If you’re looking to get in on the iPhone/Android/Kindle mobile digital comics gravy train, you’d do well to read Alex de Campi’s post today over at Bleeding Cool, where she lays out the specific formatting options and size restrictions in place for display of your comics on each of the currently popular handheld devices. Nice tutorial!

Alex de Campi posted a nice, long overview of all the companies bringing comics to portable digital devices like the iPhone, Google Android-based phones, and the Kindle, at Rich Johnston’s Bleeding Cool blog yesterday (but if, like me, you didn’t see it until today, then it’s new to you! like they say on the car lots).

The above is a fairly long, possibly overcomplex sentence. Come to think of it, that title could use some trimming, too. Good morning! Good morning!

I’ve been following the phenomenon of digital comic sales through iTunes, for reading on iPhones and iPod Touches, with a great deal of interest lately. Seems to be heating up. For some reason, people will pay for digital content on a mobile device that they’d expect to get for free in a web browser (see: ringtones, small sprite-based games, and wallpapers). I don’t know why this is. I don’t know how long it will last. But it does seem to be the case. And this includes comics. I spoke with a fairly well-known indie creator the other day who told me that his sales, through iVerse’s digital comics app, are in the “tens of thousands a month.” That’s more than he’s selling in the Direct Market, in the form of comic books. And it’s more than anybody ever sold through Modern Tales or, I’d bet, Bitpass. The Transformers comic was the number one app in the App Store for several weeks, and then the Spider-Woman motion comic was very, very popular, apparently, and so on.

All of which is weird to me, because all the things people complain about when they complain about reading webcomics on a computer screen are even more annoying when reading digital comics on a tiny handheld screen. I guess iTunes is able to reach people who don’t read print comics, therefore they have no reason to complain about digital ones? Maybe? And maybe they don’t even read webcomics, either? I dunno. Everybody reads at least one webcomic, I think. And that one webcomic is probably xkcd.

So, yeah, anyway, whatever the reason, it does look like we’ve got ourselves a burgeoning little digital comics marketplace, in the form of iTunes, almost by accident. But it’s still kind of unorganized and messy to buy comics there, as opposed to other kinds of stuff you might want to buy in iTunes. If you want to buy a TV show in iTunes, you click the “TV Shows” tab. Right? If you want to buy a song, you click “Music,” and so on. If you want a game, you go to the App Store and filter down to games.

There’s no such category for comics; they’re all over the place. You can buy digital comics in the “TV Shows” section (like Spider-Woman and Watchmen: The Motion Comic). You can buy comics in the “App Store” section as one-off e-books (like “Godland Issue 3“). You can buy comics within the context of some multi-comic meta-apps like iVerse, mentioned above, which has its own store within the app, and whose competitors are the Comixology app and the Panelfly app — both of which have their own, completely separate, in-app stores. There may be three or four more of these comics-library-and-store type apps by the time you read this.

And now you can even buy digital comics in the “Music” section of iTunes, thanks to “iTunes LP,” Apple’s new multimedia format ostensibly created as a way to boost whole-album sales (over single-song sales) by bringing back the meta-material (liner notes, artwork, etc) associated with vinyl albums, but which has been bent to the purposes of displaying Tyrese Gibson’s “Mayhem.” In fact, “Mayhem” was, according to this post at the Apple Insider blog, the very first iTunes LP made available for sale. So comics beat actual albums to the format that was supposed to bring back record album sales! Just more proof that comics is one of the most entrepreneurial little industries, like, ever.

But it’s still confusing. On iTunes, a comic is a TV show, or it’s an ebook, or it’s a subset of a larger app, or it’s a record album. There’s no one place to go browse iTunes just to find comics.

I wonder if Apple will ever decide to set up a standard format for digital comics, and create a section of iTunes where they can be easily found? This might be a very good thing for digital comics sales, and maybe a very bad thing for some of the companies who are building their own stores, either through iTunes apps or otherwise. I kind of like the mayhem (no pun intended) right now. But I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term. At some point, some software platform and file format and distribution mechanism will take over. My guess is that Apple is in as good a position as any — is in a better position than most — to step up and create those things. That doesn’t mean that they will, though. Just that I’d be surprised if they don’t.

We’re trying to build the new ComicSpace engine to be as open as possible, and to work happily in conjunction with other software — especially any software people are using to manage their webcomics (we don’t want to lock people who want to use our other services into using our software). So I’m trying to compile a list of all the content management systems webcomic artists use, so we can work on compatibility and open-ness with each. Here’s the list I’ve got so far. Any big ones I’ve missed?

Expect more of these posts in the next couple of weeks. Here’s the first:

ComicSpace is hiring more full-time staff — in particular, for this posting, an HTML/CSS (not necessarily javascript) person. Please pass along if you know anybody.

