There are parents out there whose children lead lives free of television. Their time is passed sewing artisanal bread, making papier maché furniture and turning cantaloupe rinds into objects of breathtaking beauty that will be passed down from generation to generation. Oh, and I understand they read.

Quite often, that’s us, too. But more than occasionally, there’s a TV on, airing what the broadcasters assure me is educational, quality programming. (For Canadians, there’s about to be a whole new channel of the stuff. Nickelodeon Canada has replaced Discovery Kids.

And my kids seem to be drawn inexorably to the shows that have the most cloyingly catchy themes around. Since we have a) TiVo and b) children with a startling knack for figuring out such gadgets as remote controls, those themes end up being repeated endlessly.

In some cases, I cope by getting into it; I can do a pretty decent performance of The Backyardigans‘ theme song.

In other cases, some part of my mind jumps to my defence, counteracting the carefully policed goodness of children’s culture with a little dose of darkness from the kind of stuff we watch after they’ve gone to bed.

Like, say, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

So when the theme to Mighty Machines comes on, here are the words I hear:

Skynet Machines
Terminator machines
Looking for you, doing lethal things, they’re
Skynet machines

Try to hide
From the homicide
They’ll kill humanity
They’re ready to deploy
With orders to destroy-oy-oy-oy…

I’ll catch myself wondering whether I heard correctly – did Caillou really just threaten to wish his parents into the cornfield? Or I’ll start to imagine news headlines about how a feral chimpanzee attacked and killed his owner, ravaging him so badly he could only be identified by the remaining scraps of his yellow hat.

I can’t be the only one who does this… can I?

So I'm going to start selling prints of Noise to Signal cartoons. And I'd like to do it in two ways.

• First, I want to make prints available for any cartoon someone thinks is good enough to hang on their wall (it's a hell of a compliment). That's still in the works.
• But second, there are some special cartoons where I'd like to create a few limited-edition prints.

And that's where I'd like your help: choosing which cartoons to start with. I want to pick three cartoons for limited-edition prints in time for the holiday season. So here's my question to you:

Which Noise to Signal cartoon would you most like to receive under your tree / in your stocking / during your awkward office gift exchange / next to your Festivus pole?

Leave your suggestion in the comments below. And as my way of saying thanks - because I appreciate your doing a little free market research for me - I'm going to randomly draw one name from everyone who helps out, and send that lucky winner a print of their favourite cartoon.

We'll do this for the next week or so, and I'll announce the three cartoons (they won't necessarily be the ones that get the most votes, but your suggestions will carry a lot of weight) next Monday.

You can find the Noise to Signal cartoons here. Just drop the URL for your choice in a comment below.

Thanks for your help!

So I’m going to start selling prints of Noise to Signal cartoons. And I’d like to do it in two ways.

• First, I want to make prints available for any cartoon someone thinks is good enough to hang on their wall (it’s a hell of a compliment). That’s still in the works.
• But second, there are some special cartoons where I’d like to create a few limited-edition prints.

And that’s where I’d like your help: choosing which cartoons to start with. I want to pick three cartoons for limited-edition prints in time for the holiday season. So here’s my question to you:

Which Noise to Signal cartoon would you most like to receive under your tree / in your stocking / during your awkward office gift exchange / next to your Festivus pole?

Leave your suggestion in the comments below. And as my way of saying thanks – because I appreciate your doing a little free market research for me – I’m going to randomly draw one name from everyone who helps out, and send that lucky winner a print of their favourite cartoon.

We’ll do this for the next week or so, and I’ll announce the three cartoons (they won’t necessarily be the ones that get the most votes, but your suggestions will carry a lot of weight) next Monday.

You can find the Noise to Signal cartoons here. Just drop the URL for your choice in a comment below.

Thanks for your help!

Last night’s The Daily Show was an extraordinary one – in some ways, as much so as Jim Cramer’s train-wreck of an appearance on the show or Jon Stewart’s legendary take-down of CNN’s Crossfire.

For a full eight-minute segment, Stewart channelled Glenn Beck, and he did it brilliantly, hovering at the sweet spot between an exact impersonation and a slapstick parody. And what emerged went beyond shtick – which Stewart often does, and does well – and into actual character. It was comic acting, good comic acting, and all the more devastating as satire for that reason.

I’ve never seen him do anything quite like this, and I was amazed. What did you think?

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

Slowly but surely, Twitter is adding users to its beta Retweet feature. The way it works is straightforward: when you’re using Twitter.com (as opposed to a client like Tweetdeck, Nambu or Hootsuite), you get to see a “Retweet” link when you roll over someone’s tweet:

Click it, and a little confirmation button appears:

Click that, and you automatically retweet. The original tweet now has a link that allows you to undo your retweet:

Why would you want to do that (other than spite)? Well, the feature isn’t that smart about telling you that your retweet exceeds 140 characters – which it often will, because you’re adding “RT (@username)” at the beginning of it. And you may realize you want to add a little something yourself, like “Not sure if I agree” or “N.B.: PDF link”, or edit the retweet down to the one thing you really want to highlight.

