College Football Kickoff Prelude: My thoughts on Rodriguez-gate

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If Ohio State is defending Michigan, as Jim Tressel did with regards to the allegations that Rich Rodriguez was violating NCAA limits on practice time, you know something’s gone bananas. That’s like cats and dogs deciding to work in harmony.

Tressel’s point seems to be that the NCAA limits are too low, and the players themselves want to get in more workout time because they need more workout time and they want to be the best they can be. Strictly from the perspective of the teams, at least the big-name teams like Ohio State and Michigan, a lifting of the limits would seem to be a no-brainer.

From the NCAA’s perspective, the limits, like all their regulations, serve two purposes. First, they protect academics. Time spent on the practice field or in the weight room is time not spent on schoolwork. If players want more time on the practice field than they’re allowed, their priorities are mixed up, because they’re supposed to be a student first and an athlete second, not a pro athlete in all but name and salary. Of course, we don’t need to get into how college football and basketball barely even pays lip service to that whole “student-athlete” thing anymore, and even from that perspective you could still make a case for lifting limits on practice time. Maybe they’ve already done all their schoolwork, or even if they haven’t it’s quaint and old-fashioned to insist they do. (The argument that these are “just kids” reaches this  same conclusion.)

The second purpose of practice time limits is to protect, and level the playing field for, the small schools that do care about academics and maybe can’t/don’t want to work out as long and hard as the big football schools. But this is tied in with the need to defend academics and results in a similar defense: “don’t punish us because those other schools don’t care about football”.

I don’t know whether the NCAA should or shouldn’t raise its practice time limits, but now you know where the NCAA is coming from, to at least a limited extent.

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.

Probably the last word on Roethlisberger-gate, as in, I’m chiming in so late I doubt anyone else will chime in after me. Or even listen.

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If ESPN wanted to cover up the Roethlisberger scandal, their initial decision not to report on it may have inadvertently helped that goal more than they intended, by moving the focus of the story off the suit itself and onto ESPN… (I swear I won’t spend every one of my posts talking about stories everyone has already left behind!)

Ultimately, the outrage directed at ESPN seems to have two sources. First, ESPN wouldn’t report on it, at all, not even on its web site, when other organizations – including the same company in the ABC News division – did. In his interview with ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, Vince Loria declares that “[i]t was never our intent to be out front on this story.” Newsflash, Vince: ESPN is expected to be out front on every story. At the very least, ESPN is expected to acknowledge the existence of every story, since so many people turn to it for their sports news. As more people turn to the Internet for their sports news, that may start to change, but ESPN is still the definer of the news cycle, and for the moment the Internet only increases ESPN’s responsibilities, by not restricting it to filling only an hour and thus not giving it any excuse for ignoring a story. (Ohlmeyer seemingly acknowledges as much towards the end, though he also seems to recommend that ESPN itself should make the story about its refusal to report, and no one goes to ESPN for that sort of meta-discussion… this was an issue with Ohlmeyer’s predecessors as well…)

Second is the question of whether ESPN’s decision was fair, balanced, or consistent, given the fact that ESPN has not shied away from reporting on unconfirmed civil suits in the past… then other times it has. ESPN’s inconsistent stance on this issue has seemed wildly inconsistent and left people in the dark as to what criteria ESPN is using to determine whether to report and when. (And how; some have accused ESPN of slanting the story when they did report it.) With people left to come to their own conclusions, some have determined it has less to do with ESPN’s claimed criteria and more with irrelevant aspects of the athletes themselves, such as popularity, race, and relationship to the network. Ohlmeyer arguably did a disservice by asking Loria only about Marvin Harrison. ESPN has a lot more than that to answer for. Ohlmeyer also did a disservice by asking only about ESPN’s perceived protection of the NFL, and not Roethlisberger or the Steelers (especially given some writers’ dredging up ESPN’s Spygate coverage for evidence that the Patriots are/were not one of ESPN’s “protected” teams and the Steelers are).

(In fact, Doria himself notes that “prior history” goes into coverage decisions – a commendable position on its face, but Mike Tyson getting in trouble with the ladies is kind of old news, and a pillar of the community doing so is big news.)

I think most of us would prefer that the media not get so wrapped up in accusations against athletes that damage reputations and then not restore those reputations if the accusations turned out to be false – a natural result of the fact that once the case is settled, there’s no reason to report on it anymore, so the “no accusation” doesn’t get as much coverage as the “accusation”. But that’s not the way the media (or this country) works, and ESPN shouldn’t pretend it is.

On another note, I’m debating whether to include Ohlmeyer’s line – “I think the Internet is the most transformative technological advancement since the printing press” – in my book on the impact of the Internet… then again, Ohlmeyer’s hardly the first to say it.

The 2009 State of Webcomics Address

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It’s been said that kids say the darndest things. It’s been said in many different ways by many different people. In fact, that’s essentially the lesson of the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. All the adults who praise the emperor’s threads without actually seeing them fear the consequences of calling him out on them – but the kid who points out that the emperor is, in fact, buck naked doesn’t know any better, can’t grasp the consequences that the adults fear might befall him for saying such a thing.

