Friday, January 27, 2006

Notes: Eye Contact...

Ed Godsell has been pestering us for an appearance in our cartoons for some time now. Well, ok, he mentioned it once.

I asked him at the time whether it was really something he wanted, I mean, they don't tend to be flattering. Anyway, for better or for worse he appears in this weeks cartoon.

So do Mark and Hannah. You might remember them from such cartoons as 'Guns and Roses' and... well that's it actually.

I posted last week about the fun I have adding the blood to cartoons - well, I tried to restrain myself this week - originally neither myself nor Bif pictured this as being particularly gruesome. But as I finished the cartoon I knew there was something missing.

I Skyped Bif to ask him how gruesome I could make it and he said to do what I thought best. So I added in the streaks of blood on Ed's face and a hint of it around the eyes on Hannah's head... it makes the cartoon if you ask me. Yes, I know you didn't.

ps - Ed, you need to update your IMDB page.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

And he was doing so well...

People who know Bif sometimes marvel at how polite he is online. How measured he seems when responding to negativity and outright insults.

Well, he finally lost it.

Tell you what though, he's spot on really.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Blog comment policy.

Here's some advice to people starting a blog. Have a blog comment policy.

We didn't, so when bizarre comments started pouring in we didn't know how to respond. Myself and Bif had to discuss on a comment by comment basis which comments deserved or required deletion, and inevitably we disagreed on some.

If you don't set a policy for yourself, you may find yourself in the same situation. It's better to have a clear policy from the outset - that way as soon as the comments start to get disorderly, you already know which ones violate your terms.

As mentioned in an article I found on comment policies, there are two ends to the comment policy spectrum:

1. Allow all comments, whatever the content
2. Tightly moderate comments such that comments reflect only what the blog owner wants seen.

As stated in said article, most people are somewhere in the middle. It's certainly somewhere in the middle we want to position ourselves.

The article in question however advocates a tighter hold on comments than I think I am comfortable with. The article makes an interesting point about how comments and discussion in regard to negative aspects of your business might be interpreted by readers.

We're not going to stop discussion about negative aspects of our site. However we are going to put some ground rules in place.

Putting these rules together wasn't really what I wanted to do. In a way I felt like I was going against my instinct, which was to let things run and only delete the outrageous comments. However that was not practical. Without a clear policy in place there were certain comments I couldn't make a decision on. And with both myself and Bif involved there were disagreements.

Here's what we put together - a ten point blog comment policy!

1. Comments must be on topic. In other words comments must relate in some way to the post you are commenting to!
2. Comments should not contain profanity. Please refrain from strong language.
3. Comments must not contain personal attacks or any material that might be viewed as defamatory of another individual.
4. Spam or advertising is not allowed - however relevant, on topic links are allowed.
5. Anonymous posting is discouraged and may result in comment deletion.
6. Negative comments about our content or site are fine if reasonably argued.
7. All comments are solely the opinions of the individuals submitting them and the publication of them on BifSniff.com does not imply endorsement or agreement by either Bif or Frank.
8. All of the above are at defined at our discretion. We reserve the right to prohibit all comments, to delete or edit all or any portion of any comment made, and to ban any commenter or IP address from making any comments to this blog.
9. We reserve the right to refine our comment policy from time to time!
10. Your submission of a comment consititutes your acceptance of this comment policy.

We'd be very interested to hear what you think of this. Over the top? Too formal? Good sense? Did we leave anything out? Should we take anything out... etc etc...

We'd also be very interested to hear general views on comment policies and anecdotes about comment issues.

Please leave a comment below, and er.. it will be subject to the above :P

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Thanks for voting!

Just a quick thank you to everyone who voted for us in the Best of Blogs award poll.

The voting period has ended, and we didn't do too badly at all, thanks to all of you!

because of some voting issues that were had, the rules have been changed a little and the votes make up a maximum of 20 points (and a minimum of 10) out of a total of 50.

In other words, I think we will receive 16 points (for fourth place in the voting) whereas the Hot Librarian gets 20 points (first place in voting), then the remainder of the 50 votes will be dolled out by the judges for presentation, readability and content.

