Here are two articles I read that made me wonder how these idiots get jobs in the ‘real’ world.

Naked Came The WebComic

Art, “Art”, and Almost “Art” – What qualifies as “art” in webcomics?, by Jules Rivera, only counts as ‘news’ and not a blog by the virtue of having ‘NEWS’ in the URL (if it had blog, I’d forgive it entirely).

I’m going to say this. If someone walked up to me and said ‘You’re not a writer, you just blog’, I might pop them one. I do too write! You are here, reading my writing, and either enjoying it or rolling your eyes at my idiocy and moving on. By the way, you’re welcome to do that. But this right here is my art.

I take particular offense to her deciding the XKCD, possibly the wittiest and most fun webcomic I’ve run across ever, is a terrible comic because it’s a stick-figure comic. She says of these “This is a person who is not making an effort. The more lazy the artwork, the more terrible the comic is to look at.”

Clearly she also feels math is hard.

As for a webcomic she says is ‘better’, we’ve got the one I don’t actually read regularly, Order of the Stick. The text size is too small. Seriously. I can’t read it. But I do think it’s one of the better D&D parody strips out there. And since I’m not actually a rough and tumble D&D girl (I had a bard who was actually really crap with lyrics, I miss him), it’s not my thing. Still that doesn’t diminish from the fact that the work is really good.

Look, just because you don’t ‘get’ the art, doesn’t make it invalid. I can’t stand Hemingway (a couple of my relatives will shortly be sending hit-men to my house to kill me, so this will possibly be my last blog post ever) but I appreciate his work! I get why he’s famous and a master, but it’s not something I’d read for pleasure. For that, I’ve got Moby Dick, a book many people hate. That’s how art works. It makes you stop and think.

And if the webcomics that make me stop and think are a stickman world (XKCD – don’t forget your hat!) and a photocomic of a dude writing on a chalkboard (Surviving the World, thanks Dante), then don’t diminish their work. There’s room on the net, and in the store, for all of us. Diversity is good! Express yourself the way that come’s naturally!

Well … except this next guy.

I’m With Coco

NBC’s Gaspin Talks About Emotion of Late-Night Changes, by Brian Stelter, is a failed article, not for anything Brian did, but for what his subject said, when asked what he’d learned about the whole Tonight Show shenanigans.

For those who don’t know, on May 29th, 2009, Jay Leno stopped doing The Tonight Show on NBC (which runs at 11:05pm ET) and started doing the Jay Leno Show at 10pm (same station). Conan O’Brian got the nod for Tonight, and in January of 2010, rumors began than he was going to be punted and replaced with … Jay Leno. Okay, the ratings weren’t great for either show, and I don’t know anyone, personally, who actually watched the Leno Show, but a lot of people, myself included, felt that it just wasn’t fair to Conan. I recall commenting that NBC were idiots for not just letting Leno GO and leaving Conan for a year. Late night TV isn’t the same as regular TV.

But. NBC didn’t. They fired Conan (there’s no other word for it, people), and then Jeff Gaspin, NBC Universal TV Entertainment’s chairman, said that he had underestimated the emotional drama that the whole shipwreck caused.

Quote: “I probably, you know, I probably underestimated the emotion of everything that went on. I went to Conan, to Jay, to Jimmy with a very logical, rational plan. I explained it to the press. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. And I think the underestimated the emotional impact it had on Conan, in particular.”

Frankly, he comes off sounding like this: Gee, we had no idea firing Conan would hurt his feelings! As I tweeted to my friend Sabrina, Well it’s not like NBC execs have any experience with being fired. How would THEY know.

I’ll let how stupid they are stand without comment.

If the question twitter asks is “What are you doing right now?” the answer to LiveTweeting is “Too much.”

(This does not change the fact that I give to WBEZ every year.)

Late Addition: If you have to “Live Whatever”, I think I’m a little in love with Cover It Live.

