Web site news

The closest I’m going to come to an NFL season preview

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I mentioned my college football lineal titles last week and again in today’s Part I on the college football playoff debate. Well, I’ve also exhaustively researched an NFL lineal title. The NFL lineal title only splits when the current title holder doesn’t make the playoffs, and with the NFL’s balanced schedule, splits are rare. The Steelers are the only holder of an NFL Lineal Title, and I’ll keep track of it from here.

Also, the college football titles are completely updated with the new challenges for Florida and Utah.

Your chance to influence the look of MorganWick.com

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Some of you may have noticed that the Sports section of the site has no background graphics. I would change that, but I’m a bit undecided about something. I intend to have distinct banner images for each section of the site, to let you know instantly where on the site you are. But while I think I had something in mind with the old site, where the Sports section had the banner “Morgan Wick Sports”, I’m not sure what it was now, two years later, and I’m not certain of how, exactly, I want to differentiate the top banner.

Here are the options I’m trying to decide between. You can pick between them in a new Da Blog Poll, and leave comments to tweak any of the suggestions or suggest your own, though I’ll have the final say.

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What logo image should I use for sports.morganwick.com?

  • Sports.MorganWick.com, Sports at left, big Sports (100%, 1 Votes)
  • Sports.MorganWick.com, Sports at left, big MorganWick (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Sports.MorganWick.com, Sports above MorganWick (0%, 0 Votes)
  • MorganWick.com Sports, Sports above .com (0%, 0 Votes)
  • MorganWick.com Sports, Sports at right (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Sports.MorganWick.com, Sports at left, MorganWick.com forms stack (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Other (leave comment on relevant post) (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 1

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The impending death of YouTube and the future of “you”

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I’m not sure to what extent I still believe a single word of what I wrote in yesterday’s State of Webcomics Address. As it was coming down to the wire I started realizing I was basically being a lapdog for Bengo and wasn’t really thinking about the situation clearly, right as my brain was burning out as well. I may take a more sober revisiting of the situation in a month or two.

But if there’s one part of it I do still believe in, it’s the opening section about the idealism of the youth, and that may be my starting point for a rewrite of the Address. And I can stand by that because it appears everywhere else I look at the Internet. A constant theme in all the developments to take place on the Internet is that people started a revolution first and asked questions on how to pay for it, or the impact on the money flowing to the institutions the revolutions were replacing, later, even for the most prominent and popular of those revolutions.

I was interested in Farhad Manjoo’s book True Enough last year, and now I may be adding his technology column for Slate to my RSS reader. And today, we’re going to go from Stuff From July week to Stuff From April week! Because it was in April that Manjoo wrote a column on the double-edged sword of user-generated content. It seems even YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, has been bleeding money and mostly been propped up by the parts of Google that have been actually making money.

Turns out that “user-generated content” can end up meaning “crap”. A lot of the stuff most people leer at on YouTube – copyright violations, groin shots and other dumb, vaguely voyeuristic things like that – are the stuff that advertisers don’t want to be associated with. The content that makes the most money is still content made by the pros. YouTube has attempted to make up for it by signing content deals with the pros, but that only gets advertisers to pay for the pro content, and still leaves YouTube holding the bag for the costs of storing the crap. YouTube may eventually have to impose restrictions or a limited paywall. User-generated content may have changed the world, but no one’s quite willing to sponsor it yet.

The result: I strongly suspect YouTube as we know it will die within a year.

And that’s the best thing that could possibly happen to it – and to the Web.

I say that because of Manjoo’s June column on the release of Firefox 3.5, which emphasizes its integration of the HTML 5 standard, especially the way it allows for video to be called up using an HTML <video> tag without calling up Flash. Manjoo emphasizes the way this could result in interactive video; I look at the way it could obviate the need for centralized video repositories like YouTube. User-generated video can now conceivably be hosted on the web site of the person that produced it rather easily, without needing a third party like YouTube.

I could see YouTube imposing a survival of the fittest system, where videos that fail to meet a certain support threshold, failing to earn its keep, will receive a warning and eventually be automatically removed. This would keep YouTube high-quality and fairly self-sustaining. This one-two punch – encouraging people to take on the costs of hosting their stuff themselves and making it easier to do so – would theoretically maintain the user-generated content revolution while dispersing its costs and making it more manageable.

