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Posts from May 2010

A commander in the field briefing three other soldiers. "Ramirez, you take point. Butterfield, you'll pop smoke and lay down covering fire. And — Dietrich, did I SAY this was bloggable?!"

Just between you and me (and the entire Internet)

Just between you and me (and the entire Internet) published on 5 Comments on Just between you and me (and the entire Internet)

Are you finding the same thing I am? Where you’re having a casual conversation with a friend, and you’re in the middle of saying something… well, not exactly secret, but not the sort of thing you want shared with the world… and you stop dead, suddenly worried that it might end up in their Twitter stream?

When I’m talking to someone with a blog, a Twitter feed or even a Facebook account (which, these days, means nearly everyone), I’m often just a little guarded. I have my own guidelines and boundaries when I’m dealing with other people’s information – basically, if there’s any ambiguity, I ask permission before I share – but I know other people draw the line differently.

Sometimes they’ll reveal a confidence but change a few details to protect identities. Or maybe they’d never do that, but they’ll readily tag an embarrassing party photo of you on Facebook.

While some people lay down hard and fast rules about the new online etiquette, the reality is things are still a lot more fluid than many of us realize. You’ve just had lunch with a potential client; do you tweet that? You shot a hilarious video at the company picnic; do you upload it? And do we all just assume we’re all on the record, 24-7, until and unless we agree otherwise?

Several years into the social media revolution, we’re still only making baby steps toward some kind of shared understanding of the terrain we’re walking on together. And in some ways, netiquette seems as nebulous a concept as ever.

But where are my manners? Here, have some of the last tinned peas on the planet.

But where are my manners? Here, have some of the last tinned peas on the planet. published on No Comments on But where are my manners? Here, have some of the last tinned peas on the planet.

I know that Robert McKee says character is only really revealed under pressure. But I’d like to think that we’re basically the same people whether we’re mingling at a cocktail party or fighting off hordes of the undead with only a plastic coat hanger and a loofah. “Oh, you must meet the Hendersons. They just became zombies, too!”

Known issue. Developers needed.

Known issue. Developers needed. published on No Comments on Known issue. Developers needed.

The digital divide isn’t going away. Got a favourite organization that’s helping to close the gap? Mention them in the comments below and we’ll send a little link love their way.

No comment.

No comment. published on 11 Comments on No comment.

Not that long ago, you’d write a blog post and a handful of people might comment on it. Some of those comments might be one-line approval or disagreement, but others would go some length to engage with what you’d said.

These days, though, I’m finding you’re more likely to get a retweet: “RT”, title of your blog post, and link.

Don’t get me wrong: I love seeing those. Love, love, love them. By all means, retweet away.

But what blog comments give you that retweets can’t (unless the retweeter opts out of Twitter’s retweeting feature to add a few words of their own) is conversation. I love to hear what people thought of what I said. I love for them to agree, disagree, point me to new ideas, or take an idea and run with it. And while we can do that to some degree on Twitter, the 140-character wall is pretty limiting.

I’ve been pretty lucky, actually; since I launched the cartoon, I’ve been attracting a small but growing number of deeply-appreciated comments. I have a few tools that let me import related tweets into the comment stream. And Twitter brings a lot of people here.

I’m hoping that continues… but I have a feeling that bloggers everywhere have to adjust to a world where Twitter means blog comments, and the rich conversation that can come with them, are the exception.

What do you think? Have you seen comments drop off on your blog? And if so, is Twitter the issue, or is something else at work? Comment below… or tweet me.

(P.S. – Was I clear enough about liking the retweets? No? I LIKE THE RETWEETS.)

Also, doesn’t plug-and-play well with others

Also, doesn’t plug-and-play well with others published on 4 Comments on Also, doesn’t plug-and-play well with others

You want to sound smart next time you’re at a tech demo? Learn to ask this question, “Yes, but does it scale?” Try to arch your eyebrows just a bit, so that you look skeptical but perhaps also hopeful.

If they answer yes, and start talking in technical language way over your head, you say: “I’ll be interested in seeing that play out under real-world conditions.”

If they say, “How do you mean?”, you say: “I think you’ve just answered my question.” (Then spin on your heel and get out. No further conversation can possibly go well at this point.)

Flash: nature’s way of telling your browser to slow down

Flash: nature’s way of telling your browser to slow down published on 3 Comments on Flash: nature’s way of telling your browser to slow down

Props to Flash for a whole lot of things, from making the YouTube revolution possible to offering a genuinely accessible authoring environment. Seriously, good on ’em.

