Author: Rob Cottingham

Anyone who’s run afoul of Facebook’s, um, fluid rules for user behaviour can tell you it’s like a Kafka novel. (Remember the one where nobody would friend the giant cockroach? Shudder.)

Here’s one of the latest lucky contestants: Social Media Today, a Web venture with an active presence on Facebook, was posting URLs twice a day, until one day they discovered they’d run afoul of the site’s rules and had their ability to post links blocked.

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So how often is too often? Facebook won’t say. How infrequently would they have to post to stay safe? Facebook won’t say.

Look, I get that Facebook’s a private company and if I don’t like it I can just move somewhere else – although when you’re dealing with a platform that has 400 million users, half of whom log on in any given day, that’s a little like saying you can always go find yourself another human civilization.

But there’s something wrong if we’re expected to treat Facebook like Dinsdale Piranha – forgiving them for nailing our heads to the floor because we’d transgressed the unwritten law. (Which law? “Er… Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy.”)

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You’re looking at what might be the first published cartoon created on an iPad. (Certainly the first one published on ReadWriteWeb.)

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.

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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 and Autodesk’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?

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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.)

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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You’ve probably heard that ReadWriteWeb has just announced the 2010 Mobile Summit, which – judging by last fall’s real-time web summit – is going to be a bang-up event. (With Kaliya Hamlin facilitating, how can it be otherwise?)

This one’s in honor of the summit… and in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you’re never really 100% present in physical space.

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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, which was awkward as you were the bride.

But let’s admit it: We’re part of the hive mind, and we’re proud of it. Onward to Mountain View!

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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.

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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”?

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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.)

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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.

1. There’s an audience. No, SMDS’ million-plus Twitter followers won’t automatically translate into a faithful TV audience. But those followers represent a big chunk of people primed to at least consider giving the pilot a look-see – and that’s quite a hurdle to jump. What’s more, many of them are die-hard fans… and if they like what they see, they’ll work tirelessly to promote the show to friends and family.
2. Justin Halpern is legitimately funny. SMDS isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it takes real craft to crank out laugh-out-loud jokes that fit into Twitter’s 140-character limit, and he clearly has an ear for dialogue. Granted, doing that once every day or so is a long way from hitting the sitcom pace of three or four jokes per minute – but he isn’t alone in writing for the show. And that brings us to…

3. The producers know how to walk the line without crossing it. SMDS is being produced by the creators of Will and Grace, a show that often flirted with transgressive humor and pushed the boundaries of good taste – often gave them a good, hard shove, actually. But they had an instinct for their audience’s comfort level. If anyone can pull off the balancing act that SMDS is going to demand, they’ll do it.

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.

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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.”

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No matter which checkbox you’ve been ticking – no, that’s not a smutty double-entendre – have a happy Valentine’s Day.

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Photo credit: Esparta

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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?

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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.

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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.

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I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into tech stores with Alex 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.

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It was the okay-est of times, it was the meh-est of times.

From the election of the first American social media president… to a nod to social media from the mainstreamiest of mainstream media (Oxford Dictionary, for god’s sake!)… it’s been a big, tumultuous sprawling toddler of a year, prone to tantrums and potty accidents but adorable nonetheless.

Here, then, is 2009 the way it was meant to be remembered… in doodles.

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‘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.

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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 see you in 2010.

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