What about other services facing the same problem? What about Flickr and Facebook? There’s not going to be some HTML white knight to save them, is there? Maybe not, but it’s telling that so many WordPress users have clamored for an image gallery in core, despite its gimmicky-ness, that one appears to be coming. Facebook may be harder to deal with, as it effectively is the place where a lot of this “decentralized” stuff would go, as is. Twitter may be starting to take some load off Facebook, but its core is its interconnectedness; is it even possible to decentralize social networking?

This brings me to the CWI’s Steven Pemberton’s vision of what Web 3.0 might be like. Web 2.0 was based in specific Web sites like Flickr, Facebook and Wikipedia (which seems to be doing well as the public television of the Web, running primarily on donations with zero ads), but Web 3.0, in Pemberton’s eyes, would be based on millions of personal Web sites. Pemberton’s concerned about the effect that potentially getting “locked-in” to a specific site might have if you decide to change sites, or if the site (or your account) gets shut down, or the redundancy of being on both MySpace and Facebook, and suggests instead that semantic standards be instituted for such things. For example, you could put your contacts on a page on your site, and an aggregator (of sorts) would compare that with other people’s contacts. Such an “aggregator” might actually be part of the browser itself. Imagine if Twitter were to shut down, without a replacement, but left a standard for people to send “tweets” from their own web sites that could then be read from within the browser. (Microsoft, of all people, may be getting a head start on this with the “accelerators” in IE8.)

Pemberton might seem to be a lone dreamer with his own wild vision, and at first glance, this may seem to be incompatible with corporate America’s demands to centralize everything in one place under one company that can rake in the dough. But because the Internet is free, they haven’t been raking in the dough – and because of that, money may actually encourage the creation of this new decentralized vision of the Internet, just to spread the costs out so they aren’t borne by a few companies.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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What’s this? The last RID was on a Friday night/early Saturday morning and now here’s another one on a Monday? Yeah, well, I kinda had a space available for two posts.

Here’s my (very) tentative schedule for the remainder of the week:

  • Tuesday: The State of Webcomics Address and an additional sports post.
  • Wednesday: College Football Coverage Kickoff, with the Week 1 schedule and a brand new defense of a playoff based on one or two websites I discovered earlier this year.
  • Thursday: Why YouTube will be dead before long.
  • Friday: Rethinking TV and whether we should even bother.
  • Sometime between Friday and Monday: Launch of the Morgan Wick Forum.
  • Next week: Hopefully, some more topical posts.

Sign language isn’t just for deaf people!

Random Internet Discovery of the Week, and preparation for making up for lost time

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Oh geez, have you guys not heard from me all WEEK?!? What a time for me to become incredibly distracted by TV Tropes and then become sick, when I still had a lot of work on the web site to do AND catch up on feeds… at this point, “Ideas Every Day” week may become “Ideas Every Day” MONTH, or just a revival of my old trend of posting at least once a day every weekday, as I already have enough ideas to span nearly two weeks.

I have been doing some productive work on the site, though. One thing the site relaunch allows me to do is push specific subsections of the site onto other services; as I’ve said in the past, despite potentially splintering the audience such services are still useful for popularizing Da Blog’s content. But Da Blog is way too “general-purpose” for most of them, and on Blogger there wasn’t enough of the sense I wanted of Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs. That’s all different now, though.

So effective immediately, and just in time for “Ideas Every Day” week or month or whatever it is, all sports posts will be republished on Bleacher Report, and all webcomics posts will be republished on Comixtalk. (The former in particular would not have been possible at all before the relaunch!) The timing’s a little off on Comixtalk, as they’ve been undergoing some problems to the effect I effectively had to lean on the site’s proprietor to get my account set up.

I also entirely expect to have the forum up and running on Monday.

So because all the TV Tropes stuff made my computer so slow, I didn’t actually do this myself…

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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This week was supposed to be Ideas Every Day week on Da Blog. But it’s taking me slower than expected to set up various services. That, plus other concerns, is taking up more of my time than writing anything, or catching up on feeds. The State of Webcomics Address should be coming tomorrow, along with another announcement related to the site relaunch.

Ooh, pretty pictures!

The most important day in the history of the Morgan Wick Online Universe since the launch of Da Blog, and a day never to be matched in importance again.