At this point I'd like to say that we were delighted to be nominated, thrilled to make it to the ten finalists and ecstatic that you voted for us so much!

If we don't win, it's been a ball. If we do win it's coz we're brilliant. ;)

Thanks again for voting!

Friday, January 20, 2006

BifSniff target of Wind Up Merchants Association...?

Recently BifSniff.com has been deluged with outraged comments at everything we do. Some of the comments are so outrageous they are obviously wind ups, others are quite plausible, but just stretch the boundaries of reality a little to far to be credible, and others I just have no idea if they are for real.

Myself and Bif were talking about it earlier and we are wondering if there is a forum somewhere on the internerd where the Association of Wind Up Merchants are spreading the word that it's too easy to get us going...?

I can practically hear them laughing up their sleeves as we believe we are the target of lawyers who specialises in Internet propagated hate incitment and race related matters, the Anti-Defamation League and Save the Children, the CIA, feminists, concerned parents and god knows who else...

Then again, maybe they're all for real. Some of them certainly are plausible, but then the best wind ups are. If you have been outraged at one of our postings - please don't be further outraged by being referred to as a hoax, it's just getting very hard around here to see the wood for the trees!

But I make this plea: If you know the site or forum where the 'conspiracy - to - confound - Bif - and - Frank - with - hoax - reactionary - comments - to - their - site' was born born - PLEASE, PLEASE, let me know...

Irish Blog Awards - would you like to nominate us?

Ok, the Irish Blog awards are only accepting nominations up until 8am on Monday January 23rd.

I would like to think that some of you out there might like to nominate us, so I thought I would help you along... give you a nudge in the right direction as it were... :)

So, there are at least two possible categories we might be suitable for. The first is:
Best Arts and Culture Blog.
To nominate us for Best Arts and Culture Blog, simply send an email to IrishAwards (at) gmail.com with a link to our Blog and naming the category. Full details are here.

To nominate the cartoons for the category of Best Arts and Culture Blog, I've made a simple mailto link, so you could click here if you're REALLY lazy ;)

The second category we might broadly fit is:
Most Humorous Post
Maybe you could nominate your favourite cartoon. Again, all you do is send a link to the post in question to IrishAwards (at) gmail.com including the category name 'Most Humorous Post'.

Anyway, pop over to the Irish Blog Awards website and check it out for yourself, hell, maybe you think Bif should be nominated for best blogger... how would I know! Or maybe you think this blog is a good Arts and Culture blog. C'mon, I'm very cultured... :D

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Notes: Decisions, decisions...

Stephen is back in this weeks cartoon!

Stephen has had three previous appearances:

1. The last romantic...
2. Have a heart...
3. Gray's Anatomy...

I don't have too many notes on this weeks cartoons, except to say that every time I do a gruesome cartoon I get an evil thrill putting in the bloodstains.

Really. I sit there chuckling to myself as I add a splash of blood here, a splash of blood there. "Too much? nah... a bit more... oh, overdone it a bit now, let's mop up some of that blood..."

And when I think I've got the bloodstains just right, I get an odd sense of completion.

There you go. Bet you're sorry you asked now... :P

Tomi Ungerer

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Tomi Ungerer. It wasn't my first time meeting him - I had met him over ten years ago because I went to school with, and am friends, with his daughter. It was great to meet him again. Back when we were in school he was always extremely supportive of creativity of any kind and even if you were just doodling on a napkin he made you feel as though you had just created a masterpiece.

If you don't know who Tomi is, it's well worth checking out his stuff. he has a huge range of material from children's books, to erotica and everything in between.

Some of his books are available on Amazon including Erotoscope which is a collection of his erotic art, such as this one - a very tame example, but hey there might be kids looking ;)



It's his children's books which made him most famous according to all the biographies out there, with illustrations such as this one:



Tomi has come under fire in the past it seems for producing both children's books and erotica, but Tomi is quoted as saying in response to a public attack from librarians "Without fucking, no children and without children, you’d all be out of work. I draw the fucking and I draw for the children born as a result!" (I was unable to verify the quote at this time! But I wouldn't be surprised...)