=======

Do you want to change the world? Do you have a love for comics? Do you
believe in the importance of independent artists? Do you have a great
love for web development? Do you believe strongly in making things
that are truly great?

We are looking for a passionate, creative and hard-working designer
for our next generation website. The position would be full time
on-site in our midtown Manhattan office. Our mission is to empower
independent comics creators to make a living while focusing on their
art. We have a substantial online comics community and a 6-year
history. We are looking to launch an expanded version of our primary
website and want you to be part of the team that creates it.

You should have experience with image manipulation using Photoshop or
something similar. You should feel comfortable with hand coding
HTML/CSS and tableless layout. Experience with Javascript and PHP are
both a bonus but not required.

We are an equal opportunity employer and honestly believe it would be
wonderful to end up with a non-traditional mix of employees.

Please include a resume and a pointer to some sample work you were
responsible for.

All responses should go to:

comicspacejobs@gmail.com

ComicSpace LLC is looking for a Javascript developer to work on finalizing our site relaunch with us. Must have a great deal of familiarity with the Yahoo User Interface library. Not required, but a big plus: familiarity with comics generally, and with the webcomics community specifically.

We have already designed the website, and know which YUI components we’ll be using. We’ve also started scripting them, but the scripting is going slowly (I’m personally in charge of this — basically, it takes me three times longer to do this stuff than it would take for a “real” Javascript developer).

Send an email with a cover letter, a resume or CV, and a list of links to your past projects to joey at comicspace.com with the subject line “YUI Developer”. Must include links to three or four separate YUI-powered websites you’ve worked on, and explanations of exactly whaqt you did on those projects.

This is an hourly contract gig. You can work from home. Doesn’t matter where you live. Rate negotiable.

The following is a proposal for stats functionality in WCN 2.0. It was written for the team of developers I am working with to create WCN 2.0. However, I would like to have your feedback, if you are a comics creator who uses — or is thinking about using — webcomicsnation.com to publish your webcomics. It should go without saying that Modern Tales, girlamatic, serializer, Graphic Smash, and all other sites powered by WCN 2.0 will share this functionality.

Notes:

Rather than focus on GUI issues, I am attempting in this document just to come up with all the different kinds of reports the creators (and readers!) would like to be able to see. Some of these reports are obviously subsets of others. So there’s a report for “All Unique Visitors to My Site” and another one for “All Unique Visitors to a Particular Comic on My Site” — and the way to handle that in the UI is probably to provide the larger report, with dropdowns or whatever to allow filtering. Stuff like that. In some places, it’s obvious how this filtering would result in different reports based on one general report, so that’s reflected below. In other cases, there are probably things I’ve listed as separate reports below which could actually just be different “views” of each other. I will need some help from someone with a more disciplined understanding of data structures to figure that out.

I am shooting for the most ambitious possible version of the stats in this document. It is likely that availability of some of these reports can and should be pushed out beyond initial launch. We should work together to decide which are “L” (launch) “D” (delayed) and “Future release”. I don’t trust myself to do this categorization alone, because I’d just list everything as “L”. Because I’m like that.

All reports should come with charts and graphs where appropriate. All data should be downloadable in Excel or .csv format.

The phrase “branded content category” means a webcomic series, blog, a wiki, a forum, or other content area owned by the user which has a name, and multiple content items within it (individual webcomic installments, blog posts, etc). In some cases, forums, wikis, blogs, etc., belong to a particular webcomic series, and should not be counted separately as content categories — pageviews to the “Superguy” blog and forum and wiki should be credited to the webcomic series “Superguy” itself. In others — a blog that is launched on its own, not as a supplement to a webcomic, but as a standalone branded kind of blog — they are counted as separate branded content categories.

The word “venue” means the location where a comic is viewed. This might be the actual website itself, or an instance of a widget on some outside webpage, or within a full-content RSS reader like SharpReader, or on a cellphone, on Xbox Live, etc.

Unique Visitor Reports

General Unique Visitors: A chart. User can view the number individual humans who have visited his/her suite of pages on wcn, or his/her branded standalone site powered by wcn, during a specified period of time. The default appearance is a graph showing unique visitors by day for a week. User can change both of the time values (view uniques by hour for a day, view uniques by week for a month, or uniques by day for a month, or uniques by month for a year, or uniques by week for a year, or uniques by day for a year, etc.) using a simple drop-down filtering mechanism. Can show all uniques across the entire site (default) or configured by user to show uniques by content category (webcomic series, blog, etc.) or by content item (individual webcomic installment, blog post, etc). Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile).

Registered Unique Users: this report shows the avatars of the top {n} number of registered wcn users who have visited this particular user’s wcn pages per {hour, week, month, year}, sorted by the number of visits per user. Note that these visitors can hide themselves from this report by choosing high privacy settings in their own profiles. If they do so, a placeholder question mark graphic will be shown where that user’s info would have normally appeared. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile).

