It’s not often that inside lunch I receive social networking advice.

The first thing I thought of was the Tablet PC when I saw Sketchcast as a delicious popular post in my RSS reader this morning. With Sketchcast you can share drawings with or without voice all through a pen-friendly Flash interface in the browser (Firefox or IE). I made a mockup of Hmmcast #174 entirely using Sketchcast. Unfortunately it’s not available in HD or as a download so I don’t think this will be the ‘official’ Hmmcast #174, which is one disappointing aspect of Sketchcast. Accordingly, not releasing this at the 4:20 publish time.

Here’s what my very first effort — complete with a few errors — looks like (if you can’t see the object embed in your reader, clickthru on this post to view from the website):

The Sketchcast fine print
Also, it’s only for personal use licensing unless written permission from Sketchcast is obtained per the Sketchcast Terms of Service:

(v) You agree not to use the Website for any commercial use, without the prior written authorization of Sketchcast;

Delving deeper into the Sketchcast TOS we learn what rights you give up with anything produced using Sketchcast:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to Sketchcast, you hereby grant Sketchcast a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, and display the User Submissions in connection with the Website and any of Sketchcast’s, and its successors, assigns and affiliates, business and operations, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

So basically, Sketchcast can take your work, no matter how long you’ve worked on it, and use it to promote Sketchcast without any additional permission needed from you, the publisher. This isn’t too unusual in the video world these days (publishers, check your favorite video site for similar language). The licensing goes further though, allowing anybody to remix and mash anything you publish through Sketchcast:

You also hereby grant each user of the Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms and Conditions. The above licenses granted by you in User Submissions are perpetual and irrevocable.

Not terribly useful for groups desiring privacy
It’s too bad Sketchcast couldn’t allow publishers to choose the licensing of their choice. I’m curious if more fun type sketches and less serious ones will fill the site? Looking around at what’s there so far, it’s a mixed bag. In general, I like it, and it could be useful for quickly sharing ideas — just not very private ideas, unfortunately — with others. If they add a private groups feature, it would be handy for sharing sketches with project ideas that groups aren’t ready to share with the whole world. Then again, I think there are a few whiteboard apps out there for other programs.

Haven’t written about my Tablet PC experiences as much in the third year of ownership and recently passed the 1,000 day mark as being a Table PC owner. However, it was nice this morning to see an online application where the Tablet PC shines — in Firefox too, another rarity of sorts.

Remember the moblogging site Textamerica.com (TA)? In 2003/2004 when this blog was getting off the ground, TA was a site with some promise and hype. And then Flickr rose in prominence and pretty much killed them in the moblogging popularity space, and yet they still limp along.

When I used a camera phone I sent pics to my picture blog at tdavid.textamerica.com. A Hmm search says I linked to them in 18 past posts. Those links now are all redirecting to the main textamerica.com site. Did I ever get any email from them saying they closed my account? Not that I know of, but a look at their terms of service indicates (emphasis mine):

Textamerica.com reserves the right to cancel any person’s registration and to remove any materials related to such member without notice or cause.

I hadn’t sent any pictures to them in a long time, so perhaps inactivity might have been what prompted them to axe my account? Or maybe it was posts like this one: Textamerica hardware upgrade has some members wondering: where did our pictures go?

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter because Textamerica is going to be for commercial account only (unless you are one of the few with a lifetime personal account):

As of November 1, 2007, Textamerica is transitioning into being a Commercial Only Service Provider and will no longer support individual users with personal account moblogs unless they hold a Lifetime Membership. All non-commercial account holders who do not hold a Lifetime Membership have until November 30, 2007 to archive and remove existing images and/or videos.