In the last week, I’ve been spammed by Twitter to the point that I had to stop following two people. This does not count Wil Weaton whom I adore, but he tweets too much and until I turned off ‘No @replies unless they’re to me!’ on my Twitter prefs, I couldn’t bear to follow. No, in the last 7 days, I’ve had to kick off WBEZ and nprpolitics for spamming the living daylights out of me.

WBEZ livetweeted the recent Chicago Town Hall, and in doing so, racked up 1200 120 tweets in 4 hours. I’m sure you can do the per minute math yourself, but the point was that while I was trying to tweet, read my friend’s tweets, and reply, I got spammed to the point that I could no longer follow anyone but WBEZ. And when I bitched, they said, in essence, ‘Use a better Twitter client’. My first reply was filled with swear words (I didn’t tweet it). My second reply was actually twittered and, I felt, polite and fair. WBEZ, the next day, looked back and saw they lost 12 followers. So they listened to me (and others) and made a WBEZLive account for livetweets.

Then, last night, nprpolitics livetweeted the Presidential Address, and pulled off 1000 tweets in an hour, before I turned them off. When I bitched, they said they did it all year and, I presume, no one complained. Guess what? I’m complaining! This is a complaint! They practically typed in every word the President said. Now, I like Obama and I was interested, but that was gratuitous. Have you people never heard of the radio!? Everyone was airing it! If you weren’t need a computer or a tv or a radio, then maybe, MAYBE, this was a good idea. If you happened to allow nprpolitics to tweet your phone. At which point you got 1000 SMS in an hour, which probably went over your monthly limit on text messages. Can you see the problem now?

Everyone’s answer was ‘Use a better client! Try TweetDeck to filter out what you don’t want to read!’ That’s not a solution, people. That’s you, saying you don’t give a damn about your followers. Twittering is not about spewing garbage into the air. It’s not a velcrometer where you throw stuff up and see what sticks. I used to say that’s what a blog was for, but these days, I think that’s what a private, never goes online, journal is for. Full stop. If you put stuff on the internet, it’s for public discussion and consumption. You can’t live in a vacuum and, because of how prevalent the data you put out is in other people’s lives, you can’t be ignorant of how much you put out there.

By LiveTweeting, nprpolitics and WBEZ each put 140000 characters of data out there. How much was fluff? That’s too much information and, I think, goes against the very tenet of Twitter.

When asked “Isn’t Twitter just too much information?“, Twitter replied with this:

No, in fact, Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication. At Twitter, we ask one question, “What are you doing?”

Either Twitter needs to address this shift in use to communication vs databarfing, or they need to address how they handle LiveTwittering. Limit people to 60 posts an hour, for example! That’s one a minute, and that’s pretty damn reasonable. Implement some flood-control. Otherwise it’s going to become impossible to keep track of tweets without these third-party tools, who are subject to breaking any time Twitter wants to change their API.

Sitting on the fence won’t help anyone.

But that’s at least working better now. I’m rather glad all these various things have RSS feeds that I can fiddle with, since I find that much easier to cope with than remembering to log in everywhere. I have one login spot,

I’m perilously close to online footprint burn out.

One Ring to Bind Them
The very last step was actually the first step. I had to answer ‘How do I keep track of it all without having to log into 3 places?’ That came with Lifestream, a WordPress plugin. By using that, I was able to make a page I jokingly called “Social Disease”. Using that, I can actually import everything my friends are doing into one page. That said, after I went through the effort of setting all that up, it’s not actually what I want. Who knew? Instead what I want was to be able to follow everyone my way. Which means on RSS.

For a while now I’ve been using NewsGator, since it lets me pass through credentials to private RSS feeds (which Google does not). It also has an iPhone App. As much as I like the Benevolent Overlord that is Google, NewsGator’s just simple, clean and fast for an RSS reader. It even has desktop clients, so I can keep desktop and web in sync, though I find I use NewsGator more and more than any one-computer based Feeding. Maybe if I built a feeder of my own into Ipstenu, so I could log in and see everything … but that’s another day

Integration is the name of the game! Once I dumped the idea of ‘where to keep track’ into RSS, I was left with the (slightly) more simple issue of how to update everything at once.

