Blog

I have been blogging about digital technology’s impact on culture and our lives since 2007. I post when inspiration strikes as I’m working on various projects.

 

Android and RSS as 50s Sci-Fi

The third release in my "tech joke" cover ebook series is 1950s short sci-fi story, The Stutterer by R.R. Merliss. My goal with the series is to create ebooks with illustrative covers of literature in the public domain. I design the covers using comparable references...

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Steampunk cover for Wired Love

The second book I illustrated and released as an ebook in my "tech joke" series was Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer. First published in 1879, it's about a female telegraph operator who falls in love with a male telegrapher over the wire. Yup, chat room romances...

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Moby Dick as Twitter Fail Whale

Over the next few days, I'll be blogging about the inspiration and decisions behind the 3 ebooks covers I illustrated, assembled into actual ebooks and launched last week. The gimmick here is I choose public domain books available on Project Gutenberg and illustrate a...

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Classic books, new covers

One of the projects I have been working on is creating cover illustration art work for classic novels. My shtick here is to use today's digital culture references in the illustrations. My other shtick is to package them with the classic novels themselves and offer...

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Blog vacation

It's usually at this time of year you can sense that A LOT of people are on vacation. So, in honour of this and the impending doom called "six months of long, cold, dark winter", I will be on a vacation from blogging until my triumphant return in the first week of...

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Adobe Acrobat (constant) Auto-Updater

New comic over at my graphic blog: a good example of not quite the user experience both parties had hoped for. Download, print it and use it for your September calendar :)

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Improv comics for grade 4 class

I had the pleasure of speaking to a grade 4 class on the other side of the country via Skype. My how times have changed! The topic was illustration, comics, cartooning and animation. I told them how lucky they were to be living in the Internet age where anyone can be...

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The Victorian Internet

I created a four-part series over at my graphic blog teaching a little bit about the similarities of the telegraph and today's Internet. It's inspired by the book, The Victorian Internet, and it "takes place" in a fictional version of PodCamp and PAB called, well,...

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Best conference for digital content creators

It is the day after my return from this year's PAB conference in the nation's capital and as expected, it did not disappoint. I've attended PAB every year since 2007 and always return even more energized to create content. I keep returning because the community is...

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Extending the traditional reading experience online

I just heard about Pottermore, a new website coming soon by J.K. Rowling which I can pretty much see as becoming a great case study in bringing reading to the digital world. That is, aside from just offering an ebook riddled with DRM. I was a Harry Potter fanatic back...

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Yeah, I don’t like Skype’s new UI either

I recently relaunched my webcomic Superspud.com as a graphic blog (read: graphic journalism). My latest post reflects my frustration and utter bewilderment of the new UI for Skype 5.1 for Mac. In a nutshell, it's unintuitive. I think the comic explains exactly how I...

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Changing the game at MESH11

Four years after my first attendance, I was finally able to get to Mesh, Canada's two-day web conference. And I had a great time. I met some great new people, caught up with old friends and learned many, many new things. The keynotes were awesome and really...

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Angry Birds

No, not those angry birds. For the past four days, a robin has been repeatedly flying into my window. It would return back to a nearby tree and try again. Over and over. For hours. I've seen birds do something like this a few times years ago but never to my house. So...

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Social media in speech therapy

Social media provides excellent benefits in everything. Period. On the latest episode of my podcast, Stuttering is Cool, I interview four speech therapists who incorporate social media tools in their practice. My summary follows. I first speak with fellow Canadian,...

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Using mobile apps to extend a documentary

Last month, I blogged about the Longform storytelling in a short attention span world panel discussion. One item which still has me pondering today came from PBS documentary maker, Raney Aronson-Rath, who mentioned the future of documentaries is in extending them in...

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Comics and journalism

I jumped at the chance to see Joe Sacco speak at the Innis Town Hall last night. He was in town to talk about his journalism in comic book form. I'm trying not to use the term 'graphic novel' because he doesn't like the term. And I agree. There is no difference...

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Long form storytelling in a short attention span world

Are we really living in a short attention span world? I'm convinced it's really only a matter of context. I think this idea of shorter attention spans only relates to digital media. People still read long books which seem to be getting longer, we sit in movie theatres...

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One thing in common among social media tools

Let's look at the big picture by taking a step back and see that Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, Posterous, Vimeo, Foursquare, Instagram, Gowalla, GetGlue, MySpace, Buzz, DeviantART, Google Reader, Digg, Forrst, Livestream, dribbble, Reddit, Badoo,...

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