Category: Internet

  I was searching for a New Year cartoon , when I happened to hit www.savagechickens.com .It was an amazing site with almost 20,000 readers a day, very well designed ,and the cartoons were hilarious. Dog normally doesn’t give interviews, but he has a great fan following for the cartoons he draws on sticky notes and his story of entrepreneurship as well his creative web design were something we could all learn from.Ladies and Gentlemen, the amazing Doug Savage.

1) Could you describe your career journey so far? What would your advice be to young arts graduates in these recessionary times?

I don’t know if I can quite describe it as a "career journey" – maybe a "series of lucky career accidents" instead? I drew a lot when I was a kid, but I had all but stopped drawing before I started the chickens. In late 2004, after several months of migraine-addled overtime at my day job, I just suddenly started drawing these cartoons on sticky notes. It felt like the creative part of my brain was staging an intervention. A few months later, I started putting the cartoons online in a blog. Then in the spring of 2005, I got featured on Yahoo, and things just went on from there. Now the site has had 7 million visitors and more arrive every day.

Advice for young arts grads in these tough economic times? Well obviously you’ve got to worry about paying the bills, but don’t neglect your creative side. Even if you only have 5 minutes a day that you can spend on creative work, those 5 minutes will be the most important part of your day. Creativity sustains you through difficult times. It’s as essential as food and water. Also, don’t wait around for opportunities to fall into your lap. If you want to do something, start doing it. Create your own opportunities.

2) Your website is designed by you ( and its extremely nice). Could you list say the top 5 principles or learning on keeping a photo or creative blog?

Well I’ve learned a lot more about web design than I ever intended or wanted to! If you’re starting a creative blog, be prepared to learn a lot about web design. It just goes with the territory. If I had to pick top five things I’ve learned from maintaining the web site, I’d say:

1. Before you do anything else, make sure you can get the domain name you want.

2. Pick a schedule and stick to it. It gives you a bit of structure and discipline. And readers get accustomed to coming back on a regular schedule.

3. Have fun and try new things. You don’t want it to become a grind. Keep it interesting for yourself by pushing the limits.

4. Value your work. The internet is all about free sharing of content, but when a for-profit business wants to use your work, they should pay you for the right to do so.

5. Back up your work regularly. Save your web site code, copies of your work, databases – everything!

3) How many people follow Savage Chicken now? What are the other cartoons that you like or have inspired you?

People read Savage Chickens in a lot of different ways – they come to the site, or they have it sent via email, or they read it through an RSS feed reader. So it’s hard to track them all. If I had to guess, I’d say about 20000 people read it each day.

What cartoons do I read? I’ve been inspired by Gary Larson’s "The Far Side", Matt Groening’s "Life in Hell", and Charles Schulz for many years. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels. Jeff Lemire’s work is brilliant. And online, I’ve been really enjoying Kate Beaton’s cartoons – check out her web site if you haven’t seen it yet.

4) Humor is critical to formal business. Comment please.

Humor isn’t one of those things that employers generally put into job descriptions, but I think it gives you an advantage in the business world for a couple of reasons. First, humor makes you fun to be around, and people want to work with other people who are fun to be around. If more people want to work with you, more opportunities will present themselves. Second, humor gives you fresh insight into the world around you. A lot of humor comes from looking at the world in new and strange ways. Being able to take on that skewed perspective allows you to see things that you may not have seen otherwise.

5) Do you have any Asian plans, or offering merchandise? What is the best way of ordering your merchandise outside the US.

I sell merchandise through Cafepress online, and they deliver worldwide. At this time, I don’t have any local distributors of Savage Chickens merchandise.

6) Optional- Your all time favorite top 3 cartoons

Wow. It’s difficult to choose only 3 but I’ll try. Okay here are a few that I always chuckle at:

– Explosion – http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/03/explosion.html

– The Cactus – http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/11/cactus.html

– One Cloudy Day – http://www.savagechickens.com/2008/07/one-cloudy-day.html

About Doug Savage – Doug ‘s savage chickens and his store of amazing goods are worth a dekko at http://www.savagechickens.com/category/extras

Ajay- Doug Savage and his amazing chickens can be found at www.savagechickens.com .So go ahead and smell the roses , and laugh with the chickens !!

Many a times I am asked whether social networking is worth it ( Yes) and why it is so tough ( No, it isn’t).

 

       Social Net Working ??

All screenshots and trademarks are acknowledged of respective owners.

So here I am putting together a bare bones essential set of Social Networks dos to help you be a social networking master.

