s right, insert platitude here.)
I’m not for a moment suggesting these people are stupid. But they are uninformed (as am I). And they’re being put in an impossible position: kind of a “cut the red wire or the blue wire” dilemma. Without actual knowledge to bring to bear, we fall back on arbitrary prejudice. “Well, ‘in the red’ means you’re broke, and that’s bad, while when I think ‘blue’ I’m thinking clear skies and clean water, so… snip.”
The fact is, meaningful consultation takes hard work on both sides. If you want people to give you quality input, based on their knowledge, experience, values and interests, then your conversation has to happen in a context that puts value on those factors. There’s a huge discipline and body of work on public engagement, and I can’t do justice to it in a cartoon or blog post – except to say that some producers, assignment editors and reporters don’t seem to know about it.
Maybe what we need is a movement of people willing to answer the dumb questions with the smart answer. Enough phone-ins where hosts are hearing a succession of “How the f— should I know?” responses from callers, and they might actually get the message.
As a parent, I’m dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids’ apps on our iPhones, to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze.
But there’s this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and – loath though our children’s parents are to admit it – sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue… and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play.
Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for – like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we’re groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us.
At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We’re reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story.
With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again.
It’s my least favourite expression in the world, often said after some provocative or offensive comment to short-circuit the possibility of being held responsible for it. “You’re passive-aggressive. I’m just sayin’.”
I’ll give a free pass to the way some people use it, thought – as a kind of ironic, winking way to say “I trust we understand each other.” “Someone oughta take care of that witness. Just sayin’.” Or as Ivan said late last night, “@RobCottingham You know Drupal geeks will massively retweet any cartoon referring to DrupalCon…Jus’ sayin’…”
And on that subject, Ivan…
Facebook has become an 800-pound online gorilla… or, actually, a 400-million-active-user gorilla. And with half of those users logging in on any given day, Facebook claims a massive share of the English-speaking web population, and recently outpaced Google itself in traffic.
The problem is, they operate with neither accountability nor transparency. I’m finding stories like this are becoming way too common:
The folks at Social Media Today have an active Facebook presence, using a Fan Page. And they’ve recently been posting a link to that page twice a day. A few days ago, when they tried to post a link, they received a message from Facebook:
Block! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.
You have been blocked from sharing web addresses (URLs) because you repeatedly misused this feature. This block will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. When you are allowed to reuse this feature, please proceed with caution. Further misuse may result in your account being permanently disabled. For further information, please visit our FAQ page.
The problem, apparently, was they were posting links too often.
So how often is too often? Facebook won’t tell them. How do they need to change their behaviour to get link-sharing reinstated? Facebook won’t tell them.
Now, I understand that Facebook is a private company, not a public utility. They’ve built an enormous user base because they’ve built a compelling platform, and because they’re run by savvy businesspeople.
They’re also spectacularly unaccountable: a closed organization given to apparently capricious decisions. And that’s not a great fit with the Cluetrain era that Facebook is supposedly helping to usher in.
There’s an arguably even deeper issue. With so many people engaged with each other on Facebook, it starts to take on the role of civic space… where a lack of accountability and a Star Chamber mentality have larger social ramifications.
Whether that begins to make the case for some form of regulation – maybe along the lines of consumer protection legislation – is up for debate. But if Facebook’s lack of openness becomes an irritant for the broader user community, and not just social media professionals, then government intervention would be the least of the site’s concerns.
(Originally published yesterday on ReadWriteWeb)
You’re looking at what might be the first published cartoon created on an iPad. (Certainly the first one published on ReadWriteWeb. Or here.)
From the moment rumours about an Apple tablet got serious, I was eager to learn whether it could be a vehicle for actual cartooning. Much of the buzz wasn’t promising, suggesting the device would be geared more to consumers than content creators.
Yet even a device as small as the iPhone has shown remarkable potential with the advent of software like Brushes, which produced artwork good enough – admittedly, thanks to a very talented artist – to become a New Yorker cover.