This Textamerica rise and fall for personal moblogging reminds me of why I’m reluctant to spend a significant time at third party sites. Even if the sites are mega cool (which, in retrospect, Textamerica never really was) and getting a ton of hype, I’ve seen so many Textamericas come and go that it makes it harder for me to get too involved elsewhere. This cynicism might have a lot to do with why I haven’t been an avid visitor of Flickr, Facebook, MySpace and so on. I have boarded the Second Life ship (which on some days seems like the Titanic), but that’s more because I’m fascinated in where the virtual world space is headed in the future, not only or even primarily Second Life. I’m part of a group blog at VTOReality.com that actively follows this space. So far the successes seem to be more about gaming than business, but there are some notable exceptions.

I digress. Let’s get back to linkrot like Textamerica.

How to deal with linkrot on your blog
Now that Hmm has 18 posts containing links to pages that Textamerica is redirecting to its homepage, how should I deal with these posts/links? Here’s what I am doing, but am open to additional suggestions/advice/feedback:

1. removing all hyperlinks to textamerica.com except the one in this post
2. where the post doesn’t make sense without the linked page/image, I’m adding an update text with a link to this post in brackets [like this]. These days I try to make very few posts that rely on content linked from a third party site, so even if the site goes down or changes like Textamerica has, the post will still make sense. Linkrot sucks.

I was tempted to delete some of these old posts, particularly the shorter ones with little other content, but that would be breaking my own links. How do you handle linkrot in your blog archives? Do you fix the broken links or just leave them broken? Every blog out there that links out to third party sites is subject to linkrot in varying degrees. The question is how to deal with it as your blog grows? My current strategy is when this comes up deal with it. I probably should have a more structured linkrot maintenance plan. Do you?

Update 9:47am PST: Updated all 18 archived posts with links to Textamerica and my now defunct moblog there. Along the way, I found broken links to other places in the same posts and removed those as well.

This morning TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington uses the word ‘dead’ in two titles (dead fetish day, Mike?), one of them pondering: Didn’t someone tell Feedster they were dead? My first thought looking over the next iteration of Feedster was the design is amateurish. I’m not some design pro or anything, but even I know not to use something that looks like it was rolled off a conveyor belt.

And this is coming from someone who has a soft spot for Feedster. They ranked this blog #7 in 2005 and you’d think I’d be biased toward them — and I am, somewhat — but the design reminded me of a FrontPage theme circa 2000. Either that or some sort of celebration page (party on the patio at 4pm?!)

Ick.

On the Feedster blog they explain:

To start with the obvious, the site looks completely different. When comparing the old with the new, it’s quite apparent that we decided to keep only the name from the old design. Everything else we set aside, in favor of our newer, shinier self.

I’m glad to see Feedster isn’t dead, but the design doesn’t do it for me at all. What about you? Also, I don’t like how their blog is pointing to a form page to leave feedback. Is there something wrong with comments on the blog? Wait, I get it. No time to moderate comments or allow trackbacks on a blog search engine?

(rolls eyes)

Maybe Arrington is right and the dead is walking among us. It’s in beta, so maybe they’ll kill the shiny look in favor of something less polished.

This intriguing Flags by Colours breakdown of country flags by colors has some countries looking like different colored Pac-Man. To toggle on and off the actual flag, just click on the pac, er, pie chart. The list is sorted alphabetically so looking at the screenshot above it should be easy to pick out the United States.

If Tunisia were yellow, it would be Pac-Man. Nieu without the other colors could also be a good pill chomper. Bhutan is multi-colored. Bahrain and Georgia look like Pac-man was just chomped.

Sure I’m biased, it’s Memorial Day — and it doesn’t have much Pac power comparatively — but I prefer American flag the best. The United Kingdom flag looks cool too. Which flag design do you like best?

After seeing this I’m ready to swallow every icon on my desktop. Iconicide!

Look, I’ll sign up for just about anything but every once in awhile I see a good company — which I think the design company behind the following site is a good company — being suckered into the latest, greatest trend for the sake of, well, being trendy.

You know where I’m going: social networking. We have it for videos, for students (Facebook) for Geocities/Tripod (Myspace), music, etc. Now we have it for icons.

Umm, not quite.

My friend Lestat showed me that Icon Buffet has gone — or is trying to go — social. They have completely redesigned the site, added a token and stamp function for sending and trading icon sets with your friends online. They are also upselling “VIP” access for $6/month or $42 a year.