1) LinkedIn

1. Profile – Go and create a LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com ( if you don’t have one, I suggest you create it and then come back to the article).

Make sure your LinkedIn profile has the following

• Nice presentable professional photo
• Correct Work history
• Good and Verifiable Recommendations
• Enough keywords to help people searching for people of your skills
• Make your profile visible with a customized URL (as in www.linkedin.com/in/ajayohri )
2. Groups – Join enough enough groups of both primary skills and secondary hobbies (limited to 5) .Introduce yourself there. Create a group and invite people if you feel like doing so ( Our group now has 700 people on LinkedIn). You can export the group email addresses in a csv , put this for a newsletter from www.feedblitz.com or invite them for a www.ning.com special networking site.
3. Connections – LinkedIn will help you import your address book from email providers , and even csv files . Send invitations to people you know, a Don’t Know on your invitation will set a bar on your ability to send invitations again.
4. Open Networking – Open networkers accept invitations from all, do not flag any invitation as I Do not know. They feel that the small loss of privacy is much smaller than the huge variety of contacts they get- especially since most people have shared their email address to many people. It is recommended you choose a Gmail email for open networking to handle any spam etc.You need to join groups like Top Linked.com ,Invite Me, Linkedin500, LION (LinkedIn Open Networkers) and display your email address for people to connect to you.If you connect to people having a lot of connections already, you get their network as a second tier network so it is smarter to just connect to the top 50-100 most LinkedIn people.

2) Ning.com – This is for small communities , and you can create customized communities based on your interests or join existing ones. You can even put ads and earn from the ads, pat a small amount to ning.com to  transfer your domain name to a ning.com website. The best such community I have seen is www.analyticbrdige.com thanks especially to the hard work put there and quality of people coming in. More interactive the community, more buzz it spreads, and attracts even more people- It is a circle of virtue.Opposite for low activity communities.You choose and create a group on a big existing community rather than re invent the wheel by creating a small community on your own.

3) Facebook.com  – You can create a Facebook page for your business, send invites asking your friends and customers to be fans , give updates via Facebook, even set multiple levels of what people can see or cant see in your Facebook profile to separate your friends with your business associates. The groups features on Facebook is just as well designed as for LinkedIn.

4) Twitter.com – A very good article on using Twitter is by Sandro here http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/16336

Twitter can help you attract many small followers, and you can give updates of your website or your business created to your clients ,associates,colleagues,friends and the whole world. It can even be chosen as a live chat for customer service or for answering questions.It has privacy options as well so you can send it only to the people whom you choose to connect with.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning and Twitter – 4 great ways to start social networking and get free publicity for your business and your website.

5) Blogs – Blogs or weblogs can be created on www.blogspot.com and www.wordpress.com for writing about your product and service in semi informal manner.

It is recommended you create your own website and do your blog there ( see previous article at www.decisionstats.com )

Add www.Skype.com for communicating with people all over the world without exposing your phone number and a Website for displaying your goods and services, and your Web 2.0 strategy for a small player trying to survive the recession is ready to begin.

And that my dear reader, was the social networking thing !!! Let me know your comments and thoughts below

If you are interested in cryptology ,or would just like to pass messages securely without worrying too much ( especially corporate messages ,while on the road traveling,and using a public wireless network on the airports) you may try WASTE Again.

Note – We had blogged on the Tor Project much earlier and this is a step like that !

From the website-

What is "WASTE again"?

"WASTE again" enables you to create a decentralized and secure private mesh network using an unsecure network, such as the internet. Once the public encryption keys are exchanged, sending messages, creating groupchats and transferring files is easy and secure.

Creating a mesh

To create a mesh you need at least two computers with "WASTE again" installed. During installation, a unique pair of public and private keys for each computer is being generated. Before the first connection can be established, you need to exchange these public keys. These keys enable "WASTE again" to authenticate every connection to other "WASTE again" clients.

After exchanging the keys, you simply type in the computers IP address to connect to. If that computer is located behind a firewall or a NAT-router, you have to create a portmap first to enable incoming connections.

and the features include-

Ajay- It is based on the same historical legacy of the PGP ( Pretty Good Privacy) project of the early 1990’s and offers up to 4096 bits of encryption. It offers a simple intuitive interface for a 4 step process in creating private and public key.Combine some John Le Carre novels tradecraft,one touch keypads and residual creativity :)  and your network is securely assured from goodwill hunting.

The downloads are here-http://wasteagain.sourceforge.net/downloads.shtml