Let me start right off by saying there is no way I ever want to enter into a pissing match with Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess about who had the harder childhood.

Mine could never compete with the therapy-inducing “Stanley the Magical, Talking Squirrel.” And for that, I’m thankful.

But, as I started reading her book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened last week, the chapter titled “My Childhood: David Copperfield Meets Guns & Ammo Magazine” did bring on my own set of flashbacks that I felt compelled to share, since, you know, it worked out for a book deal for The Bloggess and you just never know…

Early in my childhood we did get our water from a well. Not the kind Jack & Jill went to, but also not one with radon like Jenny’s family. And also, we moved up to “city water” not too many years later, so that doesn’t really count, other than just to say, I understand what “beige” water is like.

I, too, grew up with furniture dedicated to the storage of guns aka the gun cabinet. Ours was not just a free-standing cabinet, though, ours was built into the custom home my parents designed and we moved into when I was four. Not only did we have a built-in gun cabinent in the house, it was given a place of prominence in our living room - right behind the television. It did also include a bow and arrows, although my father did not use his as often as Jenny’s dad did.

I do know what it means to clean a deer, although standing in one is not something I had the misfortune to do. (read her book to find out more about that one) Luckily, the only wildlife I remember my father cleaning in our backyard was fish that were hung from the frame of an old swing set.

While my father was not a taxidermist like Jenny’s, he did do his part to keep them in business. In that same living room/main family room of the house with the gun cabinet, the walls were adorned with (from left to right in the picture here taken before my Senior Banquet) deer, javelina, antelope and bass. (not pictured - a turkey, too) I never really thought it unusual until friends visited from college. Didn’t everyone have stuffed animal heads on their wall? Oh, and did you catch that I called it Senior Banquet, not Prom? That’s because proms have dancing and we couldn’t have dancing. Seriously. I lived Footloose.

I, too, went to gather the chicken eggs once and found a snake. Well, no. That’s not really true. It turned out just to be an old biddy that wasn’t too happy I was sticking my hand up over my head into a box I couldn’t see in and into her business. Because I’d been warned enough that snakes could possibly be in the coop at my grandmother’s house in Arkansas, my childhood mind equated the squawk of the hen to the hiss of a snake and eggs went flying as I ran screaming into the house. My brothers must not have been around or I’m sure I’d still be hearing about it from them (along with the periodic torment I still receive over a Scooby Doo-induced nightmare).

And finally, hobos didn’t eat my pet duck, but I did eat the cow that I bottle-fed as a calf. I know that sounds harsh (and The Bloggess’ PETA friends will probably now come find me), but he had it coming. Oh sure, they start out all cute and sweet and you feel sorry for the poor little orphaned baby. Then, before you know it, the yearling is nearly as tall as you, weighs much more and thinks that butting you upside the barn wall is fun play. When you try to run away, the game becomes chase and when you look back to see how close he is on your heels you turn around just in time to see nothing but green as your face slams into the side of a John Deere combine. As you roll under the barbed wire fence to safety and notice the blood dripping from your nose, a steak dinner starts sounding pretty good.

I’m still reading the book, and laughing out loud, so there’s no telling what else might pop up that I feel compelled to share. Since the book I finished just prior to this one was “Fat is the New 30,” you’re forewarned that my Deep South roots may just start showing more than they have on this blog before.

What about you? Have any down-home stories to top these?

As a life-long multitask-er, it’s not unusual that this morning I was web surfing while listening to the latest episode of the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast.

As Shel and Neville discussed the latest round of Klout media coverage initiated by a recent Wired article mentioning a digital marketing executive being passed over for a job due to his low Klout score, I popped over to the Klout website to check my own.

As a consultant and speaker, Shel felt “you can’t ignore it” because people thinking to hire him might be looking at it; while Neville took the stance that “if it means I’ll miss out on something, well then, so be it.”

I’m probably somewhere between. If I were looking to hire someone to work in or speak about social media, I admit that I would likely check their score. A low score might elicit much the same reaction I had when someone recently came across my radar with a Twitter bio that said they’d been “at the forefront of social media” for the past decade, but apparently just joined Twitter one month earlier. Scoff.

