Internet adventures

This might be a bad sign for Windows 7. On the other hand, IE7 was the "Vista Browser" and it kicked ass…

by

I was actually a little psyched to get IE8. Maybe it could fix some of the more quirky aspects of IE7, some of its slow stretches. maybe it could even keep from stopping my computer from hibernating.

Well, the new “accelerators” are overrated – the people behind the sites you visit actually have to create them, so no Yahoo Mail accelerator for me. It and a lot of the other new features are hopelessly gimmicky. I mean, color-coded tabs? Especially when I can’t define each tab’s color?

What’s more, Autocomplete is now limited to the first (not, say, most recent or relevant) 20 history results (and most recent 5, plus any favorites) as part of “spiffing up” Autocomplete. And scrolling with the side of my touchpad sucks now for speed-scrolling. (Word has a similar problem, in that it’ll sometimes refuse to scroll past the insertion point.) And the slowness issues, if anything, may have gotten worse.

I had been considering taking Firefox for a test drive to see how it could match up compared to the more concerning aspects of IE7. The main thing preventing me from doing so was the promise of IE8 and its new features, which either would be enough to keep me from going to Firefox or wouldn’t be. I didn’t think it was possible, but IE8 has actively driven me to Firefox.

(Oddly, even though I myself use IE and IE is the most popular browser, most visitors to Da Blog use Firefox. Maybe that says something about the sorts of people who would visit Da Blog…)

Tweet, tweet! Tweet, tweet, tweet!

by

The stated purpose of Twitter is to exchange answers to the question, “What are you doing?” with friends and family. There are a few obvious problems with the concept. In some sense, it’s really just a service to send a text message to a bunch of people at once, as though you couldn’t do that anyway if you have a half-decent phone. Then there’s the obvious question whether you, or your friends or family, would want your friends and family to know about every single thing you’re doing. There’s a limit to how much following you can do at once, especially if you’re getting text messages for every single tweet (meaning you’re constantly interrupted by each incoming text) and racking up your text message bill. There are all sorts of horror stories of people begging their friends, “don’t tweet me every couple of minutes!” and “I don’t want to know what you had for dinner last night!”

In fact, if Twitter was as simple as I just described, it probably would not be on its way to becoming The Next Big Thing(tm). Instead the makers of Twitter made several decisions that, in retrospect, represent them lucking out on something they could cash in on if they just found the right business model:

  • Tweets are public. Anyone can read them, even people who haven’t signed up for Twitter (contrast, say, Facebook). This is why Twitter is called a “microblogging” platform instead of, say, a “mass text message” platform.
  • Followers control whether they want to follow you, not the other way around. It would be at the very least impractical for Ashton Kutcher to send messages to a million-plus screaming fans all at once. Big celebrities and news organizations like CNN could set up a “text this word to this number and get alerts right to your phone!” service, and probably do (for one thing, they could charge their own fees for it). But Twitter allows them to save the expense of having such a system AND open them up to anyone who desires to read them, in the spirit of the Internet itself. In fact, followship is not even a reciprocal relationship as with most social networking services, so it doesn’t have the “commitment” of “friendship”, and you don’t have to follow someone you’re not interested in just because they want to follow you. (I suspect some celebrities and corporate tweeters don’t get this and blindly follow everyone that follows them.)
  • It’s possible to run Twitter without using text messages, or even going to the site that often. Twitter has opened things up for anyone to “build a better Twitter”. I’m not really sure what the point is – either Twitter’s admitting their site sucks or it works just fine and there’s no need to use something else – but I do know I would like a Twitter platform that won’t go on the fritz if it’s disconnected from the Internet (i.e., it’ll pick right back up when you re-connect to the Internet). And that won’t prevent me from hibernating but there’s only one way to find out if that’s the case.
  • I think Twitter itself anticipated that their service would not just be used to answer the question “What are you doing?” even though almost everything about their site works under that assumption. How else to explain the existence of “@replies” or “retweets” (admittedly the latter is unofficial) or other such things? Twitter clearly sees itself as a social networking platform of some kind.