Unique Visitors per Referring Link: this is a table, not a chart. Shows top outside links to the users’ pages sorted by incoming unique visitors (includes links back which pop a new window). Can be filtered to show only links to individual branded content categories, or individual content items. Can be aggregated by domain of outside link (so all links from any pages on a particular outside domain are aggregated into one number). Can be filtered to exclude or include WCN2 network pages (like the directory, the homepage, etc).

Unique Users by Merchandise Item: shows the number of unique users who look at and/or purchase one or more of the creator’s merchandise items per {hour, week, month, year}. Can be filtered to show all uniques who look at any item, or only those who purchased an item, or only those who looked at but didn’t purchase. Can show hard numbers or a percentage (vs. total uniques) at user’s option. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Entry Pages Per Unique: this is a table, not a chart. Shows the top {n} entry pages to the user’s site, sorted by incoming unique visitors. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Time Spent Per Unique: this is a chart. Shows the average time spent on the user’s site per unique visitor, by {hour, day, week, month, year}. I have some thoughts about how to acquire this data. But it won’t be easy. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Pageviews Per Unique: this is a chart. Shows the average number of pageviews on the user’s site per unique visitor, by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Earnings Per Unique: this is a chart. Shows the average revenue share earnings per unique visitor by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Reader Participation Index: this shows the unique visitors who drop some sort of content (webcomic or blog comment, wiki edit, forum post, etc) into the creator’s site by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be expressed as a hard number or as a percentage (vs. all unique visitors). Helps creator gauge reader involvement. Default shows data across all content categories, but can be filtered by individual content category (webcomic series, blog, etc) — probably not by individual content item, though (probably useless at that level).

Unique Users Downloading Files: shows the hard number, or percentage of unique users who download one or more of the creator’s downloadable comics per {hour, week, month, year}, sorted by most popular downloadable content item to least.

Top Content Items by Unique: shows the top {n} individual content items (webcomic installment, blog post) by unique visitor.

Uniques by Geography: maybe a Google Maps mashup showing where, geographically, one’s users cluster. Possibly tied into a database of upcoming comic conventions so that creators can plan their convention appearances based on their popularity in particular regions.

Pageview Reports

General Pageview Report: shows pageviews by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by content category or by individual content item. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile). Can be filtered by individual content category, or individual content item.

Top Content Items by Pageview: shows the top {n} individual content items (webcomic, blog post) by pageviews.

Advertising Reports

Banner Impressions Report: shows banner impressions by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by content category or by individual content item. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile).

Banner Clickthroughs Report: shows banner clickthroughs by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by advertiser and by banner. Can be filtered by content category or individual content item. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile).

Merchandise Sales Report: shows total number of merchandise items sold per {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be broken out by merchandise type (books, t-shirts, etc) or by individual merchandise item. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Merchandise Item Pageviews: this is a table, not a chart. Shows how many people are looking at the top {n} merchandise items the creator is offering for sale, per {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by venue (web or widget or mobile)

Referring Links

Note that the most important referring link report (uniques by referring link) is listed above under the “Unique Visitors” heading.

Referring Links by Age: shows the number of visits from any referring link resulting in at least {n} visits, sorted by newest links to oldest. Link age is determined by the first incoming visitor from that link. Number of visits can be expressed as a hard number of as a percentage of all visits, or as a percentage of all visits coming from referring links. Creator can change the {n} variable.

Earnings Reports

Advertising Revenue Share Report: shows revenue share by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be filtered by content category (allowing creator with multiple webcomic series, for example, to know which one he/she should be spending more time on, if money is a goal). Can be filtered by venue (allowing creator to see the difference between his/her website earnings vs. earnings from widgets vs. earnings from mobile, etc).

Merchandise Earnings Report: shows dollar amounts and/or unit sales of merchandise sales by {hour, day, week, month, year}. Can be broken out by merchandise type (books, t-shirts, etc) or by individual merchandise item.

I’ve been making comics as timelines, and timelines as comic navigation. Check this out:

Date-based navigation works best obviously for date based comics — diary comics, comics about current events, historical comics, etc.

Or time travel comics … Futurist comics …

- Eric

Note that there are three incarnations of WCN 2.0:

Portal Edition runs on WebcomicsNation.com, and only there.

Collective Edition runs Modern Tales, Girlamatic, Graphic Smash, and serializer, and will run any number of other collective sites that people wish to launch in the future

Solo Edition will run American Elf and any number of other single-strip sites that people wish to launch in the future.

So, that said, here’s the current Big Improvements List for WCN 2.0, in order of priority.

– Code-based templates, similar to WordPress or Blogger. This will allow Solo Edition clients to completely and totally control their own pages’ client-side code. Collective Edition will provide the same functionality, but to editors only. Cartoonists on Collective Edition sites, or on the main portal, will have some limited templating abilities (similar, but better than, the limited template control you have over your Modern Tales / Girlamatic / Serializer / Graphic Smash / WCN pages now).

