Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

This is for every would-be Internet mogul who has yet to type </head> on their big project, but has already written the speech they’ll give when they ring the opening bell at the NYSE.

(I say this as someone who had very specific plans for putting the kids through university on the proceeds of our Second Life venture. Sigh.)

Not that there’s something wrong with dreaming of making it big when you read about the Facebook IPO or the Gurflr acquisition or whatever’s chewing up the trending topics in Silicon Valley this week. There’s a lot of pleasure in picturing yourself in the shoes of the latest tech gazillionaire.

But not nearly as much pleasure in walking in them. At least, not while they were treading the winding, rocky path you have to follow to get there: all that planning, building, reversing out of actual dead ends, plowing through the illusory ones, avoiding impending disaster, living through disasters that stop impending and start happening, nurturing a community of users, finding capital, running out of capital, getting hacked, making the wrong hire, losing the right hire to a better offer, finally gaining some traction and then promptly getting slapped with a patent suit, trying to decide when to hold back and when to scale…

…and knowing that for every Mark Zuckerberg, there are countless others who worked just as hard, were maybe just as smart, but who made just one wrong call, or had the dice come up snake-eyes at exactly the wrong time, or one month before coming out of stealth mode saw someone else launch with the same product.

It isn’t all or nothing, of course. It’s not like you either create Facebook or dress in a barrel for the rest of your life. Even when your web app dies a silent, unmourned death, you’ve learned something along the way, you’ve probably built relationships (and hopefully didn’t burn any), and if you have the appetite to set off on that path again, that’s capital you’ll be able to draw on.

Maybe more important is how you look at success. There’s room for a very few Facebooks in the world, and if that’s your definition of success, you’re almost certainly doomed to disappointment.

But if you see success in creating something brilliant or useful or entertaining that reaches – not multitudes – but enough people to make a real difference in the world, then you’ll see a lot more opportunity out there. And at least for me, letting go of creating everybody’s favourite thing creates the room to create nine people’s favourite thing.

Which, who knows? might well open up the creativity and experimentation it’ll take to create the Next Big Thing.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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It happened to a friend not long ago: she showed up at the event where she had been hired to speak and met the organizer – who was wearing that patented sheepish grin that says “Now, don’t be mad, and above all please let me leave this room alive.” It turned out that my friend’s cheque wasn’t ready, that there were still a few hoops for it to jump through, but honest, it’ll be there soon! Five, six weeks, tops. Three months at the outside.

I’ve been lucky so far: I’ve been treated very well whenever I’ve spoken. Others haven’t been so lucky – and it isn’t always some last-minute hitch with money.

Sometimes it’s the empty room that you were told would be packed with cheering throngs. (“I don’t understand it – we posted about your speech on Craigslist. Once. Two months ago.”) Or an LCD projector that requires a dongle made in North Korean during the 1990s to Kim Jong-Il’s personal specifications. (“There must be even more pins!“) Or a little switch-up: “I know we asked you to talk about The Vision to Win, buuuuut… the last three speakers all spoke on that. So would you mind talking about advances in power density for molten salt batteries in electric vehicles instead?”

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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And Oops Files number three.

I’ve never quite understood why some people insist on considering the consequences of their actions. It totally spoils the surprise.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Number two in our oops files: forgetting to send the attachment. The only thing worse is when you then send a nagging note saying why haven’t you read that document I sent you?

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Having screwed up in a minor but still awkward way in an email exchange with a friend earlier today, I sent them a little self-deprecating image that I hoped

a) they would find funny, and
b) would prevent them from hating me, and prevent me from dying alone and unloved. (Huh. Apparently Zemanta is now mining my subconscious.)

Then, after making a realistic appraisal of my chances of ever having a gaffe again, and Skitch still being open, I made a few more – just in case.

And I now give them to you, because I don’t want you to die alone and unloved, either. (Updated: I’ve moved them into separate posts for the sake of, well, for the children.)

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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You may have noticed that Pinterest has taken on new prominence here at Noise to Signal Global Headquarters in the past few weeks. There’s a good functional reason for that, as a quick look at the number of people who’ve been pinning my more recent cartoons can show you.

And there’s also a certain giddiness I feel when I see visual communication moving so firmly to the fore. I think – hope – we’re on the verge of a new age of visualization, where more and more of us are able to use everything from doodles to sophisticated rendering to explain, argue, persuade, imagine and entertain.

Sure, it’s being preceded by a wave of flotsam – not the least of which is the flood of mediocre-to-awful infographics that turn out to be neither. (I actually saw one today that has no graphics. It’s a table, filled with words. But it’s in bright text on a dark background, and there are many blocks of color, so it must be an infographic – and therefore a PNG file. It’s hard to imagine a more gratuitous screw-you to the visually impaired… not to mention to search engines everywhere.)

But I have every hope we’re soon going to see a new wave – tools large and small, shared expertise and an explosion of ideas and applications for images. Pinterest is just the pin-pointy tip of a very visual iceberg.

And here’s my particular chunk of ice and snow.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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If you’ve been hauled into your boss’s office and handed a business magazine with some new social network splashed across the front page – “Flegmar: The hottest thing since GorbMeSilly!” – and told, “We need a Flegmar strategy right now!”…

…then this cartoon’s for you.

And so is this blog post about life at Weneda Communications.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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One more session from NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference – this one featuring the EFF’s Rainey Reitman, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and NTEN’s Holly Ross.

This one works a lot better as a bigger graphic. So if you’d like, here it is.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Oh, sure, NTEN does a great job of recognizing technological innovation, community-building and superlative achievement (huge props to Farra Trompeter, this year’s NTEN Award honoree).

Yet there are so many more kinds of genuine excellence we could be celebrating, and these cartoons represent my modest suggestions for a few new categories.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb

The outrage a few weeks ago over the Etch A Sketch scandal (what to call it? “Shake-and-gate”?) was bad news for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. But it was good news for one of my favorite toys of all time: Etch A Sketch is apparently having a big resurgence.

Which brings back some pretty fond memories. A lot of kids like me spent hours, hours leaning over their Etch A Sketches, twisting knobs with painstaking care, slowly creating images that would then vanish with a quick invert-and-shake. It was a lesson in impermanence and the virtue of nonattachment… and, at a less spiritual level, the ability to move your hands in one location to draw in another.

Noise to Signal - a cartoon by Rob Cottingham

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