Not that producing erotica as well as kids books is the only thing Tomi Ungerer has come under fire for, according to one site I visited his political art resulted in exile from the US.

Apprently Tomi created anti Vietnam art at the time and some folks didn't like it much!

I don't know if this poster is from that era, but I suspect it is. It's one of my favourite pieces of Tomi's (that I know of, he's so prolific I'd say I've only seen a tiny tiny tiny fraction of his work!). Whenever it was drawn it's incredibly valid still:



Tomi was kind enough to sign a book for me, a book I found in a second hand store which was created from an exhibition put together by the Museums of the City of Strasbourg in, I think, 1981:



Tomi's signing of the book is a work of art in itself - click on it for a larger version:



An amazing artist, well worth looking up his stuff if you haven't already. I'll leave you with this link to a few sketches from Tomi Ungerer: Compromises.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

BifSniff - 'obviously not terrorists'

For those of you who don't follow the comments on this site (and sometimes they are hard to follow) I thought I should alert you to this one.

We have been causing some concern to certain of our fans, one of whom was kind enough to take the time to put his concerns in writing.

We originally caused some controversy with 'the First Noel' cartoon, followed by controversy over the 'Education Reform' cartoon and then most recently controversy over our 'Probing Questions' cartoon.

You will need to read the comments on all the cartoons to get the full effect, however here is one concerned citizen's latest comment reproduced here for you:

First of all, I don´t want to be confused with the individual above. Secondly, My name is not Val & I don´t live in Hamburg, let´s say my name is Daniel & I live somewhere in the USA, but as this information cannot be verified it`s useless, which is why I have been posting as "Anonymous". Thirdly, I run a small business so I don´t have a lot of time on my hands in actual fact. I´m responsible for several negative comments on your site, which I have been visiting for six months or more, in other words I´m a fan. The NASA comment may have been a little short of the mark but this is an area of particular interest to me so I may have been over emotional, NASA has been severely underfunded in recent years & has received a lot of bad press, especially in the States. Just so you know I did not contact any organisation about the content of this site, as I have decided to monitor your work on my own, for the time being. Lately, I´m sorry to say, I think you have been overstepping the mark. As you say yourselves, this site is meant to attract a broad spectrum, so I think you should give a little more consideration to this fact which you yourselves recognize. Although I am a supporter of Israel, I made the Jenin comment in the interest of fairmindedness. If you care to ridicule me in the future you should know that hanging above the desk where I am writing is a letter of thanks signed by the Field Director of the CIA for my service to my country. I alerted the CIA to an Islamist website which provided the intelligence services with information which prevented a major terrorist attack, which one is classified as it may endanger my life & the lives of my family. In case you didn´t know most internet research is conducted by concerned citizens as the CIA simply cannot monitor the entire web. While you are obviously not terrorists, I do think you need to recognize that we are all active participants in the current "culture wars" whether we like it or not, so anyone transmitting material needs to fully consider the consequences of his actions & the effect his opinions may have on ignorant viewers, whether unintentional or subversive.

I'm gobsmacked to be honest, if comforted by the fact it is obvious we are not terrorists.

Some have advised us that these are hoax comments, some seem to agree with the comments being made... what do you think?

Monday, January 16, 2006

Robert Scoble with Death & Penguins

Yup, there you have it. Bif mentioned is already, but in case you missed it here it is in all it's glory. Robert Scoble proudly holding up his Death & Penguins t-shirt which we gave him at the Geek dinner in Cork late last year. We also gave a t-shirt to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble and one to Patrick 'Mini Scobelizer' Scoble, and Maryam tells me they all wore their t-shirts for their Christmas photo!

You can buy our Death and Penguins t-shirt in Euros here.

You can buy our Death and Penguins t-shirt in Dollars here.

And, at the risk of putting you off buying one, here's a pic of me, at the geek dinner, wearing my Death and Penguins shirt:



Many thanks to Uldis of CaptSolo for permission to reproduce the photos!

Friday, January 13, 2006

Vote for us!