What often isn’t said is that this tendency doesn’t go away all at once, but in fact, tends to slowly dissipate over time, with the accompanying cynicism increasing separately. At no time in history has this been made more clear than in the past 50 years. Time and again, it has been people in their 20s that have changed the world – people with enough learned cynicism to know the world as it is but enough residual idealism to feel that isn’t the way it has to be.

It is this group – the generation of people in their 20s – my generation, the Digital Generation – that has sought to explore every aspect of what the Internet could be, often without regard to the potential concerns and problems raised by the older, more cynical generation. Whether it’s blogs, YouTube, or really any number of things, my generation has colonized the Internet and made it our own, revolutionizing the way we live in the twenty-first century, without worrying too much about that little “money” thing, or the effect their experiments will have on the institutions they’re replacing.

Such is the case with webcomics. The unprecedented creative freedom of webcomics have led them to attract many would-be comic strip creators away from the newspaper, right when comic strips were most needed to fill the role they filled so capably back in the days of true competition within a market, and as I explained in the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series they are on the cusp of doing the same for comic book creators. But it has still been difficult for webcomic creators to find a revenue stream. I don’t think webcomickers should be glorified T-shirt salesmen, but that and the sale of compilation books (seemingly unnecessary when all the strips are available online anyway) have so far been the main sources of income for webcomic creators. That helps explain why so many popular webcomics are gag-a-day comics: ongoing, dramatic storylines don’t lend themselves well to pithy T-shirts. (Order of the Stick is the exception that proves the rule, because while it has a dramatic storyline, it’s still ultimately a humor comic, and its books mix “deleted scenes” and behind-the-scenes info with the old strips and have all-new storylines in two cases.)

The Floating Lightbulb, in my opinion, was always a must-read for aspiring webcomickers, regardless of whether you agreed with Bengo’s advice or his seeming obsession with Scott Kurtz and his ilk. But if there’s one thing about TFL that disillusioned me more than any other except maybe said obsession, it was the fact that a lot of Bengo’s advice, especially of late, basically concerned increasing ROI on T-shirt sales. The message I got from such posts was that even the best webcomic in the world wouldn’t be financially successful if it wasn’t a vehicle for presenting T-shirt ideas. Bengo has said he wants quality, but the way he’s willing to compromise quality for money suggests that, if anything, webcomics may actually have less room for creative freedom than their print counterparts, at least as far as making money off them is concerned. At least in print, you’re paying for the story itself.

The story of webcomics is the story of Web 2.0 in general, only arguably further along. Webcomics and the webcomics community, at the core, have always been less about the works produced in the medium than the promise and potential of an idea. That simple idea was the idea of putting images side by side to tell a story, and putting the resulting story on a Web page. Dreamers like Scott McCloud evangelized about the tremendous potential of this idea, speaking of infinite canvases and micropayments and all sorts of cool stuff. Once the finances were worked out, people said, webcomics would be a revolution.

The reality has so far fallen far short of the promise. Some strips, like Girl Genius, The Order of the Stick, and Gunnerkrigg Court have been critically acclaimed and produced works worthy of the best (or at least critically acclaimed) of any medium, but even they have been bound by the comic book format; the infinite canvas, in the lack of a reliable payment scheme (as I chronicled in “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”) has proven to be a gimmick at best. With people everywhere shunning paywalls of any kind and preventing the creation of real demand for compilations as anything other than a charitable excersize without “DVD extras”, and the ad market slumping while webcomics aren’t popular enough to make a lot of money out of a slumping ad market even for the most popular of webcomics, the most successful comics, as Bengo has pointed out, have been those gag-a-day strips that serve as meme factories so they can get people to buy more T-shirts.

I decided to institute a star rating system for my new webcomic review index, and it reveals that with the exception of OOTS, Sluggy Freelance, and (depending on your definition) the David Morgan-Mar comics, the most popular and successful comics (that I’ve reviewed so far, but I’ve reviewed most of the really big ones) are decidedly mediocre. There are a lot of two-star and two-and-a-half-star comics on there, including Penny Arcade, xkcd, PVP, Dinosaur Comics, and even Ctrl+Alt+Del, which I actually like and read. (That’s before we get into the 8-Bit Theaters and Dresden Codaks of the world.)

The idea of a new Golden Age of artistic experimentation and accomplishment has driven many webcomic promoters. But a disturbing number of webcomic creators, especially those first exposed to webcomics by PA or CAD, have been driven by a different dream: slapping together comics and earning fame and fortune with minimal work instead of getting a real job with real skills. Webcomics are the geek’s version of the black community’s dream of basketball or rap superstardom: many will enter, few will win. Thus far too many webcomics are crappy video game comics that basically copy-and-paste the CAD formula (already heavily hated) onto personages from the creator’s own life.

It may actually be worse when those people actually achieve webcomics stardom, because the reason they got into webcomics into the first place was that they desired the attention that comes from fame and not necessarily because they had genuine artistic concerns, so the fame often goes to their head. If you don’t believe that I have two names for you: Scott Kurtz and Tim Buckley. Say what you will about Bengo’s obsession with Kurtz or the Internet’s hatred of CAD, but the fact is that neither creator has really endeared himself to very many people. (Well, Kurtz endears himself to people who praise or agree with him or who he’s trying to impress, but still.)