So when Steve Jobs made his Jan. 27 announcement, I was hoping against hope to hear that the device might be a worthy competitor to my beloved (but heavy and unwieldy) Cintiq. In retrospect, that was wildly unrealistic, but I was still disappointed not to hear words like “pressure-sensitive” or “stylus”.
Yesterday, thanks to the heroic early-morning efforts of my wife, I got my hands on an iPad of my own. And after seeing what my daughter did with Doodle Buddy, I quickly installed Brushes andAutodesk’s SketchBook Pro – two drawing apps for nominal grown-ups. After a little experimentation, I landed on SketchBook as my tool of choice for my first experimental cartoon.
Still, I had a problem: my big ol’ meaty index finger, which is not only a terribly imprecise drawing tool but also a very effective obstacle to seeing just what it is I’m drawing. I quickly found myself hankering for the fine-grained control of my Cintiq’s stylus.
That was when I remembered the Pogo Sketch… and discovered it was sold at the same Apple store that sold us our iPads.
The Sketch is a slender stylus ending, not in a thin nylon tip like a Wacom stylus, but a soft kind-of-rubbery material that does the same capacitive magic as your finger. And in conjunction with SketchBook Pro, it seemed to mimic pressure-sensitivity. (That’s important to many cartoonists, who like the dynamic feel of a line that changes width as they draw.)
Most important, it allowed a degree of precision and control I just can’t get with my finger, and it allowed me to draw the cartoon you see here. I can’t say it’s the same quality as cartoons I draw on the Cintiq or with pen and ink… but it’s infinitely better than anything I’d achieved on the iPhone. And to me, at least, it holds the promise – as I get a little more practice – of becoming a truly portable sketching, inking and coloring solution. I can see it coming in handy for liveblogging, rough sketches or, on the road, an alternative to more desperate measures.
How about you – if you’re planning on getting an iPad, will you be using it mainly to read, view and hear content, or will it be a creative outlet, too? And if so, what are you going to make?
As an adult, some part of me revolts against the enforced, unbroken diet of sweetness of so many children’s books, television and movies. My subconscious dreams up especially nasty ways that harsh reality might intrude on their walled gardens of bliss (“Suddenly Pippi Longstocking realized she was looking into the cold, remorseless glare of a T-1000 Terminator”)… but I don’t share them with my kids.
The reason being, another part of me knows my children only have so long before they learn that much of the world actually isn’t benevolent, that not everyone wishes them well and that terrible suffering is all too possible (and, at some point, likely). Maybe the part of me that reacts so strongly to that marshmallow-and-lollipop portrayal of the world misses the days when it was all I knew, too.
Or maybe at some level, I’m just kind of hungry, and bacon sounds good. I do know one thing: it’s going to be a long time before I share the caption to this one with either kid.
I live in a place where they’ve recently banned the use of mobile phones while driving, with additional penalties for texting. And I have a lot of company: Six U.S. states have prohibited handheld mobile use by drivers, and 20 won’t be happy with you if you SMS from behind the wheel.
(It’s having an impact. I’m noticing a sharp reduction in “Totally just ran someone over” tweets from friends.)
While the focus is on safety, and rightly so, I do wonder if there might be another benefit: inspiring more people to leave the car at home and take transit. Don’t laugh (well, not until you get to the cartoon, at which point I’d kind of appreciate it if you would). A lot of us treat mobile connectivity as a compulsion, and the enforced hour-long severing from the hive mind for twice-a-day commutes is a genuine pain point. And the growing strength of everything from location-aware apps to augmented reality will only sharpen it.
For car drivers, the freedom of the open road, as illusory as it has been for decades, is about to get more so. Mass transit may at times be crowded and uncomfortable, but with the escape to cyberspace just a few keystrokes away, buses and trains may well eclipse the car as the homes of true mobile freedom.
Force me to choose between my mobile phone and my car, and I’ll do my best to hang onto the phone. Your mileage, of course, may vary; what choice will you make?