At the same time, Twitter’s relative independence from social networking platforms like MySpace and Facebook work to its benefit as well, including the non-reciprocity of followship, which actually creates more of an incentive for people to follow you when it means strictly “receiving their tweets”. If Twitter were just another social networking platform it probably would never have been able to run down the giants. By focusing all its attention on a sole feature – quick, bang-bang updates sent out to as many people as want to hear them – and downplaying the social networking aspect of its existence, Twitter has established for itself a separate identity. You don’t go to Twitter to meet new people or whatever else you do on MySpace, nor should you, and you don’t go to Facebook to write a bunch of little blurbs every half hour.

Okay, so why tweet instead of blog? Isn’t tweeting just an extremely limited form of blogging? There’s the social networking aspects, but Blogger’s decided to ape those with its “follower” feature; there’s the ability to receive text messages instead of always going to a computer, but surely someone could have come up with a service that did that without outfitting it with all the bells and whistles of Twitter, right? There’s the ability to send text messages to tweet, but surely an outfit like Blogger could institute that capability too, right? So why is it that blogs – Blogger blogs even, like Fang’s Bites – not only have Twitter accounts on top of their blogs, but use them almost entirely to post links to their blog posts? I have to imagine it’s to allow text message notification to people for whom RSS feeds aren’t immediate enough, or blog promotion. (I personally actually prefer to read Fang’s Bites off the RSS feed than in its “original” form.)

Perhaps more interesting is those people who put some things in their Tweeters and other things on their blogs. Why not just put the stuff you’re tweeting on your blogs and stop antagonizing readers by either polluting their text messages or Twitter roll or withholding content from them? When I made Da Blog’s tagline “The ONLY blog written by Morgan Wick”, the intended joke was that of course it was the only blog written by me, because why would I create another one when I had this one? Why would anyone start a second blog – especially one that limited how much you could write so severely – when they already had one?

Twitter really hit mainstream consciousness with the Ashton Kutcher-CNN “race to a million” and Oprah deciding to get a Twitter account – but the mere fact that Kutcher and CNN could race to a million showed that Twitter had attained some sort of mainstream acceptance even before that. People have been pushing Twitter as the “next big thing” since at least 2007 (it only launched in 2006). Celebrities and ordinary Joes alike have flocked to Twitter in droves over the past year or so, convinced they have to get on board with this next big thing, and there is some evidence they eventually get confused or frustrated and quit.

Forget, for a second, whether or not the dropoff rate is the result of people using “better Twitters”, as opposed to using the website, as some have suggested. Newbies are less likely to know they exist, so there’s probably some genuine dropoff. I’ve listed above some of the confusing aspects of Twitter, areas where the uninitiated might wonder, what the hell is the point? I think some of the people wondering about Twitter should make sure they’ve looked at the tweeters of people who have already taken to it like a glove so they can really get a feel for the technology and what the community is like.

Twitter isn’t just narcissistic; it can be a more two-way form of communication than almost anything else on the Internet, including ordinary blogs with their comments and even discussion forums, as you can have public conversations with anyone you’re following and/or who’s following you, from anywhere in the world – or even have a true “chat” room where just about anyone can come in and out. In this way it can be a way to elicit comments or contributions or other such things, invoking the “wisdom of crowds”. The immediacy of Twitter helps greatly with this as well; you don’t necessarily have to wait for a follower to go to the computer and actually look to check. You can use Twitter for personal purposes as well, such as to-do lists or notes, or to manage projects, or to cover events “as they happen” (impractical with a blog), or things you’d never expect to do with such a simple concept. There are a lot of rather unique Twitter accounts with some unique applications of the concept, more than I could possibly list here.

I said in Da Blog’s introductory post that I would never have a MySpace or Facebook account. I saw them as things that were overly popular that I was therefore, in some way, “too cool” for. I had no use for them, and if I were to hop on their bandwagon I would effectively be going along with the crowd and doing what everyone else was doing. But Twitter intrigues me. In an odd way, I actually have some personal interest in Twitter’s stated goal, of letting people know “what are you doing?” Since I was very young, I imagined any number of imaginary TV channels that in some way involved me and any number of… I won’t call them imaginary friends, per se, but imaginary people. Through various corporate acquisitions and permutations (I have very well-developed fantasies – I read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid), I’ve managed to maintain these fantasies in some form all the way to the present day. Through all these permutations, I almost always managed to have one channel that followed me around all day long in whatever I did, except maybe when I was eating. I’ve always had some interest in the rituals of my own life and how exactly I spent my day every day, what I was doing at each moment. Twitter and I were practically made for each other!