I’m not sure how useful this will be to me. But it’s live now, and you can expect to see a lot more retweeting pretty soon… and a lot more truncated tweets until people do a quick character count before clicking.

There’s a long list of things I love about OS X. In so many ways, your engineers, designers and usability geniuses have anticipated my needs – even those I didn’t know I had.

But there’s one area where OS X is driving me absolutely bat-spit crazy: the way applications jump to the foreground.

Say I’m launching an app that has a lot of work to do to get started – Photoshop, for instance; pretty much anything from Microsoft Office; or, at times, Firefox or even Safari.

Do I sit staring blankly at the screen? Take a minute to speed-meditate? Stretch out the kinks in my neck? Well, sometimes – but usually, I switch to another app for a little while. Case in point: I’m working through my email inbox, and discover that Alex has sent me a Word doc to review. I’ll queue it up by launching Word, then go back to Mail.app to finish clearing – ha! – my inbox.

And I’ll start typing away, maybe using that time to compose a reply to someone instead of staring at Word’s splash screen. Meanwhile, in the background, Word is chugging away, and after a while finally opens the document.

But that’s not all it does. Word seizes focus away from my email window. With no warning, I’m suddenly typing in the open Word document. My train of thought is derailed (and as those who know me can tell you, the casualties when that happens can be appalling); my workflow suddenly hits a logjam; Bad Things Happen.

Or a background utility will suddenly jump to the foreground with a dialog box alerting me to some desperately dire condition – usually one that actually could safely wait a few hours, days or years. This time, those keystrokes vanish into thin air… or trigger the wrong button. (I had that happen with “Restart” a few minutes ago. Reeeeeally not helpful.)

I can respect the need from time to time to get my attention – although most programs drastically overestimate their own importance – but that doesn’t mean an app needs to steal the focus from whatever you’re working on in any but the most urgent cases. (And in those urgent cases, for god’s sake, either don’t feed keystrokes into the dialog box until the user explicitly selects it, or disable keyboard shortcuts.)

Look, Apple, this isn’t the end of the world. But one of the most amazing things about OS X is how seamlessly it works. This spotlight-grabbing behaviour is obnoxious; it’s anything but seamless; and it detracts from what users are trying to do.

Please: make it stop.

Real-time social media search and analysis:

In the ongoing, well, search for a decent social media search tool, Social Mention deserves a good hard look.

Not only do they offer RSS feeds for search terms, and not only can you decide which kinds of media to include, they also offer a real-time widget for displaying results on your site within minutes. Nifty.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

The culprits altered every file ending in “.html”, as well as every file beginning with “index.”, to add a hidden IFRAME element to the page. That, in turn, would quietly load a web page from a third-party site that attempts to install malware onto visiting computers.

Nasty. And not uncommon for WordPress users.

Fortunately, I was able to track down and wipe out the infection in short order. Here’s how:

• I looked at the timestamp on the hacked files. Each had been changed at 5:13 am today.
• A quick trip to my server logs revealed that at 5:13 am, a file called “cache.php” was accessed using POST.
• A peek at the file, a little Googling, and a look at a default WordPress installation, confirmed for me that cache.php a) didn’t belong, and b) was a very likely culprit. Backed up, and then deleted it.
• This left me with the challenge of restoring all of the files that had been hacked (there were more than you might think). I didn’t relish the thought of doing it one by one. Fortunately, Dreamhost has a “Restore” command for domains that can let you roll a site back to a snapshot from a few days or weeks ago.
• Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Fortunately, Dreamhost lets me use SSH to access the server.
• I found a code snippet from this helpful guy on WordPress.org’s support forum that let me run a search-and-replace operation from the command line. I just replaced his search string with mine (the URL his iframe pointed to was different from the one my hackers used), being careful to put a backslash before every forward slash in the URL.
• Then I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools home page, and requested a review of my site, letting them know I’d removed the nasty bits. That should soon mean you can visit this site without having to click past dire warnings of impending doom.

I’ll be checking even more regularly for rogue PHP files like cache.php – especially now that I know what to look for. And I’ve saved that search string for future use; with any luck, it will only be useful for helping others who’ve run into this.

So far, my store is selling Noise to Signal shwag: mugs and greeting cards, mostly. (And by all means, please equip your kitchen cupboard and put my kids through university.) I’ll be aiming to branch out into more – but not, however, into water bottles; CafePress seems to have the franchise on those.

I took CafePress for a spin a year or two ago, but found their content policies too restrictive. I then checked out GoodStorm, a wonderful-looking venture that Andrew Hoppin was involved in; their eventual merger with Zazzle brought me to their doorstep.

Zazzle’s an interesting animal; their user interface is powerful, but I often find the workflow confusing – it can be hard to tell if you’re editing an existing product or creating a new one, and it can take ages for changes or new products to show up in your storefront. Still, their tools are handy, their Flash widgets are undeniably nifty, and they haven’t stopped me from saying anything yet – all pluses for yours truly.

