Heading outside this Labor Day weekend? (Or, as we spell it in Canada, “Labour Dauy”?)

Well, enjoy – provided you aren’t being hit by New Zealand earthquakes (hi, Richard!), Eastern Seaboard hurricanes, Russian forest fires, or the global outbreak of Duke Nukem fever.

Of course, in most of the world – including ReadWriteWeb’s headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand – it isn’t labor day at all. But please don’t let that stop you. Break out the barbecue, put a few burgers (beef, tofu or unicorn, depending on your tastes) on the grill, have some friends over, and relax.

And if you happen to sneak a peek at the Twitter app on your smartphone, or slip inside to check up on your newsfeeds, or check in somewhere on FourSquare or Gowalla, so much the better. Maybe this has been the season of the digital fast… but for a lot of us, it’s also a time to connect with friends and family. Consider this permission to do that however you want this weekend: over blogs or beers; HootSuite or horseshoes; Facebook or Frisbees.

(Also posted on BlogWorld)

And it’s another lawsuit cartoon. What can I tell you? Suing people may be expensive and often wasteful… but it’s a comic gold mine.

By the way, that last lawsuit cartoon made it to the front page of Digg and to the pages of The Register. I say this not to brag – okay, not only to brag – but also to… to… aw, hell, I can’t think of a decent pretext. Let’s just leave it at this: I’m delighted, and thank you all for the support!

If you own a big tech firm, aren’t Microsoft, and weren’t named in the patent lawsuit filed this week by Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing, well… you’re probably looking deep into your soul today and asking where it all went wrong.

If you aren’t a defendant – a category that includes AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo! – why not? After all, the technology in dispute is, according to Interval, “fundamental to the ways that leading e-commerce and search companies operate today.” Dammit, you say to yourself. Maybe you aren’t one of those leading e-commerce and search companies.

Wait: most of your work is with open-source software. Like Java! Maybe that’s why you aren’t being sued by anyone.

Aw, dammit.

Ah, well. Maybe it’s for the best. Not everyone can be on the A-list or in land of corporate jets, gargantuan mergers and stratospheric lawsuits. Hell, if it weren’t for those of us on the B-list (or, in my case, somewhere way down in the YYs), there wouldn’t be an A-list.

So chin up. With a little more work, a few game-changing innovations and – yes – a bit of luck, someday you, too, could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit big enough to alter global currency markets. Good luck with that!

Here’s a cartoon drawn on Translink’s #4 Powell bus. I challenged myself to see what I could get done between the south end of the Granville Bridge and Dunsmuir; the answer is, more than I thought. (And that’s with the unblinking stare of my seatmate, who was watching me work on my iPad with something that may have been interest, derision or clinical detachment. It’s hard to tell with hipsters.)

With such a narrow finish, I couldn’t just leave the other caption in the closet, never to see the light of day again. (Especially if it might be useful for someone’s blog post or PowerPoint presentation.) So here’s the alternate version; it also happens to be the one I was thinking of when I first drew the cartoon.

Torn between two captions,
feeling like a fool…

The people of the Internet have spoken, and by the absolute narrowest of margins – 43 votes to 42 – you’ve chosen this caption for the cartoon. (Should this caption be unable for any reason to fulfill its duties, the other caption will serve in its place.)

This cartoon ran on ReadWriteWeb on the weekend, where I wrote this:

There seem to be two poles of opinion in the SEO world around content. At one pole, you optimize everything you do within an inch of its life: writing headlines and structuring copy to engage search engine algorithms rather than human imaginations. You frame your content and choose your topics with a view to linkbait instead of what really charges your passions, and you track metrics and prune away less productive activity ruthlessly.

On the other pole, you may be no less attuned to metrics than your counterparts at the other end of the spectrum, but you direct your focus to creating great, engaging content and building a community around it. Here, you’re counting less on talking directly to search engines and more on creating the kind of traffic and organic linking activity that will drive up your rankings.

And then, of course, there are points in between where you do some of each. But there’s no question that there’s a tension between writing for search engines and creating a distinctive, authentic voice of your own.

Now, I can find advice anywhere along that spectrum with no difficulty. (It’s no surprise that people who do SEO for a living don’t find it hard to make their content visible.) And I can find vocal, often heated arguments and very strong opinions.

What I can’t find is hard data on which approach works better, and where the sweet spot lies. I imagine apples-to-apples comparisons would be hard to do, but that information would be pretty valuable. I have my preferences – I like a Web of communities and genuine voices, and I’d find pushing the ruthless-linkbait-and-keyword approach soul-destroying – and my instincts about what I’d like to believe works better, but that’s just me.

Anyone out there find anything tangible?

I originally posted this on the BlogWorld Expo blog. And while that’s usually something I italicize at the top of the post, today – my first day back from holidays, hurrah! – I’m going to encourage you to give them a look-see.

Not only is it a great-looking conference (for which I am their official cartoon-blogger – and if I had a “.full-disclosure” CSS class, I’d be tagging that phrase), but the blog has some great advice on blogging including case studies, primers and discussions of the issues, challenges and rewards faced by bloggers.

(I originally posted this on ReadWriteWeb.)

No big writeup this weekend, folks, as I’m on holiday in France, a country probably best-known as the one-time home of Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur. And maybe as the setting for some of “Julie and Julia.”

But the news that PayPal will now allow you to transfer money to someone just by bumping your iPhone or Android device with theirs – that’s pretty cool.

Makes you wonder what else you could swap. Maybe DNA?

(I originally posted this on ReadWriteWeb.)

I’d like to think that becoming a Foursquare mayor means something. And something more than just the achievement itself (which is, let’s face it, a grade based 100% on attendance).

Let’s give the Foursquare mayors real power. Not mamby-pampby discounts or free bellinis, but something meaty, like – I don’t know – say, search and seizure. Or union certification.

(By the way, I drew this at a branch of my local coffee chain, Blenz. And unlike some coffee chains that think a $1 discount on the cost of a Frappuccino is worthy compensation for their mayors, Blenz has the decency to award a $15 gift card to one mayor every week. Which is only fair: If you’re going to have mayors, you’d better pony up respectable bribes.)

So what powers would you grant to the office of Foursquare mayor? Pulling their own espresso shots? Free hits of nitrous at any participating dentist’s office?

(From my original post on ReadWriteWeb, where you’ll see a fun comment thread)

OSCON has wrapped in sunny Portland, and with it the most ambitious conference wireless networking I’ve ever seen. Yet even here I heard attendees complaining about sluggish Wi-Fi… and organizers asking them not to download large files.

Now, there’s little question that OSCON is an edge case. Get a few thousand developers and software engineers together and you’re going to strain the bandwidth.

But every conference I’ve been to – every single one in the last four or five years – has had issues with Wi-Fi. And for that matter, nearly every hotel I’ve stayed at has also had issues with Wi-Fi. And I sometimes wonder if the issue is often less one of conference overload than one of facilities that invest as little as they need to to be able to say they offer Wi-Fi.

Then again, every conference and hotel I’ve been to has had at least one person who insists on downloading an OS upgrade or a movie to watch on the plane home. That would be, um, me.

The question is, when does conference Wi-Fi stop being about just checking email and maybe sharing some notes, and start being about allowing people to continue doing the heavy wireless lifting they do at home and at the office? Ever?