So I’ve been thinking about hopping on board the Twitter bandwagon for a little while – I’ve only had sufficient exposure to it to really think about it this year, but still. This is actually a little sooner than I had intended to do so, as I had intended to hop on board around the same time as certain other developments (that haven’t happened yet) came along, but I received an assignment from my communications class to (among other things) keep a log of my media usage for a four-day period. That aligns with one of the things I was intending to tweet about, and I just loved the irony of maintaining such a log on Twitter. From now until Monday, relevant entries in said log will be marked with the “#MediaLog” keyword.

So say hello to the real-life Morgan Wick Channel, also known as www.twitter.com/morganwick, your one-stop shop for all things Morgan Wick. Here you’ll find:

  • Everything (or almost everything) I’m doing. Am I on the bus? In class? Checking feeds? Working on the latest blog post? Doing actual work? Watching TV? You’ll know.
  • If I’m moved to leave a comment on something somewhere on the Internet, I’ll usually elect to write a mirroring Twitter post, depending on how much I’ve talked about the topic on Da Blog and some other factors. (Sports or webcomics? Yes. Global warming? No.)
  • Anything happening in the Morgan Wick Online Universe (which I intend to tighten soon). Every time I make a post on Da Blog, it will appear on the Twitter feed with a link. This includes “web site news” items, so you’ll get tweets every time I update the web site. I’ll also tweet every time a new Sandsday goes up, which should be a more reliable and punctual option than the Komix feed, as well as alert you when I need to post the new comic on Da Blog. If I have other projects that for whatever reason I don’t post about on Da Blog every time a new one goes up, I’ll tweet those as well. This is another reason for me to go to Twitter: anyone who likes me for anything else will be exposed to any of my other projects!
  • Other comments as I’m moved to leave them, including my more ranty moments, which will be phased off Da Blog.

I think there are enough problems with Twitter as constituted now that I’m not sure how full-bore I can go into it. Right now I’m (or rather, my mom is) charged for every text I send or receive, meaning I need to avoid texting any tweets if at all possible, and I either can’t go around following everyone under the sun or I need to turn off text reception of tweets. There are plenty of other reasons for the latter; simply put, as presently constituted there is a practical limit to how many people you can follow without getting overwhelmed by tweets, many of which you’re probably not the least bit interested in.

I’m laying down a few ground rules for my use of Twitter that will also affect what I post to Da Blog:

  • Any post that could be a tweet will be posted as a tweet. If I’m ever tempted to post something shorter than 140 characters it will be posted on Twitter and not Da Blog.
  • If I am ever tempted to write something that would span two or more Twitter posts it will be posted as a blog post instead. This could potentially actually counteract the loss of short posts to Twitter; I’ll go along and happen upon something I want to make into a tweet, but it comes out too long. Off to Da Blog with it, even if I would not have made it a blog post otherwise!
  • Some Da Blog posts may have titles written with Twitter syntax. For example, I could write a post directed to the “example” Twitter account, and so I would have a post with a title beginning “@example”. If you decide to rely on Twitter to find out when new blog posts are up you’ll want to make sure you’re seeing all my @replies. (UPDATE: Okay, never mind. See comments.) Also, from now on if I have to put up Sandsday on Da Blog the post title will start “Sandsday #XXX” to mirror the Twitter format, as opposed to now when it’s just a random thought on the action.
  • No retweets. I find merely copy-pasting someone else’s tweet to be essentially pointless. Instead I’ll just make it a reply to the tweet. (There’s a chance I’ll retweet in the title of a blog post once or twice.)

Links to my Twitter feed will be located in three places: on the right sidebar of Da Blog, on the front page and 404 page of the web site on the sidebar, and on Sandsday, both in the sidebar and below the comic. Da Blog’s sidebar, in particular, will contain “Da Tweeter”, which will display my tweets in real time.

Okay, now, I spent long enough writing this introductory post that I’m going to have lunch and immediately start working on a paper for my communication class. What will I do next? You’ll have to read my tweeter to find out.