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The day has arrived that I knew would come ever since I launched the web site.

I have moved the web site from morganwick.freehostia.com to morganwick.com.

Morganwick.com will be the new home for all aspects of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, from the seemingly-stalled comic strip Sandsday to the 100 Greatest Movies Project to the street sign gallery to my sports projects. That includes Da Blog. Effective immediately, all blog posts will be hosted at morganwick.com, and the Blogspot account will stop updating. (Some dummy posts may start appearing next year.) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to point to morganwick.com.

I’ve made my frustration with Blogger and Freehostia clear over the past several months. Blogger was clunky and prone to problems. Freehostia had a clunky file manager in IE, a frustrating FTP, and only one MySQL database on the free plan. Both of them, however, should be commended for getting me a head start in building the content that will now make the move to Morganwick.com. In fact, the problems with Freehostia have been sufficiently mitigated that I might be tempted to continue housing the new web site on Freehostia, especially since my ads pay for my domain but not my hosting.

However, that’s only possible in the short term, and it’s not really possible. I’m only allowed one MySQL database on Freehostia and it pretty much has to be used by my blogging platform; while the blogging platform is robust enough to handle a lot, I kinda need to at least have the freedom to create a second database for certain purposes. And as long as I’m moving to my own domain and moving up to paying for the hosting, I should get the best domain, hosting, and blogging services there are out there, and get the most bang for the buck for them.

For me, and for those particular fields, that means moving to Namecheap, Hostmonster, and WordPress.

For most people, GoDaddy is the only domain registrar they’ve ever heard of. I decided very early on in the process of finding a domain registrar that I would not use GoDaddy. By all accounts, they’re all T&A (literally), no substance (or customer service), and possibly the worst domain registrar on the Internet, used only by amateurs who watch TV to find an Internet domain registrar and don’t really know what they’re doing. Namecheap was one of the most commonly cited and praised names that came up in a search for good domain registrars. I found Hostmonster the same way I found Freehostia – by looking at sites that would compare hosting services side-by-side for me based on other people’s reviews. Hostmonster came out on top on multiple such comparison sites despite some tight competition, especially since WordPress didn’t include a link to Hostmonster that I could use to support WordPress, but did contain a link to Hostmonster’s sister service Bluehost.

That might be the last time I mention either service. You don’t need to know who I paid for the domain or who’s hosting the site. It’s my very own domain now. I mention them in case I ever have problems with either service, or in case I ever move from either and have to shut down the site while the move processes. If there’s a quibble with Hostmonster, it’s that they’ve been known to shut down sites without warning for violations of Terms of Service, which basically comes down to backing up the site and not getting the domain and hosting from the same place lest you become unable to leave.

Chances are if you’ve ever heard of any of the three services, you’ve heard of WordPress. Even in the unlikely scenario you haven’t heard of it, you’ve seen it. Adherents to Movable Type would proclaim its superiority, but by many accounts WordPress is the best blogging platform on the Internet, and certainly the best free one. It’s fitting that there are three major blogging platforms and they all appeal to different people. Blogger is the quickest, dirtiest way to start a blog if you don’t want to pay any money and don’t know anything about the Internet, especially if you want to start building something big. (Both WordPress and Movable Type have hosting services using their infrastructure but WordPress’ functionality is extremely limited – ads aren’t even allowed. Typepad is a pay service, which makes me wonder why anyone who could afford it wouldn’t just start their own Movable Type site.)

Wordpress is the best service if you have your own hosting and don’t want to pay, and Movable Type is best if you believe “you get what you pay for” and can afford to pay the price to get better than a volunteer effort – though depending on your philosophy on the Internet and your exact needs, WordPress may still be best. (No less than the government of Great Britain uses WordPress to host its site.) It may be ideal to take the path I took – build an audience on Blogger and take it to a self-hosted WordPress site when it gets big enough.

Honestly, not only did I grow frustrated with Blogger over the years, I’ve started to distrust it a little; use of Blogger has started to throw up a red flag of amateurism for me, especially the use of variants of the default Minima template, which is used by some of my favorite blogs. The effect is mitigated with the use of templates that at least look original, and when people have their own domain it reminds me less that it’s a Blogspot blog, but there’s still that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I can’t shake while reading something like Awful Announcing: why aren’t they at least using WordPress?