But on Safari, Chrome and Firefox, I’m discovering that most sites with a significant Flash presence are a sign that I’m about to have the opportunity to practice my calm breathing skills while those browsers slow to a crawl. For whatever reason, if the Internet is a bunch of tubes, then Flash is the slowest hamster in the Habitrail.

I’m loath to lard up my system with beta software, but Flash is ubiquitous enough that I’m prepared to make an exception. So we’ll see if the Flash plug-in 10.1 release candidate speeds things up any.

Meanwhile, on a related note: if you’re starting a restaurant web site, please be one of the few, the proud that aren’t built entirely in Flash. Mobile devices can’t use them, most are hostile to search engines (you do want search engine traffic, right?) and I have yet to see a restaurant web site that had a good reason not to stick to good ol’ HTML.

Tweaty

Tweaty published on 2 Comments on Tweaty

There’s a lot about Twitter that I find annoying: Auto DMs from people when I follow them (“Thanks for the follow! And please check out my acai berry multi-level marketing site!”). Random, Inspiration Lite™ quotations, stripped of all context. People who invent rules like “you have to follow everyone who follows you.” (No, you don’t. And you don’t have to eavesdrop on an intelligence agency just because they tap your phone line – in fact, they discourage it.)

But just when I get crotchety enough to start shopping for a shawl and rocking chair, along comes what may be the one meme on Twitter that actually warms the cockles of my heart: Follow Friday.

(I’ll pause here to let the derisive laughter die down.)

Let me stipulate: a lot of #ff tweets aren’t much use. Some are just a random string of accounts; too many others recommend folks like @aplusk, @cnnbrk and @barackobama – not exactly out-of-the-box discoveries.

But I’m finding more and more #ff tweets that put recommendations into context, saying these people are funny, or inspirational, or smart. And I’m seeing others that use Follow Friday to offer thanks, express love or suggest that people reach out and offer some comfort or attention. And when people use it that way, I’ve found I actually do find interesting new folks to follow.

For all its faults and misuse, Follow Friday is adding a little to Twitter’s growing pool of social capital. So TGIFF… and let’s try to bring that spirit of generosity and gratitude to the other six days of the week.

We are all in Witness Protection

We are all in Witness Protection published on 1 Comment on We are all in Witness Protection

It’s not just that some social networking platforms make it almost ridiculously hard to find the “delete” button on your profile. (Enough people are searching Google for how they can delete their Facebook account that it’s actually making news headlines. I want you to think about that for a second: the popularity of a search engine query is now newsworthy. Truly, we live in the future.)

It’s that they make it emotionally painful, too. Facebook throws up faces of your nearest and dearest on its confirmation screen, asking, “Are you sure you want to do that? Really? YOU WILL NEVER SEE THESE PEOPLE AGAIN.” (I’m paraphrasing. Facebook’s language is far more manipulative.)

Here’s one clue that your platform may not be delivering the value to your users that it ought to: you need to take hostages to get them to stay.

Paging David Pogue

Paging David Pogue published on 4 Comments on Paging David Pogue

If the planet came with a manual, I have to think it would carry some pretty serious warnings about certain activities:

Offshore petroleum drilling: THIS IS NOT A SUPPORTED FEATURE OF PLANET EARTH. Using this feature may void your warranty and may cause issues including – but not limited to – unavailability of the Plenty-O-Shrimp feature, increased beach viscosity and unexpected dolphin termination. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU BURN ANYTHING OBTAINED THROUGH THE USE OF THIS FEATURE. This can lead to your system running at dangerously high temperatures.

Added: Oh, curse of knowledge, you scamp. When I wrote this, it didn’t occur to me that people might not know David Pogue is the guy behind the absolutely wonderful Missing Manual series, published by O’Reilly Media.

Your friend just sniffed you! Sniff back? (y/n)

Your friend just sniffed you! Sniff back? (y/n) published on 7 Comments on Your friend just sniffed you! Sniff back? (y/n)

This cartoon is an updated look at my original Facebook dogs, who kicked off Noise to Signal as the first cartoon under that name. And they are, of course, a reference/homage to Peter Steiner‘s iconic New Yorker cartoon.

This hasn’t been a good past few weeks for Facebook. Growing concerns over what Facebook’s deliberately doing to your privacy collided with news about what Facebook’s doing accidentally with your data.

There are two upcoming ways you can protest: by not logging in on June 6, or – if you’re ready to finally cut the umbilical cord – quitting altogether on May 31. So far, while they’re getting press attention, neither initiative is showing signs of snowballing yet, with registered followers numbering only in the hundreds.