But I would probably dig deeper - not so deep to cross a line that, as Ryan “SoMeDellLawyer” Garcia, says “isn’t very smart” - but, I wouldn’t make a unilateral hiring decision based on it. In the case of the 10-year newbie I scoffed at, perhaps this was simply a new account and they had others previously. And, I probably wouldn’t want to work for someone who did pass me over for a peer simply because they had a higher score than me.

That all said, tools like Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, Appinions and others can serve as a starting point for identifying influencers or new hires. And it looks like they are continuing to try to improve themselves.

The latest move I see toward that is what I discovered surfing during FIR this morning - Klout Matchups. While the ability to give “+K” to people who influence you has been available on Klout for a while now adding some human element to the equation, these new “matchups” take it a step further.

The gamification element and boxing match feel brings a bit more fun to it, which is perhaps why it caught my eye more than a previous incarnation of this that some users were seeing back in January.

I think “Geek, blogger, thinker & Engagement Consultant” Lee Stacey said it well on a recent @barryfurby post when he commented on the concept of social scoring:

“I think it’s impossible to do without human intervention and human intervention by way of giving +K or Kred is heavily biased towards the platforms on which it is best propagated and therefore doesn’t really work either.”

No, it’s not a total solution. The game can still be gamed, certainly, but at least it shows an attempt to move beyond the almighty algorithm for score determination.

Do you think it’s enough to gain some goodwill for Klout?

Pinterest. It’s been called “Napster for Housewives” in Forbes, and Laura McKenna notes that its “lethal combination of social media competition and escapism” hooks the “Aspirational Housewife” in us all.

To hearken back to a 1980s IABC study I read while a university student, is it the “Velvet Ghetto” of social networks? Or, is there more to it? Are there business uses for Pinterest beyond fashion and food? Nikki Pilkington points out the user makeup is a different story in the UK, where men visit the site more frequently.

While I’m still working out the answers to that for brands such as my own employer Dell (I’m part of the team that’s trying things out with some of the company’s first boards in Pinterest), I stumbled across one idea that I think has merit for personal business use - a visual professional portfolio.

I wish I could say I thought of this myself, but I actually saw it somewhere else first. Kelly Barrett created a “Kelly Barrett, the Professional” board and, if memory serves me correct, Rachael King tweeting that is how it first crossed my radar. Then, I also ran across the “my CV” board from Nadav Raviv - not part of that male UK contingent mentioned before, but rather a Pinterest user in Israel.

So, I took the idea from others before me and started my own professional portfolio board. Originally, I dubbed it my “Visual CV,” after memories of the VisualCV networking site I’d joined in 2008, but never used. It sounded cool back then when it was in “early Public Beta phase,” but it always seemed like something that would require too much of my time to set up. So, when I got an email toward the end of 2011 saying it was shutting down, it was no surprise and I congratulated myself on not having invested much time on it. But, it turns out the rumors of its demise were greatly exaggerated, or more accurately, that someone else decided to revive it through an acquisition.

And, I still think VisualCV sounds like a good idea. But pinning, is just so easy! If you’re a creative professional (but maybe not this creative) in this day & age, most likely you can find lots of pinnable material online to illustrate your work. It’s as easy to start as doing an ego searchon Google.  (and if the tips in that link from Lifehacker don’t help you with it, then you might have a “Google Credibility” issue you need to address)

Once you’ve searched around and found some items you’re particularly proud of, you can pin away! Adding the “pin it” button to your browser makes it that much easier. Here is the result of one afternoon I spent pinning: Portfolio - Laura P Thomas.

Just keep a few quick tips in mind:

• Pinterest automatically arranges items in your board in order you pin them. If you want chronological order to the board, you’ll need to be a bit more methodical in your pinning.
• If you have a career that spans more than the past decade, it’s likely to be tough to find the old stuff online. There are ways you can get creative to fix this. Upload an image you’d like to use for illustration to some place like Flickr, Facebook or your G+ account (somewhere you don’t mind pointing people toward).
• Even when it is online, not everything you want to showcase will have a pretty image. This can be addressed in the creative way listed above and supplemented with a link in the description to point to more detail about the actual project or the resulting media story.