I’m probably leaving enough clues for you to figure out what this is.

by

I have a number of things on my plate. I have some posts I’ve been sitting on because I’ve had more urgent things to work on in the time when I’m not completely distracted trying to catch up on feeds. I’m trying to make a big finish to make sure I pass one of my classes, for one thing.

I also have a decent-sized series I was planning to start tomorrow that would have served to maintain a consistency of posts into the fall, and combined with other projects, the RID, and webcomic reviews, maintained my 5-post-a-week pace well into next year. But because of procrastination on my part, I entered this past week with quite a bit of work to do to get that project ready. It was already somewhat doubtful I’d be able to get all the requisite research done in a week and might have needed to go to backup plans.

So naturally I get zero of that research done, or much of anything else, personal project or no, during the past week, and now I have a mountain of makeup work to get done, and I’ve been spending the past weekend catching up on seven hours’ worth of TV shows as a result of missing two before last week. TV Tropes has ruined my life again! (Or in this case, introduced me to the Nostalgia Critic. It takes a lot of doing to get me to actually laugh out loud, and this passes with flying colors.)

So I feel I have no choice but to delay this project for a year until 2010.

I’m not particularly pleased with this decision. It passes up a once-in-six-to-eleven-years opportunity to start the series on a Monday, and by doing it next year I’m starting it on a Tuesday, which is… awkward. I could have the second part still be on Wednesday, or delay it two years to 2011 and start it on a Wednesday, but the latter might be too long for me and the nation and the world, and it would be most useful if I could get it out before the 2010 midterms, so the short notice a postponement entails is dicey enough.

But I feel it’s probably for the best. I don’t want a repeat of the mess that was the October of Politics, where the work I get done is of significantly less quality than what I had in mind and derails my life. Perhaps by waiting a year, I’ll have a larger audience and the series would make a larger impact. Also, I originally envisioned the global warming series being mostly over at this point, and it’s barely getting started, so the two mega-projects would be running concurrently for most of the time, complete with the research needed for each. There’s some research I still need to do and fast to move on to the next part of the global warming series, and two posts I was hoping to get done over the weekend that I’m unlikely to get either done today, even with this postponement. Basically, I have way too much on my plate already for the next week without this little distraction.

With luck I can focus on the problems I have now, and hold off on this problem for another twelve months.

A question for Twitter users.

by

Does Twitter allow you to change the time display so it shows the exact time a tweet was posted regardless of how recent it was, instead of “X amount of time ago”?

(Geez, you’d think someone would put up a comprehensive guide to the settings screen somewhere. Maybe that means it’s really intuitive, but it sounds like that’s not necessarily the case.)

Hate to ruin the party, but…

by

Daryn Kagan via Fang’s Bites links to an “inspirational” story of a small newspaper that’s doing well in the face of a tough market for newspapers – maybe it’s a model for other local papers? – and…

…it’s incredibly depressing. If Fang thinks this is the way to save bigger papers, he’s incredibly naive about the issues surrounding newspapers. Do you realize it basically amounts to a blog in print form with a price tag attached?

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

by

If I had decided exactly what strip I was running today, let alone actually made it, the strip would be posted about now. Instead it’s probably not going up until after 3 PM PT.

Still no votes on the RID poll? Do you people care that little about it? Well, this is probably hardly the first time I’ve linked to some vegetarian site, and it’s definitely not the first time I’ve linked to a recipe site…

A message to ESPN.

by

I am currently subscribed to this to get Bill Simmons’ columns. I’m pretty sure you can replace “Bill Simmons” with any ESPN.com writer for the below until the solution.

When ESPN redesigned their website, they changed things so those RSS feeds, instead of just pointing to the guy’s columns, points instead to the guy’s search results.

I don’t need to sit through a gazillion things that just happen to mention Simmons by name.

So I’m actually considering switching to this.

Two drawbacks:

  • I still have to sit through links to the “BS Report” podcasts, which I’m not interested in. I’m not a fan of podcasts in general, but that’s a subject for another post. Podcasts are always boring as hell for some reason, probably in part because everyone’s voices are so ordinary.
  • After making fun of Twitter in his last mailbag, Simmons has taken to Twitter like a sponge, meaning I probably have to sit through a gazillion updates every single day, way more than I’m getting from ESPN now. (This is my one major ambivalency about Twitter, which I’ll go into more detail on later this month.) But at least those updates actually come from Simmons himself instead of being “Hey, Bill Simmons said this in a column you’ve already read…” if even that.
  • Oh, one other thing. For whatever reason, links don’t work in Twitter RSS feeds.