October 26, 2010: WOW, that’s a lot of traffic today! Thanks for visiting and spreading the word, folks. As far as I can tell, this cartoon is either spreading by email, or was in someone’s (pretty large) email newsletter. Anybody know the source? I’d love to thank them.Oc
October 27, 2010: And the answer’s in. Commenter Patricia Washburn, below, explains the cartoon was posted to Systers, the legendary mailing list for women working on the tech side of computing, started by Anita Borg back in 1994. That couldn’t be more cool!
Happy Ada Lovelace Day, all. May all of our daughters grow up in a world of open doors.
Updated: And here’s the cartoon being drawn:
Have you noticed that we aren’t writers any more? Or filmmakers, or video producers, or even musicians or cartoonists? We’re content-creators.
Way too often, I hear Web folks talk about “content” as some kind of undifferentiated commodity: “Yep, figger we’re gonna need ten, maybe twelve kilos o’ content for that page. You got a bulk discount?” Back a cargo truck up to the content silo, fill her up and you’ve got yourself a website.
But there’s actually something interesting about the term – once I get past my visions of container ships laden with content, plying the seven seas. It’s a way of dismissing the value of individual creativity, sure. But it can also be a way of capturing the idea that so many of us now communicate in different media, and that digital technology has gone a long way toward democratizing personal expression.
How about you? When you hear “content”, do you think of the lorem ipsum that fills in the space between the revenue-generating ads… or something else?
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present…. the first ever abandoned blog. (That’s what you get for using ghost-bloggers. Well, in his day, probably slave-bloggers, actually.)
Hey, have you pledged to blog about women and technology on Ada Lovelace day yet?
Update: Over on the N2S Facebook Fan Page, a discussion led to the following:
“There once was a blogger named Oz / Whose empire vanished because / His follower count / was the only amount / by which he would measure his flaws.”
From our vaults, another Twitter cartoon that inexplicably failed to make the transition to the new site.
Actually, I’m always tickled to find another one of these – especially if it’s one that I’m particularly happy with. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the defendant’s expression here strikes me as just right. </bragging>
Now, if I was drawing this today, it would probably have the bank robbery in progress, with the head of the gang snarling at one of his underlings, “What have I told you? Don’t check into the bank on FourSquare!” (Update: On second thought, let’s stick with Twitter.)
(updatier) Prescience alert.
For anyone in this business who isn’t at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, pretty much every social media channel feels like sitting next to a high school clique loudly talking about a party you weren’t invited to.
If SXSW doesn’t interest you, or if you’re able to rise above it all, then my hat’s off to you and your Zen-like transcendence.
For those of us who still have some lingering envy or a fear that we’re missing out on… well, we’re not quite sure what, but something really cool… there’s actually some soothing relief this year. Check out the Twitter discussion on the #fakesxsw hashtag: if it doesn’t bring a grin to your face, well, maybe you don’t deserve to be at SXSW.
And if that doesn’t help, well, there’s always the Sally Struthers approach.
This one’s in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you’re never really 100% present in physical space.
Oh, sure, it has its drawbacks – the car accidents, the walking into parking meters, the wedding that got called off because you just had to Twitpic a photo of the moment to your tweeps (awkward, as you were the bride).
So here’s a salute to all of us who proud members of the hive mind.
And if you’re not just a member of the hive mind, but helping to build it, you’ll seriously want to consider attending ReadWriteWeb‘s 2010 Mobile Summit (facilitated by friend-of-the-show Kaliya Hamlin). It looks like it’ll rock.
And if you’d like to see this one being drawn, here’s the high-speed version…
…and here’s the full video!
What is it about the mob that makes me think “social media”? Is it the opening scene of The Godfather, where Don Corleone forces Bonasera to ask him to be his friend? Is it the resemblance of most Terms of Service to loan shark agreements? Is it just that the incessant torrent of Mafia Wars advertising has finally taken its toll?
Whatever the reason, here y’go. For the first time in a while, this one was drawn with an actual pen on genuine used-to-be-a-tree paper. And then shot on an iPhone.
You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership?
I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades – even centuries – for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.
But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic.
Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?
Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation… in 140-character increments.
Meanwhile, people, seriously – “snowicane“?
Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb.