I saw why WordPress is so beloved shortly after starting experimenting with it. It was loaded with so many features that I could use. It wasn’t so clunky as to eat the code I tried to feed into it (see: my first attempt at Da Countdown). Some of the problems surrounding draft posts, such as the matter of finding them if I stopped working on them and wanted to come back to them later (something that led me to start scheduling unfinished posts), as well as some of the patches Blogger tried to put on, such as the inaccurate post time for all unscheduled posts that led Blogger to tweak the posting settings, as well as some of the quirks of scheduled posts, aren’t an issue with WordPress, which has a “last saved draft” field allowing you to schedule a post without making it leave draft mode. And WordPress’ “pages” allows me to create my own, custom, “about me” page.

More important to you, WordPress doesn’t make it complicated to post a comment – you won’t be tempted to post as “Anonymous” anymore when you wouldn’t normally do so. Just fill out your name, e-mail, and if you have a web site a link to it, and you’re all set. And because of the Akismet spam protection system you don’t have to fill out a CAPTCHA anymore either, which is really more trouble than it’s worth since it only protects against automated, not human, spam, and automated systems can easily crack it. (If your comment doesn’t show up, don’t panic; wait 24 hours to see if it shows up. After that, contact me with a copy of your comment; there is some anecdotal evidence of Akismet eating comments without the capability of accessing them, but if so it’s so rare that on the thread I looked at, WordPress couldn’t even reproduce it.) Tomorrow I’ll launch the new MorganWick.com forums to complement the site and the comments, which I’ll have more detail on then.

And perhaps most of all, WordPress has a robust system of “categories”, including the ability to make subcategories. WordPress also has “tags” and my initial instinct was to make all of my labels tags, since that was what they seemed to resemble, and only make those labels that bore the most resemblance to subsites into categories, so I was a bit frustrated when WordPress wanted to convert them all to categories by default without giving me a choice. But after reading up on the distinction between the two (it seeems tags are mostly a search engine helper) I decided that the way I use labels, it made the most sense to convert all labels into categories.

Because of my various interests, I always intended to create various subsites once I moved to morganwick.com to house my various projects in various fields. Because of that, because of the presence of subcategories, because of the decision to make Da Blog the front page of morganwick.com, and because of the intricities of the move itself, I have made several changes to the category structure, with virtually all categories affected:

  • All categories are now properly capitalized.
  • The “100 Greatest Movies Project” label is now a subcategory of “movies”.
  • “About Me” remains as-is but may, in the future, be split into multiple categories.
  • “Advertising” is now a subcategory of “Web Site News”. As I’ve said before, most important information about ads will now come via Twitter.
  • “Astronomy” is now a subcategory of “Science”.
  • “Blog News” is now a subcategory of “Web Site News”. The exact role of both “Blog News” and “Web Site News” given the merger of the two, the further splitting of the blog into subsites, and the role of Twitter, is undetermined at this point.
  • Because not all formatting was preserved when importing all the old posts from Da Blog, and because comments will not be associated with any other comments you make going forward, the “Classic Da Blog” category will be extended to include all posts before last week, and will no longer be just a quick way to get Technorati to update correctly. (By the way, 5vjhdtuzmg I forgot how much I hated Technorati Profile.)
  • “College Football Lineal Title”, “College Football Schedule”, and “College Football Rankings” are all now subcategories of “College Football”.
  • The just-launched new category “Constitution” is now a subcategory of “Politics”, as are both the Democratic and Republican Platform Reviews.
  • “Election 2008” is also now a subcategory of “Politics”, and “Election 2008 Live Blog” is in turn a subcategory of “Election 2008”.
  • “Education Policy”, “Foreign Affairs”, and “Health Care”, all categories used solely in the platform reviews, are now subcategories of “Politics”.
  • “General TV Business” is now just “TV Business”. See below.
  • “Human Nature” is now a subcategory of “Philosophy”, two categories neither of which with very many posts.
  • There is a new “Random Internet Discovery” subcategory of “Internet Adventures”.
  • “IRL” and “NASCAR” are now subcategories of “Auto racing”.
  • “Microsoft” is now a subcategory of “Computer geekery”, two categories that may never be used again.
  • “MLS” is now a subcategory of “Soccer”.
  • “News You Can Use” is now a subcategory of “My Comments on the News”; both its posts were members of that category already.
  • “NFL Lineal Title” is now a subcategory of “NFL”. “NFL Superpower Rankings” has been deleted, and all the posts it contained moved to “Superpower Rankings” which has been made a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Non-UFC MMA” has been renamed “MMA” and “UFC” has been made a subcategory of it.
  • “Fantasy Football” is now a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Simulated CFB Playoff” is now “Golden Bowl Simulated CFB Playoff” and a subcategory of “College Football”.
  • “SNF Flex Scheduling Watch” is now a subcategory of “NFL”.
  • “Sports in general” is now simply “Sports” and all sports categories have been made subcategories of it, as have “Sports TV Business”, “Sports TV Graphics” and “Sports Watcher”. “NFL” and “College football” are now subcategories of a new “Football” category, and “NBA”, “College basketball” and “WNBA” are now subcategories of a new “Basketball” category. All my sports posts are available at sports.morganwick.com, as are the old Morgan Wick Sports features.
  • “TV Upfronts” is now a subcategory of “TV Business”.
  • “Webcomic news” is now “Sandsday”, a subcategory of itself, and a subcategory of “Web site news”. (To clarify: “Web site news” now contains a subcategory “Webcomic news”, which contains a subcategory “Sandsday”, which contains all the old “Webcomic news” posts.)
  • “Webcomics” is now hosted at webcomics.morganwick.com and is loaded with new features, including an index to reviews, tags for each webcomic mentioned in a post, new categories for full-fledged reviews and reviews of webcomics blogs, a new “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” category for both the series itself and the ongoing blog thereof, and an index to said series, with potentially more features to come. (Note: The review index and index to “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” are not linkable at this time. I’ll tweet and remove this note when they are.)