Buckley’s control-freak tendencies and desire to live in his own little fantasy world where he’s the greatest webcomicker evar and everyone loves him is well known. Kurtz’s problem is different: he’s not living in a fantasy world necessarily (and he’s even self-depreciating about his own foibles), he just talks out of his ass a lot. Kurtz has been known to pick fights with various other webcomickers and webcomic bloggers for seemingly no reason, sees himself as the new Voice of All Webcomics even if others would rather he wasn’t, and has occasionally revealed a protectiveness against pretty much any other new webcomic that might conceivably steal one penny – or even one hit – from his own comic. (That didn’t stop him from co-writing a how-to book for aspiring webcomickers, so perhaps it’s no surprise that part of Bengo’s beef has been accusing the Halfpixel foursome of cooking unrealistic and unsupported numbers to inflate expectations in Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere so they won’t challenge the established webcomickers like themselves.)

The proliferation of crappy video game comics is probably to be expected as a result of Sturgeon’s Law, but for some reason some of them have actually attracted a decent-sized following, and that, combined with the face people like Kurtz tend to present, has led the creation of a sizable group that seemingly hates webcomics in general, most prominent among them probably being John Solomon during his 15 minutes of fame. That the webcomic community rushed to the defense of many of the comics Solomon reviewed only allowed him to paint the community as an insular group that praises everything all the time uncritically, and when Solomon revealed an appreciation for such strips as the Court, OOTS, and to a limited extent PA (by contrast to other, inferior tag-team comics) it led some people to hate on them for the sole reason Solomon liked them. Thanks in part to Solomon, some even within the community have joined in the hating of bad video-game comics, and some have turned on the Kurtzes and Buckleys of the world, but they still exist, new Voices of All Webcomics have yet to appear, and sweep out the crap and the egos and you don’t have much left. You’re left with just the idea. And that idea has become shrouded by all the excess baggage.

Bengo doesn’t share my enthusiasm, expressed during “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”, that an increasingly hostile comic book market to small publishers has put comic books on the cusp of a new flowering of greatness. In his eyes, the people that would flock to webcomics are instead turned off by all the crap and egos. Personally, I wouldn’t normally expect comic creators to hold the crap and egos produced by the medium now against the medium as a whole… but consider the following potential obstacles for an aspiring webcomicker:

  • Having Scott Kurtz or some other prima donna creator pick a fight with you for no reason.
  • Webcomic blogs can’t find your comic and won’t review it in the morass of other crap, so it doesn’t get discovered by the webcomic community. This is especially a problem for comics that release all in one installment, because of certain webcomic blogs’ policies not to review comics that have “ended”.
  • The general public (outside the webcomic community) sees webcomics (if they’ve heard of them) as a bunch of crappy video game comics made by arrogant college students and doesn’t find your comic, even if they wouldn’t otherwise need the help of webcomic blogs. This makes it especially difficult if your comic doesn’t appeal to nerds.

This last point seems especially salient considering the potential Scott McCloud saw in webcomics in Reinventing Comics. McCloud thought webcomics could appeal to more audiences than comic books heretofore had, appealing to women, minorities, and lovers of genres outside superheroes. He also thought webcomics could become much more mainstream than comic books were at the time. And the viral nature of the Internet meant that someway, somehow, even if the old gatekeepers didn’t like your work, if it was quality, it could find an audience.

But once again, here – as elsewhere – webcomics have fallen far short of the potential evangelized by their supporters. The Web is a marketplace of ideas, but it doesn’t change human nature, and that means stereotyping. If comic books have suffered from the notion that “comics are for kids” and “comics = superheroes”, webcomics may be starting to suffer from their own stereotypes, at least in some corners – stereotypes that have already irredeemably sickened web prose fiction, which became almost wholly identified with fanfic, which itself became almost wholly identified with bad fanfic. Because there are no barriers to entry, someone looking at a random webcomic is not likely to be impressed, and even the faces of webcomics, comics that have managed to shake the stench of Sturgeon’s Law to some extent, are Penny Arcade and xkcd, not Girl Genius or The Order of the Stick.

There is a silver lining for webcomics: slowly but surely, all media are starting to migrate to the Web in some form. That means they will all be subject to Sturgeon’s Law to some extent. (I’ll discuss some of the implications of that fact later in the week, but it won’t be a webcomic post.) Every medium will run a risk of becoming identified with crap. The barriers to entry are greater for art forms that require more and more expensive stuff, so more good stuff and less bad stuff will make it through in those media that combine moving images with sound – the descendants of movies and TV – and webcomics could remain very low on the totem pole as a medium, ahead of only prose, podcasts, and music. (And as it gets easier to create a simple webcomic like I did with Sandsday, webcomics could even fall behind podcasts and music!) Still, eventually we’ll get used to the fact, as the ever-popular blogosphere already is, that there’s a bunch of junk out there, and we’ll just have to follow what we’re familiar with and hope word of mouth will lead us to the other good stuff. When that happens, maybe – maybe – webcomics will be able to play on a level playing field. But to do so, it may need to completely jettison any memory of its video game legacy.

