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Monday, January 21, 2013 at 12:43PM Time for another Hot Seat series. I'd like to focus on Web site design.
If you'd like to participate, please give me:
Friday, January 18, 2013 at 11:55AM Today's Archive Dive is from Jan. 25, 2012, when I offered some information on self-publishing to the Nook.
As we've been discussing tablet-based self-publishing opportunities, a lot of the discussion has been centered on iPad and Kindle, but there's a considerable marketshare being staked-out by the Nook that is hard to overlook.
Friday, January 18, 2013 at 11:11AM There's a lot going on right now! This is the third bonus post this week!
So, here's the deal. Ordinarily, I'd post this kind of thing here as members-only content, but the truth of the matter is that I have a personal connection to the story. That personal connection was the reason I never posted about Bill Day's historic IndieGoGo campaign here in the first place.
Please... keep that in mind the next time I have to moderate someone here on self-promotion. I hold myself to the same standard -- heck, a stricter one. I could have easily rationalized posting about this fund-rasier here, saying that it held the potential to be the first time a political cartoonist used crowd-sourcing to fund his annual slary. But the fact of the matter is that Bill Day holds a special place in my esteem, and I wouldn't have been able to convice me that the post wasn't self-promotion-by-proxy.
So now, Mr. Day finds himself embroiled in a controversy that has a much broader implication to all cartoonists, and I think that not posting about it would be the greater disservice. But my previous decision prevents me from making my response a members-only post. Since I encouraged my Evil Inc readers to donate to the campaign, posting my thoughts about it here would, in effect, hide it from some of the people it effects directly.
So I posted my thoughts about the Bill Day self-plagiarism controversy on my Evil Inc blog. Here's an excerpt:
So, let's boil this down to what it is. Bill Day re-purposed one of his own drawings to offer it to newspapers (and readers of his work on CagleCartoons.com) as a new thought on a topical issue. In the example above, his argument about the racist overtones in the immigration debate are repurposed to being as appropriate in Arizona as they are in Alabama.
Fortunately, there is hope in the form of some editors. One editor responded to the Bill Day story with comments that probably won’t surprise most readers but would come as a shock to the numerous American editorial cartoonists who really don’t think that plagiarism or self-plagiarism is a big deal: “As an editor who subscribes to Mr. Day’s syndicated work, we had always assumed that we were paying for new content. However, it appears that not only does Mr. Day steal the work of others, but has made a career out of using the same cartoon over and over again. My publisher is currently reevaluating the value of this syndicate and the work they provide to our chain of papers.”
From Ted Rall's blog, we get the reaction from a newspaper editor:
In that same post, Mr. Rall names about a half-dozen other editorial cartoonists who has been caught in the art of re-purposing their own work ("self-plagiarism"). According to him, CagleCartoons hires "hacks" and offers their work at lower rates, instead of "[hiring] those of us who actually take this profession seriously."
And that's where we hit the real issue behind the outrage.
Read the entire post, and then feel fre to come back here and discuss it.
Thursday, January 17, 2013 at 9:21AM Recently, DaFont came across my radar and I checked it out. At first glance, I was troubled. It looked as if people upload fonts to the site and then others download it for free. Many of them are marked "free for personal use," but then, when you dig, you get this information about the licensing:
The fonts presented on this website are their authors' property, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain. The licence mentioned above the download button is just an indication. Please look at the readme-files in the archives or check the indicated author's website for details, and contact him if in doubt. If no author/licence is indicated that's because we don't have information, that doesn't mean it's free.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 10:13AM Same rules as always. I discuss the participants and then open up the conversation to you. The theme is "composition."
