Laugh Tracks

"What's with the new bar at the bottom of my browser window?"

GoComics.com launches an enhanced sharing experience today, thanks to a partnership between Meebo and Universal Uclick, the world’s largest independent syndication company.

GoComics.com will now feature the Meebo Bar located at the bottom of users’ browser windows. The bar offers one-click and drag-and-drop sharing through individual buttons that connect to the user’s email, Facebook and Twitter accounts, among others.

Meebo, which reaches more than 180 million people each month according to Quantcast, and has been a popular addition to more than 8,000 sites such as TMZ.com and TVGuide.com, among others.

“The GoComics community revolves around the idea of comics as a shared experience,” said Lee Salem, president and editor of Universal Uclick. “Our site is designed to allow fans to share the experience of reading comics and other content with their friends and fellow users. We expect Meebo, which will be available on every page at GoComics.com, to be a big hit with existing GoComics users and new users alike.”

“Comic strips are classic entertainment at its best and the perfect type of content that you'd want to share with your social circle online,” added Stephanie Quay, Meebo Director of Business Development. “This makes GoComics a terrific fit for Meebo, and we’re glad to have them as a new partner.”

Meebo provides the easiest, most open and most “right there where you want it” way to share on the web. Integrating all social networks and communications channels into a single, simple-to-use solution, Meebo enables users to easily share content and communicate in real time with the people who matter to them, and connects people to their friends through the Meebo Bar. The privately held company was founded in 2005.

Got a question for Garry Trudeau? Submit it at AskDoonesbury.com!

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau is rarely available for interviews. But he might just take a question directly from you.

Go to AskDoonesbury.com and submit your question today. Trudeau will select and answer 15 questions from fans as part of Doonesbury's 40th anniversary celebration.

The anniversary festivities, which begin in October, will include lots of fun stuff on GoComics and will be capped off with the 10/26 release of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, a massive tome that looks back on four decades of Mike, Boopsie, B.D., Duke, Zonker and the rest of the Doonesbury cast.

Add GoComics to your iGoogle page!

Today marks the launch of the new GoComics gadget for iGoogle! (Read the official press release here.)

We are truly excited here at Uclick to offer this new gadget, which was many months in the making. It gives iGoogle users direct access to today's comics (with expandable views), plus comments, tags, and recently favorited comics. In other words, you get a lot of the fun, interactive features - the experience, if you will - of GoComics.com, right on your iGoogle page.

Get the GoComics gadget for your iGoogle page now!

Animated Political Cartoons at MarkFiore.com!

Check out political cartoonist Mark Fiore's new and improved website, MarkFiore.com. You'll find his latest weekly animated cartoon, an archive of his previous creations, news links, a store section where you can buy Fiore videos and prints, and more.

Behind the Scenes: For Better or For Worse

Lynn Johnston has added a fascinating new Research and Development section to the official For Better or For Worse website. It's filled with commentary, photos and rough sketches of the real people and places that have inspired so many of the strip's most beloved characters, settings and storylines. If you've always wanted to see what goes into a great FBOFW story, click the link above and check it out!

Baldo Revealed: Part 2

As promised, here's the follow-up video from Baldo co-creator Carlos Castellanos, demonstrating the inking and coloring of a Baldo sketch. Just click the play button below!

Now on YouTube: Baldo Revealed!

Witness the creation of a Baldo sketch in a new video Baldo co-creator Carlos Castellanos has posted on YouTube. You can also check it out by clicking the play button below.

Castellanos plans to follow-up with a second video, in which he inks the sketch, and a third, in which he colors it.

Now Showing on Doonesbury.com and YouTube: Duke's Video Dump!

Take a nostalgic look back at the failed presidential campaign of Doonesbury's Uncle Duke with the Duke2000 campaign videos, now available for viewing on Doonesbury.com and YouTube. The computer-animated Duke announces his candidacy on Larry King Live, holds impromptu press conferences outside his motel room door, and offers up some of the best quotes of the 2000 campaign season, including the instant classic "I want to be the ferret in the pants of government."

Duke2000 videos are added weekly to the Duke's Video Dump section on Doonesbury.com. You can also view them on YouTube by entering the search term "Uncle Duke."

