There are times when it seems like the economics of the web seem to boil down to:
1: Find some white space on your site.
2: Fill it with an ad.
3: There is no number three. Check out these great discount air fares!
It starts innocently enough, with a few AdSense text placements. But before you know it, you have one of those Flash-based monstrosities lurking in your sidebar - the kind you don't dare roll over, because if you do it spawns some demonic window that extends outside the boundaries of your monitor and knocks over furniture in your family room, while playing The Macarena at 130% volume.
In a week where U.S. news coverage was dominated by an inappropriate tweet from a congressperson's Twitter account, maybe it's worth taking a moment or two to think about your own personal social media policy. What are you doing to avoid landing in the same soup that Rep. Anthony Weiner has been sloshing around in for the past several days?
Herein, a brief rant. It may be bubbling up from the fact that I'm turning 48 tomorrow, and therefore approaching curmudgeon status. It may be from the past week's news: an eG8 summit that looked more like a circling of wagons against the open Web; an attempt in Washington to conscript DNS into the intellectual property wars.
Whatever the cause, I'm entering my 49th year with a deep, burning anger over the forces arrayed against the open Web.
This week is Noise to Signal's fourth birthday. On May 27, 2007, I scanned and posted the first cartoon I'd published in years... and I haven't stopped since.
I'm celebrating with a caption contest and I'll think of something else fun to do on the actual day. (It may involve a cocktail with such ingredients as gin, vermouth and Koh-I-Noor drawing ink, with a Pigma Micron marker instead of a swizzle stick.)
The cartoon's changed a lot since then. I used to rough out a cartoon in pencil, draw it in ink, scan it in and retouch it. Today my workflow is most always all-digital. And my iPad is now my tool of choice for sketching ideas on the fly. (Thank you, SketchBook Pro.)
Every organization seems to have at least one Dr. No: someone whose role in life appears to be to come up with a dozen reasons not to proceed with an intriguing idea... or even to explore it further.
That's true in even the most traditional fields, but if you're working in an emerging field like social media, you probably run into it constantly. And you may have learned such strategies as...
Okay, so my mother wasn't in any position to leave me a social graph in her will. When she died in early 2004, Friendster was the domain of the young'uns, MySpace was barely out the door and Facebook was still a month from launching.
But for someone who never saw used the word "friend" as a verb in her life, Mom taught me an awful lot about social networking.
Things like being of service, and giving instead of taking. Mom volunteered on everything from the local community association to the church. (It got to the point where someone witnessed a break-in at our home - the burglar walked in through the unlocked front door - and thought nothing of it except "Poor JoAnne; people aren't even bothering to knock any more when they walk in with more work for her to do.")
Tomorrow is election day in Canada (and to any of my fellow Canucks thinking of giving the ballot box a miss this time, "maybe give Derek Miller a read).
Most of the discussion I've seen online has been relatively polite, even muted, with only a few lapses into Godwin's Law territory — which inspired the cartoon below. The same holds true, for the most part, for the campaigns; none of the relatively little mud being flung has stuck. (Arguably, that's because the worst of it was thrown in the months leading up to it.)
But one place where passions have flared has been Canada's law barring the publication of election results from one part of the country before the polls have closed in points west. In years gone by, that prohibition has been relevant only to the broadcast media. But in the social media era, suddenly anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account is subject to those same restrictions... and a lot of them don't like it.
This one's for the engineers, the programmers, the database administrators, the sysadmins, the networking gurus, and the rest of that army of people that gets deployed when a major outage happens.
While the rest of us grouse that we can't check in at our local haunts, or log on with our Twitter app of choice, or vote a story up or down on Reddit - or even do something a little more directly tied to social or economic productivity - those folks are working brutal hours under intense pressure to get everything back up again.
As of today, I've been blogging for 10 years. (I do believe that's the CPU enclosure anniversary.)
My first post (thank you, Blogger) was about the impending provincial election, an invasion of carpenter ants and how Sen. George Allen (R, VA) was such a n00b. (He has since had reason to revise his assessment of the Internet from "free way to read newspapers" to "destroyer of careers".)
I've tried to be a little more focused since then. But more and more of my attention has shifted to my business' blog and to the cartoon, and my personal blogging has ebbed accordingly. It hasn't stopped, but there are certainly some dry spells.
Others have more discipline. As appalling an industry as content farming is - something roughly like currency speculation in its overall level of social usefulness - I have to hand it to the people who work there. They crank out content day in and day out. Just not feeling it today? Couldn't give a rat's fuzzy behind about the topic? Doesn't matter - you still put fingers to keyboard and write, or you don't get paid.
I'm a numbers junkie.
Oh, I talk a good line about how it's the quality of the conversation that matters, and the connections you make... but you won't see a day go by when I'm not checking on stats. Twitter followers, Klout score, blog traffic: if I can measure it, I'm counting.
And it's not like those numbers aren't important... so long as they're measuring something that ultimately represents some kind of impact I can have on the world, or vice versa.
But that doesn't explain why it's such a compulsion for me - and, let's face it, for an awful lot of people. I've subscribed to a number of theories over the years, most of them variants on "It's all about making up for not being cool in high school."