Bif pointed out already that the voting has begun for the 'Best of Blogs' awards, and we're up for an award...

So please, please, please vote for us... you know we deserve it!

Vote for our cartoons to win Most Humorous Blog here

Scroll down to the end, we're the last category, just after best sex blog... you heard me, AFTER best sex blog, keep scrolling...

Thank you! I'm off to prepare my acceptance speech...

Notes: Probing Questions

This weeks cartoon went up a little later than usual. Which is annoying because it was ready on time, but my Eircom Broadband went AWOL.

Anyway, it's up now. It took us longer than usual to get this one right (if indeed we have!), myself and Bif were furiously Skyping yesterday going back and forth and arguing over sentence structure and all kinds of things.

Luckily, at the last minute, Bif had a flash of inspiration and came up with a different slant to the wording which made it all happen.

You see, we were working on a text that involved the rather laboured fact that 'a meteor is the visible path of a meteoroid' (see wikipedia entry on meteors). However this meant that the illustration, for best effect, had to be a meteoroid with no visible path. And that just didn't look as good. As you can see on the left.

Luckily Bif had a 'think outside the box' moment and realised that we were labouring under an unnecessary burden and he came up with the text you see today.

The result is one I'm happy with - it's a bit different looking for us - mostly because we pretty much always have people in our cartoons. It almost looks odd not to have people in a BifSniff cartoon.

So there you have it, this weeks tales of misadventure in BifSniffLand...

Monday, January 09, 2006

Cartoons: our strategy, our target audience and our navigation!

Bif's recent post on 'infrastructure' got me thinking over the last few days. Bif made some very interesting points, based around our navigation and how 'Bloggy' types might be more comfortable with it than Webcomic types.

It started me mulling it over in my mind and reviewing our 'strategy', such as it is. The start of the new year is as good a time as any for this kind of thing!

We did focus more on getting the most out of the blog phenomenon, rather than going the web comic route. There were three reasons for this, at least on my part:

1. Blogging is huge and constitutes a much larger portion of the online community than webcomics
2. I don't know much about webcomics
3. Single panel cartoons are different to webcomics

I'm not sure if I have those points in the right order, but I think the first point is the biggest issue.

Blogging is huge and constitutes a much larger portion of the online community than webcomics

In terms of getting our cartoons out to the widest possible audience, it made sense to target, as much as possible, one of the fastest growing technologies on the web today.

To quote from an article by ParticleTree on Small Business Blogging:

"50 million Americans, or about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited blogs in Q1 2005. This represents an increase of 45 percent compared to Q1 2004."

Not only are there a LOT of people reading blogs, there’s more people reading them every single day.

In addition to the growth, the study also revealed that "the average Blog visitor viewed nearly 16,000 pages over the course of the Q1 2005 - 77 percent more than the 9,000 pages viewed by the average Web user. The average Blog visitor spent nearly 18,000 minutes or about 23 hours per week online, while the average Internet user spent just over 10,000 minutes or 13 hours per week online." What’s even more startling than their enthusiasm, is who these readers are. The following details are from the results of a survey conducted by Blogads:

• Blog readers’ median income hover between $60,000 and $90,000


• 75% of blog readers are over 30 years old


• 75% of blog readers are men


• 75% of blog readers are looking for news they can’t find elsewhere.


• 72% of blog readers never read blogs through an RSS


• "Clearly the blogosphere is crawling with certified grade A opinion makers."

These statistics clearly show just how huge blogging is and their internet habits show them to be a huge potential readership AND by the looks of things a potential market if we ever figured out how/what to sell them...!

I don't have any stats to hand on the Webcomics community or it's readership, but I think it would be very hard pushed to compete with blogs!

One of our key excercises to getting our message out to Bloggy types and Blog readsers was to provide our cartoons to people who want to display them on their Blog or website. (some more thoughts on our syndication model here)

We felt this was an ideal way to gain exposure to people who might otherwise not have ever found us - an audience with a wildly varied interest range as opposed to those specifically interested in webcomics. Which brings me to the next two points...