That’s not to say the discontent is limited to net activists and privacy advocates. “How do I delete my Facebook account” is suddenly a very popular search on Google.

Which I actually find encouraging, and not because of hostility toward Facebook. (Not that I’m happy with its privacy practices, or its approach to the open Web, by which it seems to mainly mean a Web that’s open to driving data into Facebook. And not that I side with the “your-privacy’s-dead-anyway-so-shut-up” crowd, either.) If so many people are at least thinking of voting with their feet, then maybe there’s at least some awareness among regular users that our privacy, attention and data are all worth something. And maybe, just maybe, that awareness could coalesce into a market force that rewards openness and accountability, and punishes arbitrary, high-handed behaviour.

Otherwise, well, I likely won’t quit this year. But there’s always May 31, 2011.

If they won’t rise up and smite your enemies when you ask them to, are they really “followers”?

If they won’t rise up and smite your enemies when you ask them to, are they really “followers”? published on No Comments on If they won’t rise up and smite your enemies when you ask them to, are they really “followers”?

For a few brief, glorious moments on Monday, as Twitter responded to a security issue by reverting all follower counts to zero, we were all equals. The neoest of neophytes had as many followers as Oprah or Ashton. (Hell, I had as many followers as @awsamuel. When was the last time that happened?)

Now the old order has been restored, and metrics-obsessed mavens can go back to human-bean-counting (I’ll admit it, I’m one of them). But I would have liked to see how things might have worked out if the follower-count-outage had lasted a few days instead of a few minutes. How would it have changed how we interact? Would we have resorted to deciding whether to engage with someone based on the quality of their conversation, or would we have found some other proxy for their capital-I Importance?

When I grow up, I wanna be a…

When I grow up, I wanna be a… published on 6 Comments on When I grow up, I wanna be a…

I don’t know what a high school guidance counsellor’s job looks like these days, at least on the career-advice side. But I’d have to think it involves a certain amount of throwing up of hands and answering kids’ questions with a “You tell me.”

Back when I was in high school (yes, yes, back when I rode to school on a coal-fueled barge and the skies were black with passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers), careers had well-defined paths that were expected to take you through your working life. That’s not quite how it worked out for my graduating class; our career paths forked, spiralled and went downright fractal on us.

Maybe we should give up on trying to predict the precise career options that will face today’s crop of fresh faces, and ask instead what skills will make the most sense in a socially networked world. (“Extracting surgically-implanted RFID tags” sounds like a winner right out of the gate.) Conversational authenticity, exercising sound judgement in deciding what to share and with whom, acting online and offline with intention and integrity – these all strike me as pretty critical, not to mention being building blocks for just being decent people.

Northern Voice

Northern Voice published on No Comments on Northern Voice

I just finished two days of iPad-based cartoon-blogging and doodle-note-taking at Northern Voice, the Vancouver-based personal social media conference… and boy, are my arms tired.

But both the iPad and the Pogo Sketch performed magnificently. As for me, well, I’ll leave that to you to judge.

Thanks, Northern Voice MooseCampers!

Thanks, Northern Voice MooseCampers! published on 2 Comments on Thanks, Northern Voice MooseCampers!

I got to kick off MooseCamp – the narrowly-rescued unconference stream at Northern Voice – with a half-hour on webcomics. I shared a little of what I’ve learned over the past few years, but one of the things that grabbed people’s imagination is that you can cartoon without, well, cartooning.

Here are links to some of the comics I mentioned that are created with little or no actual drawing (although there’s a lot of talent still there):

  • Dwell On It, Tateru Nino’s cartoon created through Second Life screen captures
  • Gumshoo, a fun comic that deals with the same kind of topics I do, created on Bitstrips.com
  • A Softer World, with captions over top of photos – think LOLcats for grownups (often leading dark internal lives)
  • Dinosaur Comics, which uses the same clipart and panel structure in every comic
  • Get Your War On, which uses truly awful office clipart to devastating political effect
  • And then there’s xkcd – stick-figure cartoons from someone who every once in a while proves he can, in fact, draw pretty damn nicely.

Thanks, everyone – I loved the session!

Beating a hasty retweet

Beating a hasty retweet published on 6 Comments on Beating a hasty retweet

In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll make this brief. If you’re running a Twitter contest or promotion, then please – I beg you – have entrants do something more useful, more conversational, more interesting than just retweeting a link to your latest sale item or a message about how fabulous you are.

I thank you. Your participants’ followers thank you. And at the end of the day, your brand reputation will thank you.

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