The biggest missing piece for me isn’t technical. I’d like to know a lot more about how these products are made and where they come from. GoodStorm held some real promise about bringing an ethical lens to bear on this field; I don’t know of anyone else who has taken up the torch of socially and environmentally responsible sourcing and manufacturing. (If you do, by all means please mention them in the comments!)

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

This is actually useful for a whole range of purposes: a database of online brand engagement initiatives, a crowd-sourced ranking of corporate brands, and some very interesting visualization and interface work.

Many, many kudos to the folks at Altimeter on a smashing site.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

Tattler (app) is an open source topic monitoring tool for today’s Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on the topics you want. Using semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to a journalist, researcher, advocate or communications professional.

Built and distributed on open source Drupal, Tattler’s allows a user to easily filter, organize and share content gathered from the Web.

Managing News isn’t the only Drupal-based media- (and social-media-) monitoring tool out there. Tattler, from Phase2 Technologies, is also built on the open-source content management platform… and comes from a company that helped to build the new White House web site.

Then again, Managing News comes from Development Seed, which does a lot of work for United Nations agencies… so there’s kind of an embarrassment of riches when it comes to well-regarded, highly-qualified Drupal companies creating online media monitoring tools. I’ll look forward to checking Tattler out.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

(person watching another type on a computer) Whoa! That post is going to get you kicked out of social media!

If you’re a developer who’s made a contribution to the open-source Drupal web content management system, then add this guy’s web site to your portfolio.

The White House has switched to Drupal from its old proprietary CMS, after asking that system’s developer to find a more flexible alternative.

With every commercial alternative in the world to choose from, that company went instead with Drupal, the open-source platform that also powers sites like (ahem) this one.

That will be a powerful argument for IT professionals who are used to sourcing the latest commercial, proprietary product to at least give open-source solutions a closer look. And with folks like Drupal lead developer Dries Buytaert’s company Acquia on the development team, expect WhiteHouse.gov to be one of the tightest Drupal implementations around. (That also raises that hope that innovations on the site will be contributed back to the community.)

Now, if only the economy were as simple as node/add/job.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

For a lot of the disabled, getting through a typical website is beyond challenging. It’s impossible. Amy, for example, prefers to shop for her kids online. It’s easier than getting someone to take her to the store and help her identify the products she needs. On the WalMart site, she is able to find products, but she can’t order; that requires a mouse click. A mouse is an essentially useless tool to a blind person, Amy told me.

(Incidentally, Amy won’t shop at Target at all. The only reason the iconic retailer’s site is compliant with the accessibility standards established by the World Wide Web consortium is that they were ordered to by a federal judge following blog.holtz.com

A persuasive, closely-reasoned and passionate post by Shel Holtz on the continuing failure of many web developers – including those for large retailers – to make their sites accessible to the visually impaired.

I’ve had arguments that have left me banging my head on the table (thankfully, not with clients) over accessibility. Otherwise intelligent people still advance the suggestion that blind people shouldn’t even use the web. Gaaah.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

“What do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach? …We must have equal rights for everyone. It’s what this country was started for.”

It’s an arresting video, posted by EqualityMaine.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

Stopping the Presses …

It is never an easy thing to say goodbye, but the time has come to stop the virtual presses at One Degree.  As of today, October 20, 2009 we will no longer be publishing new content. 

We have been delighted to be a part of your online marketing content consumption for the last few years. To share our thinking behind this move, we’ve prepared the following Frequently Anticipated Questions:

Frequently Anticipated Questions

1. What? WHAT?!  But, why?
 
There are a few key reasons:
 
The Mercenary One:
Publishing and maintaining a site like One Degree is a lot of work. And it doesn’t generate a lot of revenue. If you compare hours invested to revenue recognized, we actually make less than minimum wage.  And while we see One Degree as a labour of love, even love likes to get taken out for a nice dinner and be able to buy something frilly every now and then.

Just a dinner and something frilly? This is one labour of love that deserved to be taken away for a languid week on the beach, replete with chilled drinks and good trashy novels.

I’ll miss OneDegree.ca. Kate was kind enough to invite me to cartoon there, which gave me a nice regular routine of checking out the latest provocative, informative or inspiring post. One Degree has helped to incubate a growing constellation of voices favouring a fresh new conversational approach to marketing, and we owe Kate and Rosemary (and their predecessors) a real debt.

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

“What younger people bring to the table is that they understand social media culture, because it’s actually the culture they live in,” said Alexandra Samuel, who teaches a continuing education course on social media at the University of British Columbia.

Samuel, 38, and her husband Rob Cottingham, 46, are Vancouver-based social media gurus who founded one of the world’s earliest social media companies, Social Signal, in 2005. On Thursday they publicly unveiled the company’s strategies for running a social media company, including techniques for training social media professionals.

A really solid article… all the more so because the writer quotes so many Social Signal clients and staff. :-)

Posted via web from robcottingham’s posterous

Over the course of the day, I'll be cartoon-blogging from the conference. You can catch it at ReadWriteWeb and here at Noise to Signal.

Comments always welcome!

Breakout session misunderstanding