– Full-featured, deeply informative stats, including the ability to see referrers and unique visitors, as well as the ability to break your stats up by tooncast views, archive syndication views, standard website views, and RSS views, as well as an integrated across-all-versions view of the stats.

– Cross-posting to multiple websites. This will allow cartoonists on any WCN 2.0 powered site to automatically cross-post their comics, fan-art, etc., to other websites — including other Modern Tales websites, any WordPress blog, any LiveJournal, and so on. This is one-post-at-a-time, not total archive transport. See below. This feature will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– Archive transport to other websites. This will allow cartoonists on any WCN 2.0 powered site to automatically transport their existing back-dated archives to other websites, provided those websites are set up to accept a WCN archive transport. This will include any other WCN powered site, as well as any WordPress blog. And that’s it, so far. I’m working on some other API’s, which look promising. LiveJournal, not so much (back-dating is a major problem with LJ). I’m afraid LJ crossposting will be limited to one-post-at-a-time. This feature will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– You will note that archive import is not a feature. Most of the archives anybody would want to import are on closed systems like DrunkDuck or Comic Genesis — and some preliminary sniffing around has indicated to me that the owners of those sites would view any attempt to import their archives as a hostile act. As much as cartoonists seem to want this, it’s not something that I can offer with this iteration of the software.

– Archive syndication to other websites. This is similar to the current Tooncast feature, except that remote webmasters will be able to virtually present your entire archive, not just your latest strip, on their own sites. You’ll be able to control which sites can and cannot do this — you can set it to allow all sites to do this, or you can hand-pick each website you allow. Premium members (and Solo Site clients) will be able to sell the rights to syndicate their archives to other websites, for example. Unlike archive transport, above, the archives will not actually be moved to the other website — they’ll be virtually included with a little bit of Javascript — so you will always have control over the material, and can pull it from any website at any time for any reason. This feature will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– Publishing to other formats from within the control panel. I am 100% certain we will have the ability to publish your comics to cellphones (thanks to netomat.com, where a friend of Shaenon’s works). I am about 50% sure we will have the ability to integrate Lulu.com’s print on demand functionality into your control panel (depends on if I can get a static IP address from Mosso — right now, I can’t). The overarching goal for this feature, and for the archive transport / archive syndication / cross-posting functionality is to make it so that you can manage your comic once, in one place, and have it simultaneously be available on WCN, on your own website or livejournal or both, on cellphones, in CBZ format, and in print, or in any combination of those you desire. Still investigating these features, but if they make it in, they will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– An integrated advertising server, so that you won’t have to rely on third-party tools like Google AdSense or Project Wonderful (though those will always be available to you — we won’t lock them out, of course); with an integrated ad server, you can keep all the money for yourself, instead of sacrificing unknown amounts (in the case of AdSense) or 25% (in the case of PW) to a third party. This will be available to WCN Premium members, to WCN Solo Site owners, to WCN Collective Site editors, and to all cartoonists on the 4 collective sites I own (MT, girlamatic, serializer, graphic smash).

– Dog-earable archive pages. Readers will be able to dog-ear individual pages in your archives for easier return. They will also be able to add public or private annotations to their dog-ears, and share them with other readers. This will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– Interactive fan-art pages. Readers will be able to submit fan-art in the same way they submit comments, through a webform. This will be available on all versions of WCN 2.0.

– Creator blogs. You’ll be able to have your own blog on whichever site you’re on (WCN itself, a collective site, or a solo site). Collective Edition sites will also have a group blog, moderated by the editor.

– Series “Fan Club”. The fan club will work sort of like MyBlogLog — your readers will sign up for it, and be able to interact with one another specifically as fans of your comic. They can post to a group “fan club” blog, instant message each other, etc. Fan club members will always be able to see which other fan club members are reading your comic when they are. This will be available on WCN and WCN Solo Site. Collective sites will have one big fan club for the site itself, but not for individual comics.

That’s not *all* that’s going to change, but those are the biggies.

What would you like to see in WCN 2.0? Assume I’m not going to be the only programmer working on it. And assume that all the minor little things that bug you today (lack of full previews in comic upload pages, inability to re-order your series on WCN, the navigation buttons being under the comment form) will be taken care of (they will). Those are obvious improvements. Other than those kinds of things, what would you like to see? The sky is the limit. Think big.

My next monitor? 

Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off “Surface,” a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. … 

 

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

UPDATE: This review is hilarious. “I can’t see a touch-screen mounted in a tabletop being all that useful for everyday applications. When I’m working on Excel spreadsheets, I want that screen upright and facing me, not flat on the table.”

Yeah, and who the hell uses a computer for anything but working on Excel spreadsheets?!

- Eric