By my standards, I think I’m a month late with this.

by

In February, at the end of my “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series, I said this about The Floating Lightbulb:

I’m probably going to do a review of the Floating Lightbulb itself one day, and when I do I’m probably going to say that Bengo is a more cerebral John Solomon. Bengo doesn’t hate all webcomics – though the Floating Lightbulb doesn’t do much in the way of actual reviews at all – but he certainly seems to hate most of the personages in mainstream webcomics. In his eyes, most big-time webcomics creators are self-promoting jerks who probably cheated to get to the top and as such are bad role models, and most webcomic bloggers are ego-strokers, often with rampant conflicts of interest, who shill the same comics over and over again. Not every webcomic blog gets this charge, not even biggies Tangents and Websnark; mostly the vitriol goes to Gary “Fleen” Tyrell and [Xaviar] Xerexes, proprietor of Comixtalk.

Shortly thereafter, Bengo wrote a post explaining, among other things, that he didn’t hate all mainstream webcomics, he just reserved his vitriol for those grouped under the names of Dumbrella and Halfpixel. And even though he never mentioned me by name and I’m still not sure if he even knows of Da Blog’s existence, I started to panic and planned to start this post with a comedown, stating that maybe I’d overstated his hatred.

Well, earlier this week he banged out a post that seemed to show where I might have gotten the idea he was a curmudgeon. Apparently a large number of webcomic creators are engaging in an e-e-evil plot to mislead Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere in order to maintain their own standing and keep webcomics mired in a cesspool of mediocrity. Oh yes, what they disseminate is nothing but a mess of LIES! But they won’t succeed, oh no, even now their kingdoms are falling, and soon the curtain will fall away and THE TRUTH SHALL BE REVEALED! They can’t keep it down forever! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, aha ha ha ha ha hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

(This isn’t the first time I’ve sat through Bengo putting his tinfoil hat on, either. He seems to think that people who think Scott Kurtz is “nice” are victims of an elaborate charade and front so dead-on and uncanny he should be an actor, not a webcartoonist! Because it can’t possibly be that Kurtz is just a complex, contradictory – GASP! – human being who feels nice in some circumstances and egotistical in others! Not that Kurtz being an arrogant jerk who thinks he’s Scott McCloud’s heir as Representative of All Webcomicdom but always ends up putting his foot in his mouth in doing so is exactly a secret…)

I don’t want to give the impression I find TFL the conspiratorial ramblings of a madman. In fact, TFL is one of the better, or at least more interesting, blogs you’ll find when it comes to advice for aspiring webcomickers. About a year ago, Bengo started trying to research webcomics in preparation of a new project he hoped to do with his wife Pug. Distressed at the paucity and contradictory nature of information, he started the Psychedelic Treehouse website as a storehouse of his findings, and started keeping a running log in TFL. Bengo nonetheless plowed on and ultimately contributed to two webcomics and a side project, while continuing to look for information on what to expect on the financial front. He became so distressed at the information in the HalfPixel group’s “How to Make Webcomics” that after a bad interview with Dave “Sheldon” Kellett and Brad “Evil Inc.” Guigar, he wrote a scathing post casting severe doubt on the book’s business model that made him a lifelong enemy in Kurtz and is largely singlehandedly responsible for much of TFL’s popularity, such as it is (which is to say “more than that of Da Blog”).

The metaphor implied by the title is probably the most succinct summary of most of TFL’s contents. Well, kind of. Sort of. Actually, according to an informal overview I did, only a little more than half Bengo’s posts were classified as “ideas webcomickers can use, perhaps to increase their revenue or help their art, sometimes taking their cue from things existing webcomickers are doing. Often this takes the form of cool stuff on the Internet people can use. Other times it’s highfalutin’ ideas, concepts and classifications that would make Scott McCloud and Eric Burns(-White) blush.” The rest, for the most part, is split fairly evenly between actual webcomic reviews, mere observations about the webcomic community, or ripping into people Bengo hates.

