January 09, 2008

A Personal Note

Saturday, 14 Premise 2008

There is something sticking in my craw these days that I would like to talk to you about:

- late in 2006 I was amazed and honored to be contacted by Keith Tucker of What Now? cartoons and allowed to promote his site and display his latest toons. After a few months of doing so, I was starting to see his work being regularly featured on a number of other progressive web sites (with a lot more visits), including Bartcop. And, shortly thereafter, I was asked to stop displaying his cartoons on my site because it was 'cutting down on the number of page views to his site'. While watching all of his cartoons, from then on, being displayed on more popular web sites. I complied with his wishes and stopped putting his cartoons (linked to the original at his site) on my web site. For some strange reason, I was somewhat upset that a podunk blogger (with less hits over five years than the other blogs who were featuring his toons get in a day) was asked to stop displaying his work while at the same time other blogs were now starting to do the same thing. I'm pretty sure I got another email from him informing me he had moved and asking me to infotain the studio audience on the subject. Funny - somehow I never got around to it. Until now.

Keith, if you're out there reading this, I would appreciate finding out from you why it was suddenly not okay for me to display your cartoons here (because I was 'taking away hits' from your site), while at the same time it was suddenly okay for other, much more popular sites, to be doing the same thing. I usually link to the original cartoon on your site when I show them here (something I don't see others doing) and save a copy of the toon on my server (so you don't have to pay for bandwidth at my site when somebody looks at your work over here). Is there something else going on that I'm unaware of?

Anyways,... this is not keeping me up at night - and it's not as if I obsess about it. Just, once in a while, I get mildly annoyed that I don't know why I seem to be singled out for special treatment. So there's that. But somehow I feel lots better just posting about it here...

Posted by (: Tom :) at January 9, 2008 05:05 PM