Pay attention, social media marketers… insects are a massive untapped market segment. What they lack in disposable income, they make up for in sheer numbers. And many of them are inherently social. Like, say, ants. And their entire lives are spent performing mind-numbingly boring, repetitive tasks – they’re perfect candidates for a FarmVille knockoff.
Ok, did we all get it out of our system yet? The sly digs, the guffaws, the skeptical snorts? CBS is turning a Twitter feed, a Twitter feed, for crying out loud, into a comedy series, and there’s been a collective rolling-of-the-eyes out there in medialand.
The news that William Shatner has been tapped for the lead role – the “dad” of “Shit My Dad Says” – is icing on the cake for anyone who wants to pooh-pooh CBS’s programming savvy. (Yes, I said “pooh-pooh” in a post about “Shit My Dad Says”. Moving on.)
Well, here are three reasons I think this thing has a hope in hell – with the caveat that the vast majority of pilots self-destruct before they make it to air, let alone without ever becoming a successful series.
To everyone who says you can’t turn a Twitter feed into a TV series, of course you can’t. But can you take the talent, passion and spirit behind that feed, and channel that into another medium? Absolutely.
Will it work? I guess we’ll find out.
Meanwhile, my agent awaits your calls.
Maybe I was lucky enough to fall into some demographic trough, but I was usually the only “Rob” in my classes at school.
Most TV news credit sequences I’m seeing these days rival Avatar for sheer sensation. “Dude, it’s like I’m totally flying. Through. The news!“
The only problem is, the net effect becomes “Holy crap! HOLY CRAP!!… HOOOOLLLLYYYY CRAAAAAP!!! Good evening. Wheat futures dropped half a percentage point today in light trading…” They raise the dramatic stakes so high that, unless the lead story is “Monster robot army rampages through Oslo,” the actual news is bound to be a disappointment.
(Then again, if your news network’s dominant narrative is that the President is actually an alien bent on the destruction of the United States of America, you can probably meet that standard without breaking a sweat.)
And just in case you want to see this one being drawn, here’s the high-speed version:
And the full version, complete with running commentary:
Once again, CamTwist, you rock my world.
By now, the web is replete with stories from social media mavens, reporters and ordinary folk who innocently logged into Chatroulette, just to, um, check it out because they’d heard it was, um, interesting.
And then they discovered that, yes, it’s exactly like what people said it was. They saw people touching themselves in Very Private Places. People exposing themselves. People holding up dirty words on pieces of paper. People reading Ayn Rand. And worse.
And then, just when they’d finally reached someone who appeared normal and started to chat with them, that person would click away from them.
It’s StumbleUpon meets speed-dating, an opportunity to make your eyeballs bleed and your soul recoil while delivering devastating body blows to your ego. And isn’t that what social media is all about?
This is cartoon number one of a special triple-update day, in honour of all the lovely folks who’ve joined Noise to Signal’s Facebook fan page and pushed us over the 500 mark! Thanks – and a shout-out to Mr. 500 himself, Tod Maffin!
No, really, it makes perfect sense: administer a substance that makes people desperately have to pee. At 30,000 feet above ground. With 120 passengers. And two working toilets.
You just know someone, somewhere, at some airline’s corporate headquarters has to be thinking, “Heyyyy… what if those were pay toilets..?”
By now, you’ve probably had the same experience I have of learning about a close friend’s marriage breaking up because their status changed on Facebook. There’s something a little alienating about the fact that a server somewhere in Facebook’s infrastructure had the goods before I had even an inkling of trouble in paradise.
But then, the whole relationship thing in Facebook is fraught. I have to imagine there have been screaming, tear-filled fights because one partner clicked “In a relationship” while the other clicked “Hey, let’s not rush things.” Or, maybe worse for some people, “Sweetheart, what are you putting down for ‘relationship status’?” “I’m glad you asked, because I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
No matter which checkbox you’ve been ticking – no, that’s not a smutty double-entendre – have a happy Valentine’s Day.
Seen Alex‘s and my 2010 Valentine to you from Social Signal? Here ya go!
From your friends at Social Signal and Noise to Signal, our social media valentine to you!