Sturgeon’s Law may explain all the crap in webcomics, but how to explain all the egos that (at least to Bengo) are seemingly attracted to webcomics like moths to a flame? It turns out that, at least in our dog-eat-dog society, most people are predisposed to jerkdom. I myself may admit that I might come across as a jerk in real life. Under the old ways, the jerks were weeded out or reformed by the need to network and negotiate to get anywhere in their desired careers. But that’s no longer necessary to put your wares on the web with no barriers to entry, where you can talk to anyone you still need to network with in a purely utilitarian mode and hide behind the abstraction of text with no face-to-face contact, with ready-made audiences on many sites where you don’t have to talk to anyone, and with some people willing to promote your work without even knowing what you’re like as a person.

But none of that really gets to the heart of the matter as far as Bengo is concerned: To him, the webcomics community itself is the problem.

Jonathan Rosenberg started Fleen to have a webcomic blog unencumbered by a creator who runs his own webcomic on the side. In Bengo’s eyes, he didn’t succeed, since Dumbrella was almost as much a dirty word at TFL as Halfpixel. As far as Bengo is concerned, a lot of the webcomics community is either consisting of people who ultimately want to promote their own wares, or driven by those people and blinded to those people trying something new, instead led around in circles to keep propping up the same old Penny Arcade and PVP and Ctrl+Alt+Del. Moreover, because of the small size of the medium it can throw the moniker of success onto people who really don’t deserve the term, people who in actuality are wallowing in mediocrity whether aesthetically or financially.

But in Bengo’s eyes, the root of this isn’t far from that of webcomics’ density of prima donnas. Any new idea is going to come with a good dose of idealism, since idealism is the only way new ideas are born, but also some of the lower aspects of human nature, simply because rules for professionalism haven’t been established. What’s more, an idealism about the potential of a new idea and a blindness to the faults go hand in hand. Idealism is a double-edged sword; it allows you to try something that’s never been done before, but that can be because it blinds you to the problems that are the reasons why the skeptics are skeptical in the first place, both potential and practical. What’s more, the latter problem is often compounded with youth, who owe their idealism to not having experience with the problems. Especially since youth often comes with a seeming immaturity, or at least inexperience, that compounds the problems of human nature. Sometimes this is itself defended as idealism, sometimes it’s just subconscious, but always it can hold the idea back from acceptance by the old gatekeepers.

When Bengo rather condescendingly claims that what sets webcomics further back than other fields with some of the same problems is that “many people are young and lack the critical skills to recognize these realities”, it’s tempting to dismiss it as an old fogie yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. After all, he’s effectively claiming that he is the only one capable of properly sizing up the webcomic landscape – an outsider who’s barely spent a year immersed in the webcomic community. Anyone else is just too blinded by their youthful idealism. (After all, it’s not like Scott McCloud has a career in comics dating back to the 80s.) They’re too wrapped up in an insider mentality, can’t see the forest for the trees, they’re blind to what everyone else thinks of them. They think everything’s coming up roses for webcomics but only because they’re shielded – whether subconsciously or by demagogues – from the Truth(tm).

I think Bengo may be misreading the motives of some observers – many webcomic promoters don’t care that the fact of webcomics is in rough shape, because they only care about the idea. They’re not blind to webcomics’ problems because they “lack the critical skills” to ferret them out, they’re blind to them because that’s not where they’re looking. And that’s a good thing – better to look at the webcomics doing good things for the medium than the demagogues. But Bengo’s concern is for an aspiring webcomicker who’s either young and set to ruin their lives following an avalanche of bad advice, bad role models, and their own inexperience, or more experienced and trying to avoid getting wrapped up in a scene that produces a bunch of jerks – and where the financials might not have been figured out to the extent people think.

Bengo thinks webcomics are even smaller than those within the community give it credit for – and shrinking, with even the top webcomics enjoying less success and less self-sufficiency than they sometimes get credit for. Many webcomics creators, in his experience, are not just egotistical but private and unwilling to give hard data. The number of truly artistic, great webcomics – especially those noticed by the successors of Websnark, the mainstream webcomic blogs – can probably be counted on one hand. The number of webcomics that have had even fleeting breakout success outside the webcomic niche are even fewer. The webcomic community is still more committed to the potential of an idea than the actual realization of that idea. Much of the webcomic blogosphere consists of not so much coverage of actual webcomics but coverage of technological developments that might, one day, if we’re lucky, have an influence on the future of comics. (Comixtalk seems to prefer to see itself as a site for coverage of “comics in the digital age” than a webcomics blog.) Even webcomic reviews have, since Websnark near-fell off the face of the earth, concentrated less on the comics themselves and more on how lessons from them might apply to Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere.

