Here’s a very wacky Mantis type design.  It’s different, though I don’t know how many shades of green you could use to make it look truly awesome.  Creative Commons licensed, feel free to click on the image to go download the file to play with!

I decided to hand-draw some business / social contact cards. I caught upon the idea of numbering each one and making each card a unique design. Some are better than other ones, and I may eventually get some real cards printed up with my actual artwork on them (once I get the time, money, and inclination). I had an idea of making a design for Cheques since I’ll need to order some for my bank account soon. I have to figure out a great way to incorporate some of the characters and the url of my webcomic, then I’ll put the file up in case anyone wants a free design for their cheques! Yes, I use the Canadian/England spelling for Cheque, it avoids any confusion as to precisely what I mean, so deal with it.

I figure the amount of time I spent on these, sketching them, inking them, and coloring them in with highlighters will prevent people who don’t need/want them from taking them, or at least feel guilty about throwing them away eventually!
I’ve given these away in Atlanta (at the last get-together over breakfast at Sweet Melissa’s when I was down there for Joe Peacock’s New  Mentally Incontinent Book Release) and also at the 1st Podcamp Cleveland Planning Meeting.  I’ve got some more designs in the works, and I’ll put them up here before I tear them apart and start passing them around!

and its sad to watch the sky bleed.

Originally uploaded by (from a second story)Mike Bailey-Gates

These services need to bring all the conversations together. Twitter faced a huge backlash because they stopped showing all @ replies in everyone else’s streams.

But they need to offer the ability link and display the @ system, so that when one post references a specific post of another user, you can click it and read the entire conversation. You should also be able to link string-posts together, so that those commentators who wish to be more complex can be, within the existing framework.

http://twitter.com/raymondpirouz is one of those users who speak in disjointed sentences, and the strings are always worth reading. He’s basically blogging/commenting on news directly on twitter.

This kind of feature would encourage conversations. I would even consider PAYING (a non-exorbitant sum, monthly) for this feature, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a cheap bastard.

Giving the originator of the conversation the ability to trim, or delete comments that are just spam, allowing notification of new posts in the conversation, all of this goes hand in hand with the new proposed functionality.

Imagine a hybrid Google Wave/Twitter/Chat/Forum. I don’t know if this would mechanically be feasible, but it would be quite addictive. Allowing the originators of the conversations to be the moderators would free up the services to concentrate on the framework and running of the backbone of the service.

You would also see a bunch of B.S. There would be plenty of closed off threads where pricks would delete any conversation that didn’t agree with them, but the most popular twitterers would obviously allow a great diversity of opinions and fun or hilarious commentary to flourish.

This is what I see the future of twitter or Google Wave being, not only a comment-on-the-issues, but the ability to start and link threads of serious discussions, limited or unlimited in number of participants.

I tweeted about three months ago that The Internet is a Chatroom: “Okay, twitter is basically a chatroom, Google Wave (need invite please!) is a chatroom that you can replay. Is this the entire internet now?” but I believe it could be SO much more. I have my Google Wave Invite, so can I please get this functionality? @Brizzly?… @Google?… @Anyone?