I don't know much about webcomics

It's a terrible admission, but there, I've said it. The fact that I don't know much about webcomics obviously plays a part in our decision to lean toward blogs, as Bif says, we have made more friends in the Blogging community than in the Webcomic community. Bif reads a lot of webcomics and roots out some pretty good stuff which I then get exposed to through his blog - but apart from that I know very little about the Webcomic community.

It's not a good thing. I should have a much better grasp of the Webcomic community, but time is finite and I already have so many millions of things to be doing that I just don't find the time.

Which is another reason I think focussing on the Blogging world makes more sense - there must be loads of people like me who don't have the time to explore the Webcomic world, but who enjoy being exposed to comics or cartoons when they stumble across them. Therefore, hopefully, having our cartoons out there on various sites helps build our audience.

Now don't get me wrong - the Webcomic community is extremely important to us too, and has been very supportive. We have received very positive support from the likes of Zoinks Magazine, Cowpunch, Digital Strips and Evil Network to name a few. As Bif alludes to though, we need to make more friends in the Webcomic industry. I certainly need to have a better idea of what's going on and who'd behind it. Zoinks magazine does provide me with a good overview, I just need to follow up on more of the leads.

I'll be much happier when I know the names of more of the key Webcomic creators and I'll be much much much happier when they know mine!

However, the key point here is that I don't see the Webcomic community as our audience I see it as a part of our audience.

Single panel cartoons are different to webcomics

In trying to find a place we belong on the internet, the Webcomic community is obviously a niche we fit into, but only just. As has come up recently on Websnark, there aren't a whole lot of single panel cartoons.

Most people go for character based narrative stuff, which is quite different to what we do. Which brings me to the point of having a 'next' and 'previous' button on your navigation. According to the article Bif pointed to, Webcomics simply shouldn't publish without next/previous buttons. Which is fair enough if you are narrative based. In our case I don't think it is quite so important.

Certainly our stats at the moment show people don't seem to have any problem navigating through our archives since we updated the site design last.

The fact that we are single panel cartoons is also what allows us to leverage on the Bloggy area so easily - people don't need any prior knowledge of characters or narrative to appreciate our cartoons. As I have mentioned before it helps when it comes to recurring characters such as Brian and Martin, but it's not a requirement.

Anyway, I 'm rambling off point a bit now - It just seemed to me at the time that it would be relatively easy to filter our cartoons out through the blogging community, but that we were slightly ill-fitted for the webcomic community. The webcomic community, for a large part, relies on regular readership and dedicated followers - which I felt might be harder to build up for single panel cartoons than for a character based narrative.

Our cartoons are rather self-contained, whereas with a narrative people are coming back to find out what the resolution to last weeks issue was, or what trouble that pesky character has gotten into now.

To sum up...

To sum up, I guess what I am saying in this overly long ramble through my thoughts is that I am happy enough with our approach to date and the success we have had. However we, or at least I, need to get more involved with the Webcomic community so as to be better informed and possibly work with others to push the whole community forward.

Maybe we could be doing more with regard to discussion and innovation (think tank anyone ;)) if we were more connected to the Webcomic community, but overall I think we're doing ok.

Any thoughts?

Friday, January 06, 2006

Notes: Education Reform

Actually I wish I had some notes for you on this week's cartoon... but I don't really. Bif sent me the idea yesterday and it made me laugh so I was looking forward to doing it. Luckily I got the opportunity sooner than I expected because a whole week had actually rolled by without me noticing and a cartoon was due...

Where does the time go? I mean really...?

So I had to lash into it today, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I think it's a good one. It's eye catching and exciting looking, with a good punchline.

I think it'll be a popular one, but then my predictions are usually wrong, so I should keep my mouth shut!

Meanwhile, Bif has been getting his own back on me by pointing out my lack of blogging. Yes, it's true I haven't been blogging much. And to be honest, it might go a bit quiet around here for a little while as I play post-Christmas-catch-up on my other, more traditional type work.

Still, my pre-Christmas-blog-a-thon should have bought me some leeway (39 posts in December vs Bif's 19...). Plus, Bif's a writer, I'm sure he'll keep you entertained... :P