Since this was not an original idea of mine, it’s likely that many of you may have already created professional boards on Pinterest. If so, please share links and tips in the comments!

Photo via Creative Commons courtesy Bill Ohl

I was amazed how yesterday’s announcement that Facebook would buy Instagram overtook my twitterstream, prompted emails amongst coworkers and generally created a huge uproar.

Beyond amazement at the dollar amount involved, the overwhelming response I saw was from unhappy Instagram users. People are even giving out instructions on how to export all your photos “before Facebook ruins everything” and delete your Instagram account.

What am I not getting? Such weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over an app that adds filters and edge effects to your phone photos?

Maybe it’s because I spent so much time in desktop publishing in a previous life, starting on PageMaker even before it was owned by Adobe. I’ve lived through the advent of image edge effects made easy and witnessed the subsequent overuse in the late 90s. I anticipated this app would run a similar course.

I also aligned with Chris Ziegler when he and Dieter Bohn debate on the Verge whether “the retro-hip filters [are] destroying the visual internet or are they simply the zeitgeist of our time?”  Like Chris, I saw Instagram as a false artistry, a crutch, “a misguided replacement for a properly composed shot and a decent sensor.”

And that’s why I stayed away. I’m obviously missing something, though, when there is such devotion to Instagram.

Dieter countered that “When most people share photos, they’re trying to share their experience at that moment. Adding a filter is a way to make what came out of an inaccurate image sensor feel more true to that moment.”

Ok, so I can see where there might be a place and time for an effect to tell a story. And maybe every picture does tell a story, as Rod Stewart sang; but, come on - it’s an app to make photos look fancy, right? Why all the hullabaloo?

“You’re more than an app: you are an extraordinary community, and that’s what I fell in love with,” opined Tim Malbon. And one of his blog commentors added “Instagram was/is about intimacy.”  So, evidently, users were doing more than just broadcasting their fanci-fied photos to Twitter. There were connections being made within Instagram itself.

One of the Instagram co-founders, Kevin Systrom, described it during the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing conference as “a photo-based social network.” He also added:

“I didn’t start this to be a photo app. It was about communicating visually. Those are two very different things. A photo app is a utility. It’s like comparing Twitter to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you’re not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.”

So, in that light, I guess the angst is caused because users are worried their little (if, 30 million users, is little) community will get lost in the larger Facebook community.

Apparently 20 percent of Instagram users already connect their accounts with Facebook, but they weren’t all exactly welcoming to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently when he posted on their site…

Photo via Creative Commons by Aleks Grynis

It’s been three months since my last post here. That’s probably enough to take away my blogger card. Or at least hurt my blogger cred.

I could blame it on the holidays, of course. And, then the first three months of the year seem to have been totally sucked up by SXSW. Yeah, I know that’s just a couple of weeks, but it takes a lot of work to prepare for those weeks when you’re doing more than just attending or even speaking.

I took to calling myself “chief cat herder” becasue we were all over the place trying to make sure the everyone who came to SXSWedu, Interactive, Film and Music knew that they were in the hometown of Dell.

Our presence at SXSW included everything from participating in numerous panels, hosting an Entrepreneurs UnConference at Dell, organizing several “What’s your More?” music and film brand activations, having a Dell@retail booth in the event tradeshow, sponsoring the gaming Screenburn Arcade showcase, prominently placing over 300 products throughout the festival, launching a new education campaign and bringing our Social Media Command Center onsite at the event.

When your child tells random people how glad they are that SXSW is over, you know you’ve been spending too much time on it. It took seven posts just to hit the highlights over on Direct2Dell, but you can see some of it in this new video we just put out:

But, the truth is, there’s always something else to take up my time. And if there isn’t, I’ll find it. Because I really don’t know what to do when I don’t have 10 things to do.