LiveJournal
LJ integration is as done as it’s getting. I’m not going to fuss with it, since the only wish-list I have is for importing LJ comments into the correct WP entry, and that’s a pipe dream. So we’ve got WordPress crossposting to LiveJournal via LJXP. Check!

Twitter
Twitter is done, officially, now that I found Andrea Vascellari’s Comments via Twitter pipe. The problem I had was that while you could see my tweets, no one’s replies showed up. This is something that really should be part and parcel in Twitter, an RSS feed would cover it. Also I wanted to bring tweets to my blog (as you see on my pretty sidebar) and update my tweets with my blog posts. That one is thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools. So now I have WordPress cross posting to twitter AND Twitter being noted on WordPress.

FaceBook
Facebook! My blog posts get cross posted to my FaceBook wall now via Wordbook. Wordbook uses a FaceBook ‘app’ that magically updates my Wall, but what it didn’t do was update my blog when I changed my FaceBook Status. That came with Brian’s Status Press Widget. Sadly, it doesn’t come with a handy way for me to update my Status without popping in to FaceBook itself, but I think I can live with that. I have a RSS feed for my friends status, and while I’d like one for my wall, it apparently can be done, but I’ll have to try it from home when I can actually get into FaceBook. Firewalls.

MySpace and LinkedIn I’ve decided can go to hell. I hate MySpace. FaceBook at least is clean, and MySpace is like GeoCities. I hated GeoCities. Nice idea, but fugly. And LinkedIn, well, I’m not sure what I think of it at all yet. FaceBook for professionals, I guess, but it’s weird. And it’s not for my personal blogs.

Integration.

I use Twitter Tools to crosspost my posts here with Twitter, and Live Journal Crossposting is working pretty well. But what about Facebook? Really what I want is a way for me to post here, and have it update to Facebook and Twitter (and MySpace I suppose) and then to come back here and update me with comments.

I suspect half my problem is that I can’t figure out where everything is in Facebook anymore. I don’t get this whole ‘Wall’ thing, so when I want to have my blog cross posted to my wall … where does it go!?

I really do hate this. I want my friends to find me wherever they find to play, but I don’t actually want to have to have six million places to remember to update.

But I digress!

The Browser Wars ended with a weird stalemate, and it wasn’t by choice of the users. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their modifications of what was and was not okay in the Web (yes, there are guidelines to web design) managed to reward early adopters for things like HTML 2 and XHTML. They, without ever enforcing rules, and without ever making a browser of their own, managed to finagle enough ‘power’ such that website developers wanted to proudly display their compatibility. No longer did we create sites like ‘Best viewed on IE’, but we aimed for these standards, and coerced our websites to look ‘Okay’ on IE and Firefox, Windows XP and Mac OS X.

But unless you have three computers with multiple boot sectors and multiple browser versions, either physically or virtually, how do you know what your site looks like?

My personal website I know is ‘okay’ on most browsers. It looks perfect, just as I want, on OS X in Safari and Firefox. It looks good on Windows in Firefox. And then there’s IE. I hate it. I hate it. It’s not safe, it ignores the W3C, and it just doesn’t do what I think it should. Browse Happy is a site dedicated to reminding people about the alternatives. Like Firefox, yes, which is my Windows XP browser of choice. But I can’t just ignore IE, even if I hate it. Oh, I ignore IE 6 and older, but 7 and 8 I need to pay attention to. So what do I do?

I hit up sites like BrowserShots, where they will go and snag a screenshot of what my site looks like in a freakishly vast array of browser/OS combinations. It’s not perfect, sometimes it hits weird errors where things I know look fine suddenly don’t. But if you want a quick shot to see what CSS stupidity certain browsers entertain, well, it’s good and free.