Today's cartoon may well be an exercise in envy. I'm using an iPhone 3GS, and it'll be another 14 months (or 424 days - not that I'm counting) before I'll be eligible for a free upgrade to a phone that lets me use that Siri-esque magic.
And voice-control easily the feature I'm most drawn to right now when I start looking covetously at other, more advanced, less diesel-powered Androids and iPhones. (Yes, this Mac fanboy is tempted by Android... even though my investment in iOS apps probably exceeds my retirement savings. Those things better appreciate in resale value over time, or my retirement isn't going to come much before age 103.)
A while ago, I posted about one of the classic blunders in response to online criticism: deleting negative comments.
Let's add another mistake to that list: silence.
I'm not sure there's a force on earth that could have saved Susan G. Komen for the Cure from the social media firestorm that engulfed the organization this week. But lord knows their communications strategy didn't do them a lot of favors - starting with their initial silence.
I'm somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who's taken one of my classes... or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll.
So I can understand why I'll get the odd "TL;DR" in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.
SOPA and PIPA, the twin bills before the U.S. Congress, may not be dead dead. But after the past few weeks of protest, culminating in Wednesday's remarkable day of action, they're not looking at all well.
Votes on both bills are now delayed indefinitely. (Or, to put it in terms the MPAA would understand, they're in development hell.) Former sponsors are now fleeing for higher ground; the bills' supporters are fodder for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
As you get older, you start to see the great cycles of life emerge. Hope and disillusionment and hope again; pride crushed by defeat and then rising again; and of course, the rising wave of speculation in advance of every Apple product launch.
No surprise, then, that Morgan Stanley analysts are getting plenty of news coverage this week for predictions of a March iPad 3 release and a June iPhone 5. They join plenty of other pundits, and the predictions are more or less coalescing around quad-core chips, a higher resolution screen for the iPad and a slimmer profile for the iPhone.
There's a special appeal that Myers-Briggs personality types holds for folks in the online space. Maybe it's because of the appeal of a simple yet exhaustive taxonomy that can capture the whole spectrum of human variation. Maybe it's because you can quantify it, plot it on a graph and measure it against other people's - kind of like Klout for your soul.
As I was drawing this one it occurred to me that if you look at nearly any piece of web terminology long enough, it starts to seem vaguely smutty.
Sometimes it doesn't take any contemplation at all; Facebook should feel downright embarrassed about pushing "frictionless sharing". (No, I'm not drawing that one - at least not here. This is a family site, bub.)
And don't get me started on HTTP status codes - although, sadly, it's the client errors that seem the most compelling. Between 417 ("Expectation Failed"), 405 ("Method Not Allowed") and 429 ("Too Many Requests"), they tell the story of two tragically incompatible people who should never have hooked up in the first place. "And when he woke up the next morning, she was 410."
If you hang out on Reddit, then you're probably well acquainted with the phenomenon of the IAmA. It stands for "I am a..." and usually ends with either "AMA" ("ask me anything") or "AMAA" ("ask me almost anything").
It's also one of the most fascinating things the web's offered in a while - which, given that it's entirely text-based, is pretty remarkable.
There's a lot to like about Cyber Monday - the day online retailers try to woo us out of the big box stores and into virtual ones - over Black Friday.
First, you can do Cyber Monday in your pyjamas. Hell, you can do it with no clothes at all. Black Friday (as the court order the mall sent me makes very clear) is not pants-optional.
Yes, yes, the Internet is killing old media companies. But every once in a while, they take their revenge. They put us through agony over the threats of god-awful legislation like SOPA, currently before the U.S. Congress. They cackle as Canucks and other non-Americans grind their molars to dust every time we click on a video, only to see those dreaded words, "This video is not available in your jurisdiction."
But their sweetest vengeance, the schadiest of schadenfreudes has to be the moment when it dawns on each of us that, having created a blog, Twitter feed or YouTube channel, we have to feed the damn thing with content.