So, I’m making it a goal to get back to being more active here. I’m also going to get more active in IABC. I rejoined my local LSU Alumni board last year, too, and vow to be a much better co-chair for our scholarship fundraiser this year.

It almost feels like New Year’s or something with all these resolutions! Now I just need to start exercising…

“Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become too big to be managed by a single individual.” – aplusk.posterous.com

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I read that right? One person can’t keep up with their own Twitter account?

Apparently that’s Ashton Kutcher’s new opinion based on the fact that he got panned for what E! described as an “ill-considered pro-Joe Paterno tweet.” So, just because he gets bad reactions to one tweet he’s going to turn over his twitter account to his PR team? Seems a bit over-reactive to me.

Surely he can’t think he’s the only one who’s tweeted something they regretted. I’ve done it myself, albeit to a much smaller audience. The fact is, many have gone before him (James Andrews). Some have had a hard recovery, but most been able to overcome, a few even capitalize (Red Cross), on mistakes.

“A collection of over 8 million followers is not to be taken for granted. I feel responsible to deliver informed opinions and not spread gossip or rumors through my twitter feed.” – aplusk.posterous.com

Now that I can agree with, although I have to suspect due to the continued existence of celebrity rags at the grocery checkout, a great many people who follow someone like Ashton are actually hoping for a bit of that gossip.

To me, the strength of twitter has always been the ability to eliminate barriers and connect with people directly. Granted, someone with eight million followers is going to have a hard time going 1×1 with them all, but at least he was trying.

Not a big follower of celebrities on Twitter, I did still love the way he, Demi and other members of their family and close friends embraced the platform and seemed to understand that same strength I see. But, now that appears to be lost.

“While I feel that running this feed myself gives me a closer relationship to my friends and fans I’ve come to realize that it has grown into more than a fun tool to communicate with people. While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk, I’m going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content. My sincere apologies to anyone who I offended. It was a mistake that will not happen again.” – aplusk.posterous.com

Whether or not a fan or a follower, I still feel this is a loss. Don’t run away Ashton. I mean, it’s not like you can’t say or do something stupid somewhere else (Rolling Stone, Oprah’s couch). Keep twitter real.

In case you missed it yesterday, Google+ launched their first official pages. Pages are extremely similar to profiles, but are for businesses and have some key differences from personal profiles:

• Pages cant add people to circles until the page is added first or mentioned. Learn more.
• Pages can be made for a variety of different entities whereas profiles can only be made for people.
• The default privacy setting for elements on your page profile is public.
• Pages have the +1 button.
• Pages cant +1 other pages, nor can they +1 stuff on the Web.Pages cant play games.
• Pages dont have the option to share to Extended circles.
• Pages dont receive notifications via email, text, or in the Google bar.
• Pages cant hangout on a mobile device.
• Local pages have special fields that help people find the business physical location.

I was fortunate to be part of a great team that had been working for many months behind the scenes to prepare the +Dell page for launch day. One of the things weve been planning related to the page launch is more hangouts.

Several Dell employees, and our iconic leader Michael Dell, have already been holding Google+ hangouts for a while now, but we thought a few timed to the new page launch would be a good way to showcase what makes G+ different from our pages and accounts on other social networks. We werent the only ones thinking that.

Its time to put on makeup. Its time to dress up right

Another thing that would probably be hard for you to miss lately is the fact that those timeless Muppets have a new movie coming out. They were also quick to leverage G+ pages to help promote that movie and soon after launch announced that they would be doing a hangout.

So, with three nine-year-old girls excitedly watching over my shoulder (this is soooo exciting! oh, I need to fix my hair! I LOVE the Muppets!), I eagerly logged into Google+ at the appointed hour. I knew there were limits to how many people can get into a hangout, so I warned them we might not get in, but got rather excited myself when it looked like we might.

I soon realized that what we were viewing, however, was not an actual hangout, but rather a video stream of a hangout just between the Muppets and their real-life co-stars not a hangout with the general public as I and the more than 16,000 other people who at that time had circled the Muppets page expected.