Say what you will about his conclusions, or even dismiss them entirely as someone too jaded to realize how times are changing and bitter about not succeeding the way “better” cartoonists did, you should still be sobered by Bengo’s announcement that he would be leaving “webcomics” entirely, feeling the term too poisoned, and urging others to isolate their sites as much as possible from the “scene”. And cheerleaders for the idea may want to listen to what Bengo had to say before that, directly to them:

I’d be alarmed that an open-minded, truth-seeking sort like myself would enter webcomics, study it round the clock for several years, and find it mostly over-blown, in love with itself and falling out of fashion. I’d be even more alarmed that there are quality comics with quality accounting who far out-perform the alleged self-supporting titles, providing a valuable reality check to the people peddling your bright webcomic career along with your lottery ticket and Brooklyn Bridge. The ignorance deficit — the difference between what most webcomic people know and what they need to know — is so gaping, the typical aspirant’s chances of success are rotten.

During Bengo’s farewell series, Scott Kurtz left a series of comments so mean-spirited and trolly it may have been hard to believe he was actually responsible for them. But that can’t be said for his tweeted response to Bengo’s announcement he would be leaving the “webcomics scene”, which regardless of what you may think of Bengo and his conclusions, has to be a wake-up call to anyone:

I think @krisstraub and I forced a man to quit webcomics. I’m proud. Proud of what we’ve acomplished [sic].

Really, Scott? You’re proud that a man who wanted to enter webcomics, who saw the potential of the core idea of webcomics and wanted webcomics to be the best that they could be, someone who could have – for all we know – been one of the great forces and driving figures to help webcomics achieve their potential, instead saw a cesspool of jerks and crap and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble? You’re proud that you forced a man to quit “webcomics”?!? How could you, self-proclaimed Voice of All Webcomics, possibly be proud of driving someone from it? Is it just because he didn’t bother kowtowing to you and dared to challenge you and your infallible statements? Is it because you think he’s bitter about not being good enough and you see him picking a fight with you for no good reason, oblivious to the fact you’re making yourself as bad if not worse, and taking webcomics down with it? Or perhaps we should take your nonspecific phrasing at face value, and decide this is one instance of you letting slip your real goal, that you don’t really want webcomics reaching their potential, that you don’t want anyone escaping the cave to discover the true mediocrity of your work, that you’re willing to bring down an entire art form so you can remain self-proclaimed king of it?

This one statement, more than any other – even any from Bengo – is telling about the state of webcomics today, held back by those who would wish that Sturgeon’s Law continued to hold as much as possible, that it would remain a niche small enough for their own delusions of grandeur to seem realistic, that its reputation could be sullied enough that it could remain their own little club. It’s possible that one day, when the history of comics on the web are told, we will say that once upon a time, there was a community of people, led by those who created the early successes and tried to ensure there would be no others, who produced a body of work and built their own insular community around it known as “webcomics”, and their actions nearly set the cause of comics on the web back years, and their community initially attracted those who would defend the idea, but decided that to avert the fate of the idea being slaughtered in the crib, they would have to distance themselves from it and start over, ditching the roots that “webcomics”, an outgrowth of the dumb Internet culture of the Web’s childhood and adolescence, laid down.

I would love to come back in a year, at next year’s State of Webcomics Address, and say that this period of webcomics history is not quite as bleak as I just described, that we have found a new Voice of All Webcomics that can rescue it from the damage Kurtz and his ilk are doing, that Bengo’s description of the potential missed opportunity facing us did not turn out to be as tragic as he feared. I’d even like to be able to say the state of webcomics wasn’t as bad as I made it seem even now, that Bengo was wrong all along, that webcomics’ own quirks – even its propensity for egos – were good enough to grow and thrive in the context of the Internet. But not only am I not holding my breath, I’m not sure if I’ll even know the answer from the webcomic blogosphere.

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!

Sports journalism in an age of transition for all journalism

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This is my first blog post to be republished on Bleacher Report. Hi! I’m going to bring some quirks to my writing, which I hope to (re-)introduce you to over the next few days and weeks. I just relaunched my Web site, MorganWick.com, where I talk about a wide variety of topics, including some you might never have heard about, and even the topics that are familiar I often talk about from a unique perspective, because I’m constantly thinking about them. On my site, the motto is “Ideas every day”, and to celebrate the launch of the new site, this is Ideas Every Day week month at MorganWick.com. Because I got the idea for Ideas Every Day week over a month ago, I’m going to start it with some ideas for posts that are not as topical now as they were then.

We are in a period of painful transition in journalism. We are in a period where the Internet is big enough to take a bite out of newspapers but too small to effectively replace them and too young to know what, exactly, will replace them, or how it’ll be paid for. It’s outside the realm of a single blog post for me to proclaim to have all the answers for how to save newspapers or maintain the standards they set in the Internet Age. It covers too much ground, touches on too many aspects of our everyday life. One day I hope to write a book on all the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and maybe I’ll try to find the answers there. Nonetheless this post is on just one symptom, one aspect, of this larger problem, and it unavoidably means talking about the larger problem and thinking about how to fix it.

