It started as an idea from Robert Scoble.
I then made it an open wiki.
And today, the first ever cartoon based on ObsoleteSkills.com has been published in the Tampa Tribune.
First ObsoleteSkills cartoon, published in the Tampa Tribune
I wish a little that it was a funny cartoon, instead of one that is supposed to make you think, but either way I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out. As a side note, the main character is supposed to be based loosely on me.
Just a quick note to let folks know that I have just licensed contributions from ObsoleteSkills.com to be turned into a weekly cartoon series by cartoonist Greg Williams of the Tampa Tribune. The series will take skills added to the site for the inspiration of each cartoon, similar to Greg’s previous work on a comic called ‘Blogjam,’ which draws from several online sources. Greg also produces WikiWorld comics for Wikipedia’s Signpost online newspaper.
The cartoon series, which should debut in mid-June, will appear both in the print edition of the Tampa Tribune, and on the newspaper’s website. I will post a link to the cartoon when it is available online.
In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.
Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.
Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.
Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.
Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.
Inspired by an interesting blog post from Robert Scoble (yes, he does have them every now and then), I purchased the domain ObsoleteSkills.com and set up a wiki for people to document all those skills that the latest technology really makes obsolete. So far, skills that have been added to the wiki include things like adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV, dialing a rotary phone, and churning butter of all things. That is all great, and I hope that people enjoy it, but to register the domain I had to pay over four times more than I usually do, and in the process I had my eyes opened to a very dodgy system from Network Solutions.
I am coming into this on the tail end, as apparently Network Solutions had been called out on this previously, but the company undertakes a poor practice when a user searches for a domain: the company effectively registers it, and enters it with the status ‘clientHold,’ even if the user doesn’t actually register it. This DNS status usually means that there is a legal issue involving the registrant or a service on the domain, and it causes the domain to still be registered but not resolve to a server. The end result is that anyone wishing to register the domain, not just the person that originally searched for it, must go through Network Solutions to do it, and they can charge whatever they see fit.
This is exactly what happened with ObsoleteSkills.com. Someone, presumably also having seen Scoble’s post, would have searched for the domain using Network Solutions, but didn’t go through with the registration. When I went to register the domain with my normal registrar, it said it was taken, but I was able to register the domain through Network Solutions, albeit at a severe premium.
All this has been detailed quite well by Todd McKinney in his ‘Evil Still Lurks‘ post and a follow-up post.