I’ve been signed up for Icon Buffet for awhile and it’s been a decent service, although I don’t recall ever using any of the icons in any project. I do appreciate and like some of the icons I’ve been sent. Someday I could see maybe using a few here and there. I was happy with the former system which emailed you free sets once a month.

Originally I turned Lestat onto the site when he asked me one day a (legit) place where he might acquire some icons. There are a bunch of icon sites out there that use trademarked images and their legality is questionable at best, Icon Buffet seems to be one of the good guys operating above board. I like to link to sites like these and share these type sites with friends.

The way Icon Buffet works is they email you notification of free icon sets once a month that you can download. This way you can pick up some different free sets of icons that you might use in a project someday. For a non-designer type like me, this is a worthwhile service. These icons can be used in your projects with the following licensing:

You may use the Product in your personal, commercial, and client projects, including advertising, web designs, software applications, on-line or multimedia projects, presentations, film, video, and computer games.

Icons only for personal use aren’t much use to a webmaster so it’s nice to see flexible licensing.

The catch here is most of the free icons — at least from myself and my friend Lestat’s perspective — aren’t really that fantastic. They aren’t bad, mind you, and certainly better than anything I could create without a lot more training, but the design technique is very similar across all icons and because it’s a free for all you’ll see these icons used on other sites. Maybe even other sites in your same niche. It could make it look as if you were copying the other site’s icons even though you both were using a free icon set. The really good usable icons are the ones that cost $$ and have much more limited use. I’m not saying all their free icons suck but when you factor in the saturation factor, well, they aren’t very real world usable.

It would be better, although more costly, to pay a professional designer for some custom icons or if you have the skill create them yourself. Aha, now you get what the real Icon Buffet pitch is here. The free icons are merely a loss leader.

That’s understandable and not a bad business plan.

Blogging about icons, come on
Now enter a site where adding blogs for the registered users makes little sense. Ok, maybe if I want to make one blog entry that says: everything in life I have to say about icons can be said in the following blog post (the one you are reading now) and link.

What else am I going to blog about? How much the free set I received for the month rocks but will be used by a bunch of other blogs? How I just sent a webmaster buddy a few mostly unusable sets of icons? Vent about how he tried to send me icons but I didn’t have enough “tokens” to accept them this month? If the icons sets are free then why is there a token charge to trade them?

Wait, I do see one use for the blog. A blog at Icon Buffet would be useful if I was a competing designer who sold icons. Come on over and buy my icons when you get tired of this design! Icon Buffet just opened the door to their competition to come in and blog on their turf. Oops.

As for the whole bug my invite my friends spiel (emphasis mine):

There’s another important way in which you can earn a whole lotta points, and that’s by inviting your friends to come join in the pandemonium. Hit the “Invite friends” link on your profile and send somebody a note about the fun you’re having trading Taipei Monkey and Manhattan Metroplex.

Join the pandemonium trading icons? LOL! Man, they can’t be serious. Just so it’s clear with Hmm readers, there are no invite or referral code links in this post for Icon Buffet.

The slogan: Welcome to the ice cream social
Icon Buffet has been the type of site that has existed for one purpose: a place to search and acquire free or pay icons. Call me an anti-social icon shopper if you like, but I don’t want to stop by and search for icons and have people asking me to visit their Icon Buffet blog or make them my Icon Buffet friend. The problem with most (all?) these social sites is they are bleeding our attention and time. We only have so much of ourselves to spread around and I don’t see a MySpace of icons being a good place to spend time.

While the site is very nicely redesigned none of what they’ve added makes me any more likely to buy icon sets nor do I see a point in dropping 42 bones a year to be a VIP member and get a surprise once a month and some more of those 31 flavors tokens. I had already invited my friend to this site before any of this social crap. I see them trying, the wheels spinning, but they aren’t going anywhere.

