I'm Confident

The great thing about these comics from the 1940s is how similar the situations are to the present. I believe we like to think that some of these confidence scams originated with email and the internet, but, as seen in this Paul Kirk, Manhunter, panel below, con artists and thieves were using that new technology of the time, the telephone, to engage in exactly the same game.  It's not the technology, it's human nature--we all would like to think we've got that rich uncle, but that's just our greed showing, which certain people well understand and attempt to take advantage of.

Comics in Comics #3

Self referential example from Sensation Comics #1, January 1942.

Comics in Comics #2

This one is so meta it almost hurts to think about. From Master Comics #22, January 1942, Fawcett Publications.

Plus ca change

Perhaps that's why Rome fell?

(images from Four Color Comics #15, 1942, featuring Felix the Cat)

Comics in Comics

From Human Torch #6, Winter 1942

The Daily Duck for 4 July 2011

from World's Best Comics (1941)

At least it's been dressed.

The Daily Duck for 3 July 2011

Uncle Scrooge is kinda like Uncle Sam in this regard.

  

The Daily Duck for 2 July 2011

In the first appearance of Donald Duck, he looked somewhat more goose-like than later.

from Walt Disney Comics & Stories (194X)

The Daily Duck for 01 July 2011

In an attempt to pay more attention to this web site, I have decided to bring you the fruits of my research into how the disposable entertainment medium known collectively as "comics" have depicted our fine feathered friends over the years. This is inspired in part by a little stuffed bull known as Bully, who has run similar features on his web site devoted to Ben Grimm (aka The Thing), Hank McCoy (aka Beast), and the Warriors Three. I was going to concentrate on just my favorite comic duck, Howard, but then realized that there were others as equally deserving of being featured, such as Daffy, Darkwing, Dewey, Destroyer, Donald, Ding, Huey, Louie, and Scrooge, and that's only the drakes and doesn't even get into the real ducks!

Without further belaboring the idea, here's your first installment:

from Howard the Duck (v1 n1), Jan 1976, Created and Written by Steve Gerber, Illustrated and Colored by Frank Brunner, Inked by Steve Leialoha, Lettered by John Costanza, Edited by Marv Wolfman, Published by Marvel Comics

So, come back daily for another ducky dose, won't you?

Top 4 Reasons Google Has Screwed Up the Web, and 1 Reason for How They Might Be Fixing It

I was going to original do 10 reasons, but narrowed it down to 4:

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has rendered blogging into a non-optimal experience.

Google is constantly tweaking its search algorithms. What had been a purely simple and elegant idea--let's return results ordered by the number of pages that link to the page that also matches your search terms--has become a nightmare as people who are trying to improve their "Google juice" go out on the web to seed links to their pages by virtually scrawling graffitti on any open page they can find. As a long-time blog owner, it has been a constant fight for the last ten years of deleting inappropriate comments from robots (and increasingly real people hired for the purpose). They are fairly easy to spot, even if it's a real person who posted, because there's always a link to a page that has nothing to do with what your blog post was about. Because discussion is not easy anymore in the wide web, conversation has moved to a different point: Facebook.  Proof?  Look at this graph that shows how much Facebook has outpaced general web readership.

3. Search Results Results Pages.

When you last used Google search and started clicking through the results, how many pages did you get that were just a list of links?  Those pages, created automatically through a similar search and repost search results content, are the bane of the web.  There is no value added from these pages, as the information you are seeing has only duplicated (and sometimes badly duplicated, at that, with inappropriate terms to your original search) the results page you had just seen a link before.  But these pages exist because of automatic software that creates them out of Google Search, and the reason they exist is to put GoogleAdSense advertisements in front of you.

2. It's all about the impressions.

The main reason GoogleAdSense sucks the life out of the Web is that the one metric that matters, i.e., what you get paid for, is how many times an ad is displayed in front of a person. While there are two versions of AdSense, a cost-per-click (CPC) and a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), most of these no- or  limited-content web sites use the latter, because it's all about the economy of scale.  Their business is just to get you to get their server to display their page for you which contains as many Google ad impressions that they can serve up and increase their numbers.  All that it would take for a fundamental shift in the Web world for the better would be for Google to stop making CPM payments.  But, that's Google's prime business, as they are the prime CPM vendor in the world.

1. The Top 10 (or 4) List

The genesis behind this blogpost complaint was hitting a very informative series of articles today about skills needed for the future workplace. I found the series great, and wanted to print it out, but it was split into 5 pages containing 2 skills per post (as it was posted over a series of 5 days) and there was no page/pdf available that gathered it together.  Why?  Because more posts equals more readers equals more ad impressions ("Hey, that's 5 times the impressions for one article!")  Many sites run top # lists where each number is a separate page.  I'm bucking the trend by putting all of my points on the same page here--but then, I don't participate in GoogleAdSense anymore, and this list is one of the reasons why.

The Fix?

Today Google announced Google+. I haven't received an invite yet, but I'm interested.  Maybe it's just a Facebook clone, as some business analysts are already coming out saying.  Maybe those are the same ones that said the iPad was just another tablet computer.  I need to try it myself to find out. I'd like to see something that competes with Facebook on its own terms, just like Android is now competing with iOS.  Because competition does make things better.