The second sentence of the preceding paragraph is an important way to describe and look at the situation. For all the trouble that newspapers are in, they still reach many more people than most websites and even most TV news shows. The slow disappearance of newspapers isn’t just about the in-depth journalism that will be lost, which itself is less about the disappearance of newspapers and more about our increasing demands for immediacy. There are still a lot of people, people without any access to the Internet, that are reliant on newspapers (and, admittedly, TV) to know what’s going on in the world. At least in the short term, losing access to newspapers could mean complete disconnection.

The flip side of that is the reality that whatever it is that replaces newspapers, it will exist in a greater number, diversity, and precision than what exists now. The diversity of voices on the Internet has a lot of advantages. But it also has a number of problems.

For many, including me, it’s easy to assume that the future of the Internet and journalism in general will follow the mold set by television, a future largely supported by ads. There are a few problems with this supposition, but one of them is that very, very, very few web sites will have the mass penetration of a leading daily newspaper or TV station. The value of advertising lies primarily in the number of eyeballs you can have seeing your ad; the fewer eyeballs, the less value. While it’s theoretically possible for people to follow more websites than they subscribe to newspapers or watch TV shows, the fact is that there are going to be more voices fighting for a piece of the pie, and there’s a limit as to how big the pie can grow, especially when a lot of the eyeballs are going to be the same people over and over again.

Not all journalistic functions that are going to be changed, and possibly not for the better, by the Internet are time consuming. Some are just expensive, underwritten by less expensive sections of the paper. Something that requires a lot of traveling may attract a significant number of readers and eyeballs, but it’s still going to be harder to pay the bills that go along with it – which in turn, means fewer people are going to be willing to take the plunge. It’s doubly hard when we’re talking about something that requires a lot of traveling yet is still local.

Which brings me to July’s series in the Sports Business Journal on the declining sizes and budgets of newspaper sports sections. Sports sections have reduced staff and page counts, cut travel expenses on beats (especially by not sending writers on the road), and even when they haven’t reduced beat coverage, cut coverage of big events as well.

A one-two punch of the Web and ESPN has put a crimp on local sports sections, and given its frivolity compared to the rest of the paper, I wonder if sports sections will be first to be cut entirely. Hardcore sports fans who once were reliant on the local sports section, or the sports minute on the local newscast, for sports news from anywhere in the country have found ESPN a godsend. A self-reinforcing pattern of people flocking to ESPN for sports coverage in the wake of shrinking coverage in the local paper has started to emerge. There’s now a significant group of people like me who consider themselves general sports fans, rather than necessarily fans of any particular team. The team I have the closest attachment to is the Mariners, and that’s because I’ve been going to a couple of games every year since I was a little kid and feel a sentimental attachment to keep going. I probably couldn’t tell you half the names on the team.

ESPN will tell you when Brett Favre is coming back – they’ll cover the big stars and the big-name teams. That’s why its detractors like to call it the “Eastern Seaboard Programming Network”, despite its willingness to cover LA teams even before opening a studio there. They’ll cover leagues at the macro level, at least to an extent, but as Don Ohlmeyer noted in his first ombudsman column for the boys in Bristol, “programming and commentating for a national audience made up mostly of local interests is a treacherous balancing act.” ESPN itself has suffered from becoming “America’s sports section” in a nation more patriotic about local teams than any other. To get the same level of coverage of individual teams requires a local-level operation whose patrons only expect them to cover two or three teams. There’s less money in those local level operations, so travel expenses have been cut and coverage has suffered.

For teams that aren’t already being doted on by ESPN, that means they’re threatened with a slip to irrelevance. When ESPN puts and keeps an event in the news, people pay attention. If the amount of coverage a team gets in a local paper is a short wire story on the game on page 36 and the amount of coverage on the local news is less than ten seconds, meaning they’re probably getting more coverage from ESPN than the local media (assuming it’s a Big Three team), the team effectively gets shut out. Unless a blogger can become really popular, they’re not going to be much of an improvement, because they either watch the team on TV, cover only the home games live (just like the beat writers who see travel expenses cut), or fork over a considerable amount of money for travel expenses.

That’s why I think it’s smarter for papers to skimp on coverage of big events. Unless their team is in it, people already get more coverage of the Super Bowl or World Series from ESPN alone than they’d ever need, and there are, by my count, nine national sports websites before you go into single-sport websites like the sports’ official sites, fan-powered websites like Bleacher Report, and blogs like Deadspin – ESPN, CBS, Fox, Yahoo, SI, NBC, USA Today, Sporting News, and depending on whether or not you consider it a blog, Fanhouse. What people want, and need, is maintained coverage of the local teams. And if their team is in the championship, no coverage the major sports organizations can provide can match the coverage provided by someone who has grown intimately familiar with the team over the course of the season. But not all papers have realized this, and for papers with large, somewhat national readerships, like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, it poses some tough questions as to which audience to appeal to.

At least in the short term, most of the easy answers are unsavory, involving the dicey concept of teams subsidizing their own coverage, which always raises the specter of conflict of interest. The LA Kings, who saw the Times‘ beat writer stop travelling with them on the road, hired their own freelance writers to write coverage for their own web site.