And what do icons have to do with ice cream? Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s like hanging around the ice cream parlor. Old school, but it’s 2007, not 1957. Johnny’s ice cream just melted.

Solutions?
Now if these tokens could be amassed and used to buy the good, unsaturated icon sets that could be worthwhile, but it doesn’t appear — at least neither Lestat or I saw — that the tokens have any value beyond charging your friends (in non-value tokens) to send them free icon sets they don’t have. It’s not like we’re trading baseball cards or comic books, free icon sets are not that valuable.

I could understand if you could create your own icons with flexible licensing and share into the Icon Buffet pool, but it doesn’t appear that we can. It’s a one way gig where Firewheel Design (the company behind Icon Buffet) is the only one who gets to share their creations but nobody else can. That’s some kind of warped social networking.

Now if they change that then they might possibly have a worthwhile community building site. Instead all I can do here now is beg my friends to join so I can earn points to earn tokens which have no value, or become a VIP member where I get more tokens with no value.

This is not social networking, it’s social networthless.

Update 8:51pm PST: Wow, a number of strange and mostly humorous things happened this morning after making this post. You can catch the gist of it by visiting the comments below, but let me see if I can summarize the sequence of events:

1. Post published above here.
2. One of the lead “Chef’s” Josh Williams (comment #4 below) stopped by to say he was sorry I didn’t like the site and that they were “… growing at a faster clip than ever before since the launch, and I think we’re willing to call the experiment a massive success.”
3. I posted a new blog post at Icon Buffet under the “my blog” section pointing to here. There was no hyperlink just the text. You can read the post and all the replies here. I’ve made a copy on the outside chance it will be taken down and will post it over here instead if that happens.
4. comments started to appear over at Icon Buffet and here from the VIPs at their site as well as Hmm readers. VIPs are people who paid the $6/month. You can judge how those comments fared yourself, but from my perspective, my opinions clearly weren’t shared by the VIPs.
5. I replied questioning why only VIPs were responding. I mean, after all if it’s such a massive success where are all the non-VIPs … or are they all VIPs?
6. More comments flood in. Icon Buffet closes comments on the thread so I can’t respond to more people that responded to me.
7. More VIPs keep adding comments to the thread but I still cannot reply. Neither can my friend Lestat who I mentioned in the piece above. Confirmation that comments could no longer be left.
8. I point out here that comments have been closed on a blog thread created by me under the heading of “my” blog at IconBuffet (comment #8 below). See the screenshot of the green message.

9. More angry VIP Icon nerds appear angry that how dare I question the value of a service they are paying for both here and yes, even on the comments at Icon Buffet where I still couldn’t respond. Social networking … how?
10. I begin receiving email notifications from other Icon Buffet members trying to send me free icon sets — only I don’t have enough tokens to accept them. Still can’t respond to comments being made at Icon Buffet on my own profile and the first and only blog post I made had the comments closed without any official explanation or email.

In comment #21 I tried to explain the joke which, well, if you explain the joke you ruin it somewhat, but apparently some people did not understand what the “humor” category means.

11. Chef Josh Williams returns (comment #24) to accuse me of trying to do this to generate traffic from Icon Buffet and suggest that the number of comments means this blog is desperate to receive comments: “Be grateful you have our paying VIPs to come troll your blog. Looks like you wouldn’t have much to talk about otherwise. Trust me… I’m laughing too. Hope you got some traffic out of the deal.”
12. I respond by pointing out that the third party stats site I like the least (compete.com) indicate this site has more traffic than Icon Buffet and that I would have been more than happy to continue the conversation at Icon Buffet on “my” supposed blog post started over there but couldn’t since they closed the comments. Strangely, other people could continue to leave comments — and all of them were Icon Buffet VIPs — when the Icon Buffet site still indicated to us that comments were closed to me!
13. Chef Josh Williams again ignores addressing the issue of why the comments were closed and how other people could continue to leave comments but not me (didn’t he get how UNsociable that is?) and replies that Alexa stats show Icon Buffet has better stats but concedes third party stats are inaccurate. The big dick contest is on!
14. I point to another third party site stats and that Site Meter has been available on this site for ages showing full TRANSPARENCY of stats here compared to the no stats transparency at Icon Buffet.
15. Chef Josh Williams replies again saying that third party stats are “tools for tools.” I guess he hasn’t yet learned that many advertisers LIKE TRANSPARENCY, but he’ll figure it out someday. Maybe. It seems at this point he can only try to insult me and the blog rather than explain or answer any of the questions I’ve asked.