My love Alex conceived and wrote the text, created the video and suggested two of the cartoon ideas… I got to focus on the doodling. Enjoy!
Social Signal’s 2010 Valentine is a celebration of how the Internet can help you find love and keep it alive.
The word that Google has decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 as of March 1 will come as welcome but bittersweet news to designers and developers who have wrestled for years to make perfectly compliant sites work properly in that wretched browser.
Welcome, because this could well be the death knell for IE6. You can make a legitimate case to clients that, hell, if Google isn’t supporting it, why should they?
And bittersweet, because the death of an old foe feels almost like losing a friend. No more nights curled up by the monitor together, trying to remember obscure hacks and puzzling through baffling JavaScript errors. No more repeated “!important” declarations. (sniff) No more (sob) custom script to get “hover” to work… or workarounds for (snuffle) transparent PNGs… sweetie, could you pass me that box of Kleenex?
Oh, who the hell am I kidding? The only tragedy about IE6’s passing is that it didn’t happen three years ago, and involve giant snowmobiles with poison-tipped 12-inch spikes embedded in their treads. (And what do you want to bet the meddling feds would have some objection to poison-tipped 12-inch spike-riddled snowmobile treads? But I digress.)
Consider the number of Web sites that have required major time-wasting workarounds. How many? 200,000? 300,000 at a very conservative estimate?
Say it took a developer two hours to get each site to work properly. That’s 600,000 lost hours… or more than 1,643 years. And at an average life span of 67 years, that’s… 25 lifetimes.
Now, if corporations can have the same rights as people, then surely abstract life-equivalent calculations can, too. Internet Explorer 6, you’re under citizen’s arrest for murder. That’s right,murder. 25 counts.
Given how arbitrarily and unjustly the death penalty has been applied, I can’t in all good conscience give in to the temptation to sentence IE6 to be taken from this place to a highly magnetic place and to be overwritten with zeroes until it is dead, and may Bill Gates have mercy on its soul.
Instead, install it on a computer that has also committed a heinous crime, seal it in a watertight box with a large solar panel affixed to each side, and set it adrift to live out the rest of its days on the shore of some deserted island. (“Hey, Professor, what’s this?” “Don’t touch it, Gilligan! It’s IE6!!”)
And then pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, and let the bells ring out. Ding dong, the Six is dead.
In lieu of a real Noise to Signal, here are some doodles from the airport.
In fairness, there’s plenty to do and eat and purchase at YVR. But I was there latish, and a lot of things were closed.
That said, I did not in fact get drunk – had a workshop to do on Friday, and besides, who wants to endure jet lag and a hangover?
Ah, yup. Between the price point, the locked-down App Store approach, the spiffy design, the tech specs, the lack of camera, the lack of multitasking, the lack of phone, the cool iBook Store, the corny iBook shelves, the impending transformation of personal computing, the impending collapse of Apple stock, the green light for 3G voice-over-IP apps, the telco deals, the publisher deals, the rumor fact checks, the comparisons with Windows, the Kindle-killing, the not-Kindle-killing and the just-have-to-wait-and-see, all of the good points are taken.
Okay, except maybe pointing out how disappointed cartoonists are that there’s no pressure-sensitive stylus. But That Would Be Self-Serving, so I won’t say it.
I’m sure there are probably a few more sanitary-napkin jokes left waiting in the wings (Anyone joke about a Maxi model yet? They did? Bugger.) but I’d like to think I’m above that. (Addendum:Alex tells me that “wings” is also circulating as an iPad joke. God, I’m clueless about this stuff. Is there a course I can take somewhere? Or maybe an app?)
All I can say is this: Dollhouse wrapped on Friday night, and I’m just about certain that even if the zombie apocalypse was brought about, not by the depradations of the Rossum Corporation, but by an iPad OS update that went horribly, horribly wrong… I’d still want one of the gorgeous damn things.
Nobody said all the cartoons would be geeky. But if it helps, there’s an Apple tablet under Gary’s body.
I’ve always loved the Law of Unintended Consequences, mainly because just saying the name of the law tells you what it is.
