ReadWriteWeb

There are times in our lives, extraordinary times, that call on us to open our hearts like never before. To embrace those who are suffering, and offer them comfort and support.

This, my friends, is such a time.

If you know a BlackBerry user, reach out to them. (Not with email. That's just mean.) Let them know you care, and that just because they were offline for a few days, you still love and respect them.

It isn't hard to find people willing to make absolutely firm predictions about technology and social media, each one asserted with total certainty. Facebook will be around forever, and Google+ is doomed. Google+ is the future, not only of social networking but of human evolution. Google+, Facebook and Twitter are all doomed, and within a year we'll all be communicating exclusively through Ping.

Some predictions are extrapolated from data, drawn from careful observations of long-term trends, and inferred from past patterns and outcomes. Those, though, aren't the ones that get the blood pumping and the retweets flying; the predictions that really get arguments going are the ones grounded in sheer opinion.

I drew this week's cartoon on my iPad, in a plane, at 37,000 feet. I penciled it, inked and colored it all in the confines of an economy-class seat, which experienced air travelers know has now shrunk to the size of a Scooby-Doo lunch box.

We're now accustomed to digital miracles. High-speed, jaw-dropping graphics on a cheap gaming platform? Been there. The video projector that sits in the palm of your hand? Old news. Casual 10-way videoconferencing? Thanks, Google. (Now what else have you got?) A massive personal catalog of music you can access from nearly anywhere you're likely to go today? Apple is about to deliver it, and they're playing catch-up to Google and Amazon.

When the news about Google Plus broke, I was as cur— Sorry, just a sec. I have to go reload the Google Plus page to see if they're accepting new signups yet.

Nuts. No luck.

Where was I? Right: when the news about Google Plus broke, I was as curious as anyone about— Wait! Someone just tweeted that they're accepting newly invited users at a special URL!

The other day, I was at a local coffee shop trying to troubleshoot a page on my cartoon site. I didn't have my trusty laptop with me, but I no worries — I had my iPad, which is practically the same thing, right?

Until I opened the page in Safari, and had a look at the source.

Or, rather, didn't. It turns out Safari in iOS – you're going to want to sit down for this – doesn't have a "View Source" command.

Unlike pretty much the rest of Vancouver, I don't watch hockey — even Stanley Cup finals — so I was in a state of media blackout during the seventh game on June 15. The one exception was Twitter, which I was mostly ignoring because the feed had degenerated into nothing but anguished variations on "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUGH!!!!! #canucks".

But by the time the game was due to end, I thought it might be safe to start peeking again. And that's when I started to see the ensuing riot unfold in ASCII: A car overturned. Then another. Then one on fire. Then windows being broken. And then all hell breaking loose.

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?

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...