All of those three categories, to some extent or another, furthers the same goal as the first: educating aspiring webcomickers. Bengo reviews webcomics so we can learn from them, his recent posts on webcomic traffic trends were made with an eye to trying to find out why so aspiring webcomickers wouldn’t fall into the same traps, and he doesn’t want anyone looking to Scott Kurtz as a role model or have their business plan ruined by “How to Make Webcomics”. This isn’t just generic stuff you can find anywhere else on the Internet, either. Bengo pretty much assumes you’re looking to enter webcomics for the long haul, and make some money from it at the same time, and maybe even join the Tier 1 Pantheon of Popular Webcomics. I can’t vouch for the effiacy of any of the advice Bengo gives – I’m afraid I would have to classify his comics as Tier 3 and unreviewable until proven good (or at least potential-filled) – but there’s a lot of stuff you won’t find anywhere else (by which I mean you won’t find any competing or affirming advice) and a few things where Bengo seems to be downright pioneering, daring to go where no one has gone before. Where else are you going to find stuff like this?

All of which means TFL has a rather interesting clientele in that it is written primarily not for the general public at large, but for aspiring webcomickers. What really makes this interesting is that a blog written entirely for aspiring webcomickers would ordinarily go entirely into the advice pool. Bengo writes for a specific subset of that clientele, yet he’s also calling out the webcomics community at large for their practices that derail aspiring webcomickers. I think the closest thing to an equivalent I can think of would be Bengo’s mortal enemy at Halfpixel at webcomics.com, yet even that site doesn’t really go into current events or reviews or that sort of thing, yet despite the tagline of “webcomics news,” TFL isn’t really a news site either (by which I mean it’s not much of a news site at all). (The tagline used to be “Webcomics Eureka”, which was a little more accurate if a little redundant with the title and not entirely sensical.)

Now so far, my webcomic blog reviews have been of review sites, so I should probably say a few words about TFL’s reviews. Briefly, they tend to focus on obscure webcomics, and somewhat surprisingly for TFL’s normal subject matter, they tend to be rather basic, focusing on such things as what the setting is, what the format is, how good it is with mechanics, and what Bengo likes and what he thinks could be improved. They’re short, general, and to-the-point, without too much of the rambling or dwelling on specifics of the Burns(-White)/Howard/Solomon/Wick crowd.

The Floating Lightbulb is the closest thing I’ve yet found to the Order of the Stick of webcomics blogs, in that it’s hard for me to find anything (well, much) bad to say about it. If Bengo’s insights into webcomics are vindicated – which really only happens when you become popular, as people either deconstruct your arguments or tell people how much you helped them; it’s damn near impossible to do what the opposite of vindication is, since you generally don’t get popular if you’re wrong, and in any case Bengo may be well on his way – TFL (and Psychedelic Treehouse) could become an absolute must-read for anyone looking to jump into webcomics, as well as anyone else examining the field. And the Webcomic Blog List is not only a useful form of webcomic blog promotion, it’s a useful resource for anyone looking for webcomic blogs to read, such as someone like me who’s looking for more webcomic blogs to review.

The one big elephant in the living room where TFL is concerned is Bengo’s sometimes-obsession with Dumbrella, Halfpixel, and their cohorts, which can come off as just trying to drum up attention by picking fights and proclaiming “everything you know is wrong!” (If Bengo decides to respond to this post in any way, I fully expect him to go on another possibly-conspiratorial rant about all the damage Kurtz and Co. do to webcomics just like all his others.) When Bengo isn’t ripping into the self-proclaimed “role models” of webcomics, his posts are thought-provoking and insightful. Even when he is they can be enlightening and affirming. Either way, you’re guaranteed to get your recommended daily allowance of brain food just about every day.

The Floating Lightbulb is, pending verification of Bengo’s advice, most highly recommended. And I’m not just saying that to get on the Webcomic Blog List – TFL’s on my RSS reader for good. As I said back in February, I’d bet anything Bengo would rip me and Da Blog to shreds, both for lavishing praise on him and focusing too much on popular webcomics for my own good (and maybe echoing Robert A. Howard’s critique on top of that).