acidlabs

Social media is a strange thing, particularly when it comes to the notion of memes, those little outward-reaching, super-powered thoughts that pervade our online life. Just look at Ken Lee, Matt, the Dancing Guy, or Numa Numa, or the Star Wars Kid…

Hell, look at them all!

As with all memes, sometimes, something gets a little out of hand in a good way. If you’re a Twitter user, you may have noticed that a fair number of the Aussies now have these odd little cartoon avatars. They’re all drawn by our favorite political cartoonist and Crikey (if you don’t read Crikey, you should) contributor, First Dog on the Moon (@firstdogonmoon).

It’s all a consequence of a minor action on Twitter itself:

I should be cleaning my office. But here is my hand knitted twitter aggregator and diy electronic whiteboard. http://twitpic.com/ww3y #

That link led to a picture of a whiteboard covered in sketches of several Twitterers as imagined by First Dog. Naturally, we all begged, pleaded and bitched until we had our own First Dog avatars. You can see the results for Mark Pesce, Stilgherrian, Jo “Mediamum” White, Sean Carmody, Dekrazee1, Zuzu and others.

EDIT: More for the list - Andrew Barnett, Kate Carruthers, Pete Davis, Linda Gehard, Jinjirrie

And, as is often the case with social media involvement, First Dog is doing this for us because he wants to and because we asked nicely (mostly). Of course, there are larger consequences. First Dog built on the already substantial social capital he has in our community. People like me blog about it, introducing others who might not be familiar with First Dog to him. People start wondering where all these weird little anthropomorphic drawings came from and go looking, discovering First Dog for themselves. It’s all very self-feeding and virtuous and a living example of the power of these tools and the way we live our lives through them.

Wild prediction for 2009 - (at least in Australia) First Dog becomes the #1 Twitter cartoonist, eclipsing @gapingvoid himself, Hugh McLeod.

I’m getting a copy of mine for the office - printed, signed and framed, no question

I’ll only be taking a short break over Christmas, but just wanted to sign off the next couple of days with the Christmas greeting I sent out yesterday.

I was a little worried that people would think it was dorky and twee to send this, but the reaction I’ve received has been great, so I feel I did the right thing.

If you’re taking a break, do take care, spend some time with your family and think about not driving yourself into the ground next year (we could all do with working smarter, not harder).

Merry Christmas.

Today, I’ve been playing with Zemanta on some of my old posts here at acidlabs. It’s an interesting beast that modifies the editing interface in your blogging tools (it works with huge range of the popular blogging, community and content management platforms) to provide real-time contextual images, links and tag suggestions. You can add it to your toolkit via one of several server-side plugins or as a client-side plugin in Firefox, IE or Live Writer.

I haven’t got it fully figured out yet, but it does seem promising.

Hat tip to Roebot for pointing me at Zemanta.