One of my favorite insults he lobbed was that I still had the Feedster #7 Feed of the Year icon up on the homepage from 2005. You bet it’s there, I’m proud of it too! But it’s not like we’re stuck in the past like a band with a hit record 20 years ago. Tell you what, Josh, I’ll continue to leave that up there until at least the end of 2007, is that OK with you? I don’t think two years is that long for a blog to be acknowledged out of the millions of blogs out there. And CNET added this blog in January 2006 and we’re still on their CNET 100 blogs. I don’t think we’ll be removing that one any time soon either although maybe we should have a separate awards page. Perhaps I’ll solicit reader opinions on that in another post someday. This would have been a good week since it was navel gazing week.

Josh also responds to a challenge from reader darkmoon who points out that you can’t compare time on page for a blog to a social site. And then he says the kicker: I shouldn’t have brought up stats when he was the one who brought traffic and stats up!
16. I still can’t respond to any comments being left at IconBuffet, but I continue to receive free icon set offers from other Icon Buffet members. I receive a friend’s request through Icon Buffet, too. Hey, I’m not hated by everybody over there.
17. I leave to host today’s 331st radio show. After all the playing around this morning, there wasn’t enough time to get today’s Hmmcast (#118) produced, edited and published, so I had to take a vacation day there.
18. As of this evening’s update I can now leave comments on my own profile page at Icon Buffet again but the comments on the blog post I made over there are still closed. No new comments on the situation left over there although there was one strange comment that I’m not sure how to respond to below (comment #35). Seems like the icon nerds have calmed down.

Today I’ll always remember as the day I made the IconBuffet nerds angry. It’s not quite as poignant as The Day The Earth Stood Still, but it made me laugh. Hard. I can’t look at an icon the same way again. The Firefox icon made me laugh the most I think and that has nothing to do with Icon Buffet. It’s this fiery fox trapped in a sphere! It’s me, it’s me!

Chef Josh Williams, IconBuffet VIPs, MakeYouGoHmm loves you, have a nice weekend and don’t spend all those valueless tokens on oversaturated free icon sets at once ya’ hear.

This cake could fool me from a distance, how about you?

Tezco spotlights a bunch of other cakes, noting:

Yes, these are all real cakes, made from flour and eggs and frosting. No plastic models here.

I also like the money counting cake, solitaire, roulette wheel and tennis shoe. Mad skills indeed.

Paul wonders if comment spam is down lately:

Did the spammers take Easter off? Have they lost interest in this blog considering none of their spam’s get through? Is it simply a lull in the storm?

I decided to check the comment spam numbers for this blog over the last nine days:

Doesn’t appear to be much difference in the overall comment spam flow here, Paul.

Tracking spam and creating spam art
One of my recent weird science experiments in the Hmm Labs has been to take all the comment spam this blog receives each day and computer generate 16×16 icons based on the spam. It’s a completely automated program that runs via cronjob nightly. I’m also tracking some other statistics about the spam partly in an attempt to understand and analyze different patterns and the overall spam DNA. Here are the spam art generated icons since I started the experiment:

I realize it kind of looks like nonsense but I’m thinking that 100 or more days together might form some type of spam art mosaic. I’m definitely not the first person to try and make spam art, but I couldn’t find anybody else out there making comment spam icons. If this project is something that would be of interest to you, let me know in the comments below.

Maybe a social spam art mosaic? If you are wondering why, then ask yourself why not? Maybe we can turn something ugly into art.