In addition, all web site features have new addresses, and may not be immediately accessible:

  • morganwick.freehostia.com/greatestmovies (the Greatest Movies Project) is now at greatestmovies.morganwick.com.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/sports (Morgan Wick Sports) is now at sports.morganwick.com. It may be a while before this section of the site returns to full functionality, and when it does everything will be at a new URL. Watch the Twitter feed to find out when everything is restored, and where to find it.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/streetsigns (the Street Sign Gallery) is now at www.morganwick.com/streetsigns.
  • morganwick.freehostia.com/webcomic (Sandsday) is now at sandsday.morganwick.com. I’m still trying to translate the PHP from PHP 4 to PHP 5, so it won’t be linked to there until then.

For the time being, the Premier ad is being shut down, as it doesn’t translate easily to the new site. I’ll continue working out the kinks throughout the week morganwick.blogspot.com and morganwick.freehostia.com will remain up, but not maintained; in a year my Freehostia account will lapse and that site will no longer work.

It’s a new day on MorganWick.com. Let’s go boldly forward into the future.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week and a prelude to a series of posts a year away

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See, now, this was the sort of thing I had in mind when StumbleUpon allowed me to bring more specific criteria to the RID! I may have to refer back to this when it comes time to run a related series next year. And that series is hinted at in the new label.

Important notice: Any comments left between now and the launch of the new site will not survive the launch of the new site. We are that close to launching the new site.

How LeBron salvaged Kobe’s reputation

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I was originally saving this post for the big relaunch of the site, when I would have a week of exciting, interesting posts. Various factors have been continually pushing that back much further than I ever intended. But the relaunch should go through next weekend, sometime between the 15th and 17th, as I’m very close to taking care of both those factors and the last few tweaks needed before relaunching the site.

In the interim, in our 24/7, hypermedia world, we’ve already forgotten and moved on from the LeBron dunk story. The word came out that Nike suppressed the tape of LeBron being dunked on by a college journeyman, we all laid shame on Nike and LeBron, crappy, Zapruder-like tape came out and we all ridiculed Nike and LeBron some more, saying we would have seen the footage and forgotten about it if LeBron had just let the tape go… and then we forgot about it.

But I think that, in the big picture, LeBron James, in the space of a few months, has done more to salvage the reputation of Kobe Bryant than anything Bryant himself could have ever done.