Now that he’s seen what they can do with editorial content, [Vice President of Broadcasting and Communications Mike] Altieri said he is warming to the idea of hiring a newspaper pro to cover the team both at home and on the road.

They looked into doing it three years ago, but decided against it, mostly because of the expense. The salary of a seasoned professional likely would approach $100,000 in Los Angeles, a difficult expense when he can’t demonstrate that it will lead to more revenue, particularly at a time when the team’s on-ice performance has been shoddy.

If traditional coverage continues to wane and the team improves, it may be worth the money, Altieri said. The debate then will be whether the front office is prepared to occasionally find criticism on its own site. Without it, fans probably won’t view it as credible, and they won’t come back.

The Kings wouldn’t be first: the Dallas Mavericks hired the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s NBA writer as that paper left Mavs coverage to the Dallas Morning News (merging of beats between competing papers has also become common practice where once that level of collusion would have been unthinkable), and at least six NFL teams have done similarly, led by the Bengals’ Geoff Hobson, who has written for the team site for a decade. In Major League Baseball, where the Advanced Media division runs MLB.com and all 30 club Web sites, 12 online writers have Baseball Hall of Fame votes. The Chicago Bulls, concerned about the loss of legendary Chicago Tribune NBA writer Sam Smith weakening the NBA’s profile in a football- and baseball-crazed market, hired him to continue his work for their site. In their case, they saw the departure (without their intervention) of one writer having a severe impact on their profile. The resulting uptick in traffic suggests other teams may follow the Bulls’ lead in that sense, ignoring the concerns about editorial control and conflict of interest given the larger issues at stake. Major League Baseball seems to have leapt into the future head-on: with no editorial interference from MLB or the clubs, the Advanced Media-run sites are fairly impartial.

Still, given the issues involved, I would suggest a better, less nauseating option, especially in markets without competing papers to share resources, would be to help pay for some of (in the Kings’ case) the Times‘ beat writer’s travel and other expenses – maybe, depending on the comfort level of all parties involved and necessary logistics, even letting him ride on the team plane. That would not only be cheaper than subsidizing all a reporter’s expenses, it would not only lessen (though not eliminate) the appearance of a conflict of interest, it would also restore that broad exposure of coverage. The only people who will find coverage of the Kings on the team’s own site are people who are looking for Kings coverage in the first place – not casual fans, unless they read aggregators, but content providers are very protective of content these days and some of them want to kill aggregators for “stealing” content.

Flamboyant Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has in fact taken this idea one better: he’s proposed that the major sports leagues form a “beat writer’s cooperative,” “hiring reporters who would provide daily content to local newspapers in exchange for guaranteed space in the print edition.” He’s gone on record stating he doesn’t believe a team Web site is the place for objective, unbiased opinions and reporting, but for selling the team. (He does think it’s the place to break news despite the risk that runs of antagonizing papers the team needs more than ever.)

If local teams are concerned about the loss of local beat writers, at least those writers spend half their time at home, and the emphasis on their presence adds up to less concern for the leagues. Take all the pressure faced by each of 30 teams, ratchet it up considerably, and concentrate it in one place and you have the problems facing individual sports – NASCAR and golf most prominently – that are all travel no matter where in the country you are.

It’s easy to separate the national and local levels in team sports – ESPN and the national outfits cover the biggest games like the playoffs, local outfits focus on the local teams. But that dynamic goes completely out of whack in the NASCAR and PGA tours, where for years local beat writers often spent all their time on the road. Considering the additional expense that entails, it’s no surprise those beats have often been axed entirely. Even national chains (who could conceivably get by with one beat between them) and content-sharing local papers have severely cut back coverage as writers have left for the Web. But that just puts more pressure on the national outfits to put as much resources into covering every event on the tour as local outfits do into covering every game for their local teams. It’s easy to cover the big races like the Daytona 500 and the majors – but the Local Dodge Dealers 400 and the side tournament Tiger’s skipping on some random golf course in Texas somewhere? Other than golf-specific magazines, only the AP, New York Times, and three of the aforementioned sports sites (ESPN, CBS, and USA Today, the latter more as a paper than a Web site) have a regular presence on the PGA tour.

PGA Tour Executive Vice President of Communications and International Affairs Ty Votaw insists that, mostly because of ESPN’s and CBS’s online presences, there’s still more being written about golf than ever… but here we run into that little “transition” problem, and a potential harbinger of problems to come. As with local teams, newspaper beat writers are a more visible place for coverage than a team web site, and unless they take the form of a blog, national sports sites aren’t really much better than the latter. Although Web sites have more space than newspapers, the amount the average fan will see is less. General sports fans can easily look through every page of the sports section, but they can only look at the front page of the Web site before anything they aren’t already interested in falls off the radar in favor of what they already came to look at. (The value of RSS for improving this situation is… iffy.) The result is a far more Darwinian competition for space than that which ever existed in the sports section.

