To celebrate the launch of The Dark, we have arranged a very special prize draw, with our esteemed publisher Markosia, to win a signed copy of The Dark. The competition is simple to enter, just tweet our URL “http://www.thedarkcomicbook.com” anytime between now and January 31st. Every tweet will count as an entry, and a winning tweet (and tweeter) will be selected at random on February 1st 2010.

It would be fantastic if we could make The Dark a trending topic on Twitter, but I’ll settle for knowing that we’ve got the word out there to comics fandom and that someone, somewhere, will be enjoying a copy of The Dark gratis. As they say in the National Lottery adverts … Maybe, just maybe …

Full terms and conditions for the draw are available from our website.

You can now add a badge, or “Twibbon”, to your Twitter avatar to show your support for the upcoming release of The Dark from Markosia.

Twibbons have been spreading across Twitter for a number of causes, and you can even create your own at twibbon.com.

So, please add our twibbon to your profile and show your support.

Managing an online presence or brand can be a challenge, but it is something that all writers need to do, particularly comic book writers who can reach out to a significant proportion of their fanbase online.

A typical online profile will consist of your own blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and possibly a LinkedIn and/or MySpace account as well. You’ll also have at least one email account to manage, more than one if you like to practice a little email partitioning.

If, like me, you were finding that managing your online presence across these multiple platforms was becoming a headache, then you should take time out to try digsby

Digsby provides a Microsoft Messenger style interface to all of the above scenarios, with system tray icons and configurable pop-up “balloons” to alert you to activity on Facebook and Twitter. It’s also a solid chat client for when you want to talk to any of your online contacts, providing a much better interface to the clunky Facebook chat if nothing else. It also provides a website widget that you can install on your blog.

By combining all of your online presences into a single user interface and providing you with pop up notification of changes and activity, Digsby radically streamlines the process of managing a complex online identity or brand. Utilising Digsby, brand management and social networking are now something that I do in real time, in parallel with whatever task I am working on, as opposed to being something that requires one or more dedicated time slots during my day.

Patently, there is a security concern with using Digsby in that you need to store your account details on their server, protecting yourself behind a single Digbsy account password. For the moment, security breaches are nill. It is fair to say that only a single breach is required to kill of a project such as Digsby … but for now they have a clean sheet.

In the interests of disclosure I will mention that Digsby now also have an Affiliate Program, paying up to $1 for every new user. In the interests of staying as neutral as I can in this blog post, I am not currently signed up to this scheme. If you do download Digsby on my recommendation, please send your $1 to me direct

I have just lived through a bizarre experience, watching news of Michael Jackson’s death propogate across the Internet in real time.

I saw the news first on Twitter, where microbloggers tweeted and retweeted the news that had been broken on the TMZ website. Whilst traditional media, such as BBC News 24, tried to confirm the story, I was able to watch it metamorphose into something else time and again.

As I write this, the news has just broken on the BBC, the first news source that I trust enough to believe it. I have also had four messages that he is not dead, two that he is in a coma, one that it is a publicity stunt, and eight jokes (none funny). Some people praise, others decry. I am sorry to say, a few celebrate in a manner that tries to disguise ghoulish glee for a moral compass.

A friend has just IM-ed me to tell me that the Wikipedia page has already been updated. I have no doubt the eBay auctions are already being set up to auction off tickets to concerts that will now never play.

All of which makes me wonder something …  is this the way that the worth of our lives will be measured in future; not by the deeds we do, but by the tweets and blog posts about us when we are gone?

I have 296 Facebook friends. I worry that this is not enough of a legacy.

GeekDad has very kindly selected the top 100 friends that you wish you had on Twitter and provided links so that you can dutifully cyber-stalk them.

And I have obeyed.

I am now following the “100 Geeks You Should Be Following On Twitter” like a good boy, but on my part more as a curious social experiment to compare who tweets more often and more interestingly – the friends I have found or these professional geeks at arms.

So, check them out. I’m following them right now. You should be to.

Go. Follow!

In these days of bloated software that requires multi-gigabyte installs, websites that take an age to load even on a 24 mbit connection, and keyrings that have more storage capacity that it was original thought was required to hold the world’s knowledge … it’s nice to see some standing up for elegant, efficient coding.

Congratulations to all of the #tweetcoding round 1 winners.

Scott from Comic Book Outsiders has set up a Twitter bot that will be re-tweeting any tweets that contain the words “Bristol” and “comic” over this weekend.

Follow the bot here: http://twitter.com/BristolConBot

Looks like I made the cut for the Monkey On My Back Twitter Comic. Check out panel #10 for something typically MWM.

Wasn’t entirely sure how this would work, both practically and in terms of the way the story would break down, but there is certainly something interesting happening.

What I would love to see is this being done on a larger scale now – with every response Tweet getting an illustration and creating a divergent path in the story. That sort of meta-fiction fascinates me, andI think it would be amazing to see the different storylines expand, cross, converge, and even merge towards the end.

I’ve been thinking about trying to build some kind of overall narrative into the Monkeys with Macineguns Live! event based on this. I’m not sure if it will be possible, but certainly we’ll be Twittering throughout the day, so if you can’t make it to the show itself, be sure to follow us on Twitter and see how we get on.

The guys at Monkey On My Back are running an interesting experiment. Can the almost infinite monkeys of Twitter create anything near to the works of Shakespeare, or are we all about to SMS ourselves up in flames?

The gambit is simple – start a story, then have people tweet in the next line. Pick the one you like, retweet it, draw a comic book panel for it, then wait for more tweets to come in. Rinse and repeat until story done.

I’ve tossed my hat into the ring, although with my track record of killing “comic jams” dead with my overuse of the word “betwixt” (long story, for another post), who knows if I will get to be one of the monkeys in question?

It came from nowhere and spread like a virus. Suddenly everybody we knew was on it – telling us what they’d been up to, uploading photos, sending flirtatious messages and logging on as if the site were crack and they were addicts.