LeBron was supposed to be the good guy. He was supposed to be the guy who helped his teammates, didn’t get into legal trouble, came from Akron and helped the local small-market team to an NBA title. He was supposed to be everything big-market, me-me-me Kobe wasn’t. Kobe was a petulant individualist who was accused of sexual assault in Colorado and was poison to team chemistry, ultimately driving out Shaq and demanding to have the Lakers to himself, to carry a team on his own shoulders. The hopes of NBA purists rested on LeBron to give Kobe what for.

But three things have happened to completely reverse the roles. In reverse order: One, the LeBron dunk controversy. Two, Kobe DID carry a championship team by himself. And three, LeBron’s reaction to losing the Eastern Conference Finals, refusing to shake hands or address the media.

Bracketing Kobe’s title win were two events that create a new narrative of LeBron James. The dunk controversy in particular makes LeBron come off as a carefully crafted persona, too perfect, a fake, a creation of Nike. (After a shorter career with fewer titles, LeBron is more visible in Nike ad campaigns than Kobe.) Getting dunked on may have seemed harmless, but it didn’t fit the Nike storyline of perfection, so Nike tried to erase it from the narrative and in the process exposed the true LeBron. Kobe Bryant, by contrast, is human, and (unlike LeBron) lets his human foibles come through. Kobe is one of us, what we would be like if we had Kobe’s talent. According to this narrative, LeBron couldn’t handle losing the Eastern Conference Finals because it didn’t fit into The Plan as laid out by Nike, which says that LeBron must always find success.

We may end up seeing Kobe’s career from 2004 to 2008 very differently than we did at the time. We may see it as the struggles of a tortured man to find his individuality and find fulfillment, struggling to balance the demands of NBA stardom with his own needs and desires. Finally he managed to find the magical combination that could lead him to the title he could claim as his own. As for LeBron, probably the only way he can even hope to kill the narrative, the only way he can go back to being Michael Jordan instead of Tim Tebow, is to stay in Cleveland, or at least move to another mid-sized market. If he moves to New York, the Clippers, or even Portland (capital of the Nike empire), all moves that would be driven by Nike’s marketability needs more than anything else, I’m going to start calling him LeNike or LeSwoosh.

@trent_reznor’s plan for turning indie music into webcomics!

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New label time. I once had fantasies of becoming a musician, but I can’t come up with an original beat to save my life, my voice sounds horrible recorded, and, like most of my fantasies, I liked the fame and impact more than I liked the actual, you know, work. Certainly I might have never had a chance to break out within a year of recording a short demo tape like I fantasized, at least not without getting a gig on American Idol, and I’d probably be the guy you laughed at on the audition shows anyway.

But that fantasy is at least a little closer to the reach of musicians today, thanks to that great invention that will define the next millennium or at least the next century, the Internet. Which brings me to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor’s thoughts on how aspiring musicians can take advantage of the Internet to break in to at least a limited extent.

Trent’s advice in a nutshell: Forget about making any money off your records. Give it all away for free. Put your music on iTunes just to get the iTunes audience, but base your revenue model off selling tchotshkes like T-shirts and other premium content. Basically, the typical webcomics model.

Huh? Evidently Reznor needs to be introduced to Scott McCloud’s 2001 theory that all the music industry needed to do was lower prices to the point that it would become too inconvenient to pirate to justify the savings. In other words, it’s not strictly necessary to give everything away for free, just really, really cheap. “Ah, but that was just McCloud’s attempt to justify his micropayments obsession…” Really? Then why did Xaviar Xerexes recently espouse essentially the same philosophy without noticing it even when I pointed it out to him? Besides, while micropayments have by and large been a complete failure, music in the form of iTunes has been one of the few places where it’s worked.

Look, I know a lot of people don’t like iTunes for loading down its music with DRM, but that just means there’s an opening in the market for someone to come along and try and create an iTunes killer that sells music at iTunes prices or maybe even slightly higher but without DRM. Take a YouTube-like zeal to wiping out pirated music and you just might create a service that, eventually, one of the big boys decides they should move to to reach out to the people who have run away from iTunes to get a DRM-free experience. In the meantime it becomes the hub for music that hasn’t sold out to The Man – and those musicians get to make at least a trickle of money off the music itself. Is the lower exposure worth it? I don’t know, but I’m sure it is for some.

I don’t like the notion of webcomiceers as glorified T-shirt salesmen and I’m not any more happy with the same notion as applied to indie rockers. The difference is, in the latter case, it’s not necessary.