For NASCAR, it seems like the universe has it in for them. NASCAR devoted so many resources to encouraging newspapers to covering their circuit in the late 90s as they made a push to be accepted as one of the modern four major sports… only to see their efforts wasted in the face of the juggernaut destroying the business they courted, and in a position to be first to go. Many papers haven’t ended NASCAR coverage entirely but switched to running abridged AP copy. NASCAR has attempted to adjust by removing the travel from its coverage – running weekly streaming press conferences with e-mailed questions from around the country – and, like local teams, has begun credentialing bloggers and other Web-based operations.

There is a silver lining in this for teams and leagues: as newspapers die, sports coverage may slither to the Web easier than you may think. Smith’s example suggests that sportswriters with large – even if strictly local – followings may be in the best shape of anyone threatened by the decline of newspapers; they have a ready-made audience to follow them to the Web in the form of a blog or just a series of columns for another web site. Unlike most journalism, sportswriting lends itself well to a conversion to blog format. Several sportswriters – especially those let go by ailing newspapers – have found new homes at a league or team web site, one of the national sports sites (ESPN seems especially popular), or even starting their own blog or web site.

Which approach is best for the sport or team varies. The best approach to reach a general audience is probably the national sports sites for the sports in general, especially the big individual ones. For local teams, the future for reaching a general audience may be dicier, at least until more local Web-based sites spring up and become popular. For their part, ESPN is trying to broaden and focus their mandate; earlier this year they launched ESPNChicago.com, a site dedicated to coverage of Chicago-area teams. The site quickly attracted more eyeballs than the Chicago Tribune‘s online sports section, and ESPN will soon launch similar sites for New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. All four cities are places where ESPN owns a radio station (Pittsburgh being the only other), but few doubt that they’ll eventually expand beyond that zone into markets like Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC.

If what’s wanted is coverage, regardless of whether that coverage only reaches the people that are looking for it, a blog may be the best approach to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, at least for the writer looking for creative freedom, and for the sport or team that’s looking for a diversity of voices. But that sends the writer plunging headlong into the issue plaguing so much else of the Internet: the question of money. (SBJ’s profile of Racin’ Today, started by four laid-off motorsports writers, encapsulates many of the issues involved.)

Over the seven or so years that it’s run, ESPN’s Around the Horn has almost been emblematic of the changes coming over journalism. It started as a show for banter between four newspaper sportswriters. From west to east, the current lineup of writers includes: Bill Plaschke (Los Angeles Times); J.A. Adande (formerly L.A. Times, now ESPN.com); Woody Paige (Denver Post, excepting about a year working double duty as co-host of Cold Pizza-turned-First Take‘s 1st and 10 segment); Tim Cowlishaw (Dallas Morning News); Jay Mariotti (formerly Chicago Sun-Times, now Fanhouse, though probably moving to the Chicago Tribune); Kevin Blackistone (formerly Dallas Morning News, now Fanhouse after a lengthy unemployment); Bob Ryan; and Jackie MacMullan (both Boston Globe). Only five out of eight regular panelists still work for newspapers, and because Mariotti shows up almost every day, it’s a rare sight to see nothing but newspaper writers on one show. Occasional panelist Gene Wojcehowski moved from the Sun-Times to ESPN.com; Michael Smith became an occasional panelist (after being a regular for a while) after moving from the Globe to ESPN.com. On ATH‘s “big brother” show, Pardon the Interruption, Tony Kornheiser no longer works for the Washington Post.

There’s one other noteworthy thing about ATH: almost always, the youngest person on the show is host Tony Reali. Perhaps more disturbing, the youngest of the panelists still at a newspaper is Cowlishaw, who seems to be in his 40s if not 50s, and the only regular panelist I’d even suspect not to be in his 40s or above is Adande. It takes a long time for a sportswriter to build a reputation and following, but there haven’t been a lot of writers to get their start this decade. Newspaper sports sections are being further crunched by the fact most people who once might have been aspiring sportswriters are getting a head start on the future and starting out on the web and firing up their own blogs, free of editorial control and deadlines. Bill Simmons once aspired to be the next Ryan, but instead found enough of a following with his “Boston Sports Guy” web site he was picked up by ESPN.com and is now one of the site’s major attractions. Until recently he even had a regular column in ESPN the Magazine – akin to being a regular writer for Sports Illustrated.

Ultimately, the content of sports journalism will come out intact and possibly even expanded. It’s just an open question how much it’ll change in the process.

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!

Did I just fall into the Twilight Zone?

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One minute I’m thinking Jay Glazer’s report/opinion piece predicting a Favre comeback merely reflected disgruntled Vikings who didn’t like their quarterback situation and maybe didn’t quite understand the circumstances and reasons why Favre wasn’t already there, didn’t quite understand that Favre wasn’t any ordinary free agent. I wondered if ESPN’s obsessing over the story was related to its willingness to give Glazer credit for it instead of saying “ESPN’s Michael Smith reports…” and whether ESPN was setting up Glazer to get maximum egg on his face when the report proved spurious.

The next, Favre not only signs a contract with the Vikings, he shows up at training camp and is going to start the next preseason game like he was always there?

I mean, within 24 hours, we went from Favre being retired and in Hattiesburg, to being at training camp and the No. 1 QB on the depth chart without even throwing a practice pass.

Did history somehow retroactively change on everybody?

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.