By the by, while we’re on the topic of love, Alex has created an amazing site making the case for our Shorty Awards bid as the most ah-DOR-able couple on Twitter.
Jolie O’Dell sparked a fascinating thread on marketing to geek women – specifically, marketing cutesy pink stuff to them.
Okay, so maybe there is a long-tail market for Barbie’s Dream Server Farm. But my experience in shopping for consumer electronics says there’s plenty of room for folks who sell technology of all kinds to get a little more savvy on how gender relations have changed.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into tech stores with Alexandra and had the salesman (I use that word advisedly) glom onto me… despite the fact that Alex is the household video, audio and telecommunications geek. Some get it after a few not-too-subtle hints (Alex: “Now is that true MEMC 240Hz, or just scanning backlight?” me: “TV’s hard! (giggle)”), but a surprising number of them can’t seem to resist directing their pitch exclusively to me.
I’d like to think times have changed from the days when cars were sold to women on the basis of how many cupholders they had. (The cars, not the women.) But I wonder.
Somehow this escaped the Great Site Transfer of 2009!
It was drawn in a godforsaken departure lounge at YVR. So if you happen to be in such a departure lounge right now, reading this, please know: you are not alone.
This cartoon is in support of my ongoing campaign to be allowed to declare our Macs as dependents for tax purposes. Won’t you lend your voice in support?
You might think I’m mocking gamers here. I’m not, actually – I just got seized by the idea. I’d love – love – to see a charity set up something to let you contribute World of Warcraft gold to them. (There’s a market for WoW gold, so in theory this should actually be possible.) It’s not unprecedented – the American Cancer Society raised a little over $274,000 last year with their Relay for Life in Second Life (I just dropped by ACS in Second Life, and confirmed that it’s on for this year, too – July 17-18.)
By the way, if you’re looking for ways to help the people of Haiti, the CBC has a list of agencies doing relief work there. My U.S. readers may find this list compiled by the people at Convio handy – along with this article from the Nation.
It’s getting to be a joke: the magic things cops can do with computers. “Wait – there’s a reflection in the teakettle! Magnify! Enhance! Now pull a DNA sample from the image! I don’t care, just do it – boost the power if you have to! Crossmatch it with every person named Brent in the continental United States! Damn, this new version of GIMP rocks!”
Annnnd… DING! Three seconds later, up pops the photo of the perpetrator, out go the cops to haul him in and America sleeps a little more soundly tonight.
We’ve grown to accept this, partly because without these little storytelling cheats our streets would be crawling with fictitious master criminals executing horrific, if imaginary, atrocities. And partly because we have a tacit understanding with directors that they’re going to keep us entertained, and there’s nothing pulse-pounding about “Well-elp, might as well take the rest of the week off while this thing renders.”
But maybe what really sells us on the idea of magic high tech down at the precinct is that, deep down, we kind of wish it were true (never mind the bladder-emptying implications for civil liberties and privacy). If we were being stalked by a sociopathic ex-con determined to exact a terrible revenge for our having sentenced him to 30 years in prison, well, dammit, we’d want those nice CSI people to have every tool they needed to stop him in the nick of time.
And maybe, just maybe, that technology could trickle down to, say, the prosumer market. “Computer… draw cartoon!”
Here’s one I dashed off in the wee hours as both Alex and I were consumed with making absolutely critical adjustments to our respective blog themes. (Which is why there’s a better-than-even chance you’re reading this in 15.5-point InfraZombie Ultracondensed Pukeybold.)
For some of us, blog themes are what flower gardens were to our parents, hot rods were to our grandparents and folk cures for Spanish flu were to our great-grandparents: things we could tinker with indefinitely. And Alex has just installed a WordPress theme called Thesis, which is currently pretty hot among certain heavy-hitting bloggers and benefits from a startling degree of customizability.
(Oddly enough, I’m a lot less inclined to frak with the Social Signal site template, because it was built by people whose skills vastly outstrip mine – Aaron snatched the pebbles from my hand ages ago. One misplaced semi-colon, and I could burn down the server building. Or worse, install Farmville on the Facebook profiles of everyone who visits the site.)