It didnt take long for others to begin to realize this, too, and a flurry of negative comments began:

Some visitors, obviously new to G+, thought the video feed was cool because it was supposedly live, but those familiar with G+ knew it wasnt a real hangout there was no join the hangout button on the Muppet page.

So, we walked away and enjoyed our dinner. If it was just video, we could watch at our convenience.

But, about 30 minutes later I returned out of curiosity and found that they had switched to a real hangout. Of course, it immediately filled with the maximum of 10 people. I still kept hitting the try again button just in case I got lucky, but apparently only one person ever left the hangout, so only a total of 11 people actually got to hang with the Muppets. At least two, possibly three, of them apparently work at Google — a fact that was quickly noticed and drew comments.

Tips for a more celebrational, Muppetational hangout

So, what are the lessons learned here for other brands and businesses that want leverage hangouts?

Dont promise more than you can to deliver. If it had been clearly stated to be a viewing of the cast hanging out with each other, the confusion of visitors wondering how to join, and their subsequent disappointment when they realized they couldnt, would have been avoided.

Dont expect everyone to know how a hangout works. Google+ is still relatively new, and even those who created accounts before now have probably not leveraged all the functionality. When the real hangout did start, many commented on the frustration of having to download a plugin. Let everyone know theyll need to prep download plugin, check microphone, etc.

Explain how streaming can help others join the fun. Until the limits are raised on how many people can join a hangout, video streaming is a beneficial way to allow more people to see whats happening. Position this as an alternative, though, rather than using it as the primary means of communicating. Engaging with others is the primary goal not pushing out content.

Dont fill all your available spaces with your own people. Maybe the Googlers in the Muppet hangout had the same opportunity the general public had to join. Or, maybe they were providing assistance because the Muppet team wasnt well-versed on how to conduct the hangout. Either way, it left a bad impression and is a warning that with such a small limit on how many can join a hangout, you dont want to fill it up with your own employees and create an image that youre only talking to yourself.

The main thing is lots of up-front communication to your audience. The more they know about what will be happening and how best to participate, the smoother everything will go. And, be sure you’re interacting directly with people to avoid the impression one fan expressed by describing the Muppet hangout as “a media/pr blitz with little consideration for the fans.”

Im sure there are others out there with more experience than I have with hangouts, though, so any and all other tips you have for a celebrational hangout are welcome! | Lessons Learned from a Muppet Hangout

On first look, the headline of this post may seem like a black & white answer, but it’s really a loaded question according to some of the latest research released by social media scholar, youth researcher & advocate danah boyd.

The recent release of  “Unintended consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act‘” by boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz and John Palfrey generated a lot of interest.

The blog All Facebook said that doing so was maybe “not as bad as parents buying beer for their kids under age 21 or cigarettes for those under 18,” but all three do require parents displaying a lack of respect for rules to the children they expect to follow their rules.

One commenter on that blog asked “how else are they going to stay in touch with their friends in this digital age?” Several others felt it was OK if they were actively monitoring their child’s site and had the account password (as if that couldn’t be changed when the kid decided to lock mom out).

But another raised a great point: “While I know that it seems safe to have a child on facebook and parents say they are monitoring their childs FB …I don’t know how many are ACTUALLY doing it. Or how many know how to effectively protect their child on facebook.”

This one, however, is the comment I think gets back to how grey the answer is to the seemingly black & white question I posed: “I have never thought about if i would break similar age rules in other areas. In almost every other area i would never even think about breaking the rules. Interesting why it’s ok with me with facebook… ”

So what rule is being broken? Well, there are really a couple of them. First is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) mentioned in the research. This Act became effective back in April 2000 and is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
It basically says that if a website has visitors under 13 and collects any information from them it must use “reasonable procedures” to ensure they are getting permission from the child’s parent. These procedures may include:

• obtaining a signed form from the parent via postal mail or facsimile;
• accepting and verifying a credit card number;
• taking calls from parents on a toll-free telephone number staffed by trained personnel;
• email accompanied by digital signature;
• email accompanied by a PIN or password obtained through one of the verification methods above.