OSCON final day

The last day of OSCON is here and it's soon time to pack up and head home.  There were only a couple of sessions slots to attend today and the most interesting one was put on by a couple of guys from Six Apart, better known as the LiveJournal guys.  They have a set of tools (memcached, MogileFS and PerlBal) which are becoming standard tools for people running large concurrency web sites.  We've been using memcached for a little while now in a few places and I can see we will need to probably use MogileFS and PerlBal in order to take gocomics and some of our other websites where we want to go.  It amazing to sit in a room and have people from Google, Yahoo, Shopzilla and other large websites be listening in on the same talk you are. I guess I automatically assume that these sites have it all together and have solutions for these things and it's nice to see that they are hacking along just like the rest of us.

To wrap up the conference they had a talk by Eben Moglen on the state of Free Software and what's upcoming.  I share a thought path similar to his that the mobile space is going to be the next big battle ground.  Wireless for computers is starting to become an assumed ability and cell phones are starting to access not only the microcosm that is their carriers space, but the larger part of the open internet on a regular basis.  Right now what runs on that thing in your pocket is heavily determined by your carrier or manufacturer, how long is it going to stay that way?  He pointed out that for better or for worse it seems we are transitioning from a society where you have a block of real estate that houses your devices to a time where the digital devices are becoming what we consider the home and the interchangeable part is the location to put them in. I bet there's an extremely large number of people out there who's email address is more permanent then their physical mailing address.  There is another shift coming and while I don't have a good handle on what it is, you see it starting to form and it will shake things up in the near future.

So it's the end of a week and my brain cramped from all the thing that were put into it, next week, John and I will be back in the office trying to put to words all of the wisdom imparted upon us here.  I've met some brilliant people and found faces for those that were legends within our circles.  There were more than a few new tricks learned and a couple pieces to show us that what we thought were old dogs still have more life in them than expected.  All in all an awesome experience and I'm glad I came. While Portland is a beautiful city and I would recommend to anyone to come and visit, I can't wait to get home and see the family after being away for a week.

ScottK

OSCON day four

The last full day of OSCON was today and tomorrow everything wraps up around noon and the geeks go back to their daily lives. While there's been a multitude of things learned this trip I'm ready to get back home and see the family.

Today I caught a few database discussions, one of which was presented by the creator of SQLite (Richard Hipp) while some of the big guys from Postgres and MySQL sat in the audience. The presentation was outstanding and to see representative of the two major OpenSource database engines in the same room casually talking about what they can or can't do and not trying to one up each other shows how great the community is.

There was a presentation by Ben Trott, the creator of Movable Type, on Data::ObjectDriver which may be something we need to look at in preference to Class::DBI. I think every presentation by the Six Apart staff talked about how they and the things they do both rock and suck. To me this is a great aspect to point out and one that few people are willing to confront. Every application, site, and idea in general out there has things they can do better and things that they are doing well. In the ever evolving internet realm the main idea is to keep doing well at your main focus and then to also work little by little at decreasing the amount of suckage that you have. It's impossible to cover the entire field but you need to learn how to adjust your defense depending on what comes to the plate and look to what you can do to minimize the inevitable errors that do happen, at times the adjustments help and other times they hurt and in either case you need to learn, keep your chin up and keep playing the game.

I managed to catch a talk on OpenLaszlo and speak to the guys in the booth more today. I was wrong about what their stuff actually does, but in a good way. It seems you write your code in OpenLaszlo's language (LZX) and then their compiler allows to you compile the application down to a Flash 6 piece or if you prefer an AJAX widget you can put in your page depending upon what you want to do. They hinted that there will be an announcement in the near future regarding a move to put their foot into the mobile space. When you take a look at the amazing things that are being done in Gmail, Yahoo Mail beta and even the mapping mash ups out there it's obvious interactivity is being taken to a whole new level on the web and those that don't step up are going to have some trouble getting caught up in the future. Personally I like the old hooves on cobble stones sound and while Flash and Ajax may not be the final model that sparks the switch over to automobiles it is going to happen, and more likely sooner than later.

While John and I were out and about looking for dinner I did snag a few pictures of Portland bridges and managed to eat a whole meal with chopsticks without making a complete fool of myself. I'm not someone who's traveled around the country much (or out of it at all), but of the places I have been I would say it is one of the best cities I managed to visit.

ScottK