I’m pretty sure a lot of Noise to Signal’s readers are cut from the same cloth. Are you?
Tell me you wouldn’t at least look at it in the store.
Right, I thought so. Me too.
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When I first got a big TV (28″!) I thought it was the most astonishing video experience imaginable… especially because it replaced an old 14″ screen. I could see Peter Mansbridge’s pores, for god’s sake.
That held me for a whole decade. Then it was the 32″ LCD – and the jaw-slackening truth of DVD video in its full glorious progressive-scan resolution. And once I figured out how to watch high-def TV… suffice to say I kept looking for Laurence Fishburne to yank me out of it. (“720p is all around us. It’s in the air we breathe…”)
Late in 2009, we moved up 10 inches in diagonal size. We moved to 1080p and Blu-Ray. And for the first time since… god, since my parents first got a colour TV… I had that weird experience of watching something that looked just for a moment a little more real than the world around me. Certainly more vivid. And definitely louder, and with more Romulans.
Then again, Star Trek notwithstanding, 1080p isn’t the final frontier. Something else will come down the pike (the people at CES last week are swearing it’ll be 3D TV), and my kids will probably remember the TV we have today with fond exasperation. (“Remember how you couldn’t actually touch the characters on the screen?” “Yeah, or feel heat from the explosions?” “Or mate with the Vulcans?”)
In the meantime, I’m going to run. We have last night’s Simpsons 20th-anniversary special on HD PVR… a show I first watched on that old 14″ TV. Now I can see Homer’s pores, for god’s sake.
Yes, I finally use the “take two tablets” line. You may resume breathing.
Meanwhile, I’m just aching to know if the new Apple tablet (insert caveats, weasel words and qualifiers here) is a potential Cintiq competitor. I don’t think it will be, but you never know. It may also have a built in barometer and bird call generator.
‘Tis the season and all that, and this time of year I find myself thinking a lot about my parents. This is exactly the sort of thing they’d have said (if my childhood had been, oh, 20 or 30 years later), and it would have driven me CRA-ZEE.
Funny thing: It’s also exactly the sort of thing I find myself saying to my own kids.
And speaking of ’tis the season, thanks and all the best to all of you who’ve read, tweeted, forwarded and commented on Noise to Signal this year. Have a great holiday if you’re celebrating, and just have a lovely week or two if you aren’t.
I’ll easily spend more time hunting for a discount code than I will thinking about the thing I’m actually buying.
The debate rages on over whether social networks (and Twitter, and YouTube, and, and, and) have any legitimacy in the workplace, fueled in no small part by people who sell tools to block them.
But employers who turn their noses up at Facebook et al. may well discover that their coveted Millennials (a.k.a. Generation Y, a.k.a. those damn kids who won’t get off your lawn) are happy to return the favour when recruiting time rolls around. Blocking access to Facebook looks a lot like those IT departments that wouldn’t install web browsers on your computer a decade ago… or external email access a few years earlier.
And like those tools before them, the social web today is increasingly being used by companies and organizations for productive, collaborative work. So it’s not just a question of denying your HR department a hiring pool of cool kids. Blocking social media from your company can mean cutting yourself off from an important potential source of productivity, innovation and increased efficiency.
Of course, that’s an argument I like to make to people who haven’t just received a dozen Farmville notifications.
Here’s one for all you holiday shoppers out there, fresh from ReadWriteWeb. I said over there that stores have good reason to worry about customers walking in clutching their iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys:
Which means customers are bringing the competition into the bricks-and-mortar stores with them — and they can switch allegiance as easily as point, click, swipe, call up the keyboard, tap tap tap, dammit, backspace, no, that wasn’t it, tap tap (repeat eight or nine times)… submit.
So maybe stores should think twice this holiday season about trying to trim costs by thinning their staff. Longer lineups don’t just discourage shoppers, they give them the means, motive and opportunity to shop elsewhere.
That said, just abandoning your cart would be kind of a dickish thing to do. Forcing those overworked staff to restock all the stuff you took off the shelves – that just isn’t in the Festivus spirit.