Talk about being defiant, I’ve changed my mind and am joining the holdouts from converting my friendly, fun Flickr username to my boring, played out Yahoo ID. Strangely my Yahoo ID is almost the same username as my Flickr one. Doh! I’ll get to my holdout reasoning shortly but first some history and a reminder disclaimer that I own Y! stock.

Ken Camp:

I don’t like this. I have multiple Yahoo IDs. They are disposable, in part, because Yahoo is disposable. My loyalty to Yahoo is non-existent. Their email sucks. The IM client is a bloated pig given years of creeping featurism with continual incorporation of crap the doesn’t work and users don’t want. In short, I’m not a Yahooligan.

Clifford Pearson likes using Gallery instead of Flickr, which is one of the services we’ve been demoing in the Hmm Labs. I’ve never really been a regular Flickr user, preferring like Clifford, to host our own most of our images, but I did give it a B+ grade clear back in July 2004. I liked Flickr’s creative use of Flash.

Rachel at License to Roam listed the concerns of diehard Flickr users:

- The inability to stay logged in or to use other Yahoo accounts at the same time
- Why do I have to give them all this info to sign up with a service I don’t want.
- I have to get a Yahoo email address and if I don’t use it, it gets deleted and my Flickr account will go.
- I’m going to get spammed by Yahoo.

Being Rachel’s post was written January 2007, I wonder if she and others in the spurned Flickr camp have since given into the mighty Y with the exclamation? Which was more important, Flickr service with Y! or voting with their feet?

Not holding out here for any of the reasons I’ve seen others mention. My change in heart really isn’t a change at all over what I said in August 2005. Just felt combative this morning when I saw the message shown at the top of this post. Actually, I believe most holdouts will be like me: changing when they actually need to change.

Yes, I’ll give into the Y! when I actually need to do something at Flickr which could be later today or a year or more from now. Yahoo should continue to offer an export function for the “old skool” members who want to get all their content out of there quickly and easily. I’m sure somebody will point out that there’s been a couple months for disgruntled Flickr users to clean out their lockers, but now the only way to do that appears to be converting to the Y! ID and then exporting, yes/no?

Last week Adobe announced they were going to have an ad-supported Photoshop web version, a territorial move to (try and) cut off Google from moving in. From Adobe’s point of view this is smart but from a customer using Photoshop, I’m not sure how much graphics work I’d do online.

I enjoy working with graphics offline as I do with writing longer creative works. I don’t mind using online docs programs for short works like letters, blog posts, shorter articles, etc. There is a place for online versions of spreadsheets, wordprocessers, but … Photoshop online?

This morning I needed to resize six avatars for our group blogging project and tried using mypictr. I can see doing quick graphics work like this online. The process took only a few seconds and it was hassle free.

I have almost zero interest using an ad-supported version of Photoshop online and signs are pointing that it will be targeted at “casual users” like what I used mypictr for this morning. Thing is I didn’t see any ads at MyPictr. Maybe if I dug around that site more, I’d find them.

Whatever happens Adobe, please, please, please don’t add chat or some other socially intrusive functions to be part of the cool crowd.

How many ‘my’ pages can one have?
Personally I think the technology web is becoming too social. We don’t need to and shouldn’t share everything we’re doing every day. I don’t want to have friends lists and “my.domain.com” pages for every website I visit, especially when I have to repeat most of the same information across the same sites. My pages are the websites we own/operate, not places at Netscape/AOL, Yahoo and beyond.

And from a creative standpoint, sometimes I enjoy going offline and working on things in peace without the distractions of social interaction. Don’t you? Sometimes?

Not trying to be anti-social because there are also times I’m looking to get involved and check out what others are doing and I do enjoy sharing with others. But not sharing everything. And I’m not sure how any of the social stuff that is the attention magnet for a lot of online apps makes Photoshop better.

Maybe professional designers and artists feel differently? Maybe they can point to missing social parts of Photoshop that only a new online version with ads could offer? Collaborative design on large projects makes sense, but for smaller design firms, I don’t see collaboration features being anything but in the way. Am I missing something?