As something to watch, reading Narvic the other day, he was talking about SixApart''s new Journalist Bailout programme for all of the hacks being laid off in the States. The economic crisis plus the lack of a viable news business model in many places plus the development (not premature death) of blogs might have a big impact on journalism-blogging.

• 11 hours ago

What about this year's US elections, with Obama's use of social media and blogs to help him into the White House?

• 23 hours ago

of course!

• 5 weeks ago

I agree about graphics, images and cartoons generally transcending language barriers but I think cultural ones, or mixing cultural and linguistic ones, are more difficult; depending on what you try and do with the cartoon.

The cartograms are explanatory; your blogger cartoon is simple and amusing and describes a culture - blogging - that is modern, global and technology based. If you were to mix in more ingrained (national, religious, gender or linguistic ) cultural elements, you would run the risk of getting lots of visits but for the wrong reasons.

Cross-cultural satire doesn't work very well, for example: look at the Danes and their Mohammed cartoons (different languages + different cultures) or The New Yorker with Michelle and Terrorist Obama burning the US flag in the Oval Office (same language, different social cultures).

Neither of them worked outside of their cultural contexts and neither contained any words, as far as I can remember.

• 5 weeks ago

I'm with Chip. It would be interesting for the green dots to go red when the store was closed. Wal-Mart deliberately overlaps the reach of their stores until they've pushed out the competition. Then they close one of the stores. We've got an empty hulk of a store up here in Fort Collins just a few miles down the road from a brand new Wal-Mart that they're putting up by the highway.

• 6 weeks ago