And since we’re in a retail frame of mind, for a limited time only, this cartoon comes FREE with a live video capture of its rendering:
…AND with the alternate version of the caption, which I just never did quite make work:
Do people actually do this in bars, and not just on TV?
This is the first cartoon posted on our sweet new webserver (all hail the mighty Linode!). I’m getting plenty of hand-holding on the sysadmin front, and wanted to mention: if you’re looking for top-flight folks in that department, you can’t go wrong with Mike Kelly and Natasha Scott. Xs and Os to ’em (we miss you at SoSi, Nat!).
And here’s the cartoon being drawnified:
A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn‘s somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. (“I vomited on their shoes at the office party” isn’t on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn’s categories.
Probably no need to mention that this cartoon was inspired by the Web 2.0 Expo debacle involving danah boyd, a Twitter backchannel projected onto a giant screen behind her, a speech that faced an uphill battle from the get-go, and a few audience members with some impulse control (and other) issues.
There’s a fascinating renegotiation going on between audiences and speakers. Twitter and backchannels are part of it, but I suspect something deeper is afoot. There’s a revolution sweeping all forms of communication – ask anyone who works for a newspaper or a record company – and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that even something as seemingly timeless as public speaking would be affected.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be jerks about it.
This came to me while reading Dave Eave’s post about the challenges of turning the promise of crowd-sourced quality control in open-source development – the idea that “many eyes make all bugs shallow“. (It turns out the challenges are substantial, whether you’re building software or managing a city.)
By the way, I’m starting to draw the occasional cartoon live on Ustream. Follow me on Twitter (@robcottingham) to find out when I’m doing the next one; meanwhile, here’s what today’s looked like (the sound, unfortunately, got pretty distorted).
Is there anything more fun than drawing a rampaging robot intent on destroying civilization? (Answer: being a rampaging robot intent on destroying civilization.) Update: Alex reminds me that the idea for this one came from her recap of Jer Thorpe‘s amazing session last week on Processing. (What she doesn’t mention is that she made the connection, suggesting I do a cartoon about an unclosed parenthesis. xoxo)
Hey, if you’re thinking of getting some nifty Noise to Signal merchandise for holiday gift-giving – and who can fault your marvellous taste? – remember those shipping deadlines. Better order now!
And if you don’t find your favourite cartoon emblazoned on a coffee mug, printed on a greeting card or shaved into the belly of a raccoon (oh, wait – that one’s an invitation-only beta), just let me know and I’ll be happy to add it.
Ooh… this might be a nice one:
</shilling>
Also, my page on TripAdvisor.
With this cartoon, Noise to Signal moves to its new home here at RobCottingham.ca. (Social Signal will continue carrying N2S, but the all-important RSS feed will point here.) We’ll be doing a few renovations in the coming months to make it cozy: a breakfast nook here, some sconces over there. And the posting frequency will probably pick up a little.
Comments are always welcome. Enjoy the toons!
There are organizations out there embracing social media with open arms, open hearts and open minds.
But others aren’t nearly as welcoming. And if you’re working for such an organization, you’ve probably felt a little like a space alien when you try to advance even the most modest of social media projects: “See, if we had a Twitter feed, then we could monitor customer service issues and resp-” “Twitter?! Why, it’s full of viruses, spam, pornography and Ashton Kutcher! Speak to me no more of this apostasy!” Which means you, my friend, are what I’ve come to call a stranded evangelist: a stranger in a strange land.
Chances are you spend your days banging your head against the brick wall of an organizational culture of fear, hierarchy and entrenched power, and your nights tweeting your frustration to friends living with the same pain.
There are ways of changing your stranded status: building trust and alliances within your organization, going for the smallest of small wins and expanding from there, gaining insight into your organization’s strategic goals so you can find both pain points and sweet spots where social media can help. But while you’re waiting for those efforts to take off, you can at least take some comfort in the knowledge that you have company.
So the next time you’re proposing a Facebook Page or a blogger outreach initiative, and getting the kind of reaction usually reserved for stories of alien abduction (or, worse, getting the same kind of probing often featured prominently in those stories), then just smile, nod, and remember:
We are not alone.