All of those, however, require a certain amount of administration and personnel to manage that many social media outlets do not have or want to hire to make sure all the kids under 13 have parental permission. That’s why sites like Facebook simply say they don’t allow anyone under 13 on them.

And that is the second rule being deliberately broken by 68 percent of those surveyed in the research that reported their child joined Facebook before the age of 13.

It’s worth noting that this research was supported by Microsoft Research. This gives Digital Democracy the feeling that “this study is an industry-funded attack against the current FTC proceedings that will ensure that children cannot be targeted via mobile and location data services or be the victims of companies engaged in behavioral targeting.”

But, whether you are for or against COPPA, the fact that half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds reported their child has a Facebook account, most (82%) knew when their child signed up, and most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account should make you stop and ponder.

My own nine-year-old girl has friends who already have Facebook pages, so I’ve faced the request join those numbers. My stance is that the rule is 13, so not until she’s 13. Not to cast any stones at others, but simply because I want to set an example for her to follow rules.

Even though that’s my current position, we’ve still already had frequent talks about what she should or shouldn’t share online. Those who remember when the two of us were touring kids virtual worlds will know why. Although many protections are in place and as much as I try to monitor (like many parents of young Facebookers), I know I can’t always be there, so talking early and often is my plan.

What’s your plan for preparing your kids for online interactions? All suggestions welcome!

“Yes, ‘winning’ matters, but it’s winning at hard things - intrinsic motivation - that really matters. People aren’t stupid. Pasting scoring on trivial activities doesn’t make them less trivial. As Rilke said in his poem The Man Watching, ‘What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small.’” - Tim O’Reilly as posted on Google+.

It’s a great point of view from Tim about what he calls the shallow end of gamification.
As I start this week in a somber mood, trying to get a grip on some hard things in my personal life (no, I don’t tell you everything online), it brings me back around to thoughts that have been floating around in my head for a while now.

There’s a little blue sticky note on my desk with two sentences written down to remind me to put it to paper post. It says, “Klout has added foursquare, flickr and others. What’s next? My Fandango account?”

My initial thoughts were around privacy and how little it really takes for us to give up more and more of it. A free Spotify account earlier than everyone else and $30 worth of free moo cards? Sure, I’ll connect you to my Goggle+ account!

I throw no stones. I stand guilty of accepting both of those “Klout perks” referenced and of connecting every new service they bring on board to which I currently subscribe.

The human ego is so easily stroked that we forget how small a thing increasing our Klout score is and how it can make us small. It can make us forget what all this social media was supposed to be about.

What brought this home for me was an interview with Klout’s founder Joe Fernandez that I read in “The Social Media Monthly” magazine during my recent travels (the fact that there is a print publication out there focused solely on social media is a whole other post to be written). In it he says:

“A year from now I think we continue our march as being the standard around measuring influence. And we’re really focused on how do we make consumers, end users, care that they have Klout Scores? I get mad when I see CNN scrolling tweets and they don’t have Klout Scores next to them. I want you to see that Klout Score everywhere you go.”

So, does he mean CNN should only show tweets from people with high Klout scores? Or, we as readers of the tweets should only pay attention to those with high Klout scores?

Either way, I thought the beauty of social media was that it gave everyone a voice and you didn’t have to be “someone” to be heard. Too idealistic?

It’s Sunday morning, and as I always like to do, I’m reading the newspaper. I generally scan the headlines of the main sections. As expected, there are several stories about 9/11. I read a few, but not too in-depth. I’m not sure I want to dwell.

So, I head to my favorite part of the Sunday paper - the comics. I see the impact of 9/11 there, too, and the same struggle I face to figure out how to commemorate its 10th anniversary.

Some of the strips make no mention of it. Life must go on, right? Many talk of remembrance and respect for fallen heroes. A very few risk political statements. Some stick with quiet symbolism.

I feel for the writers and artists of these comics because I experience the same internal conflict. I don’t want to be consumed by looking back. I don’t want to be unfeeling or disrespectful either.

Many bloggers today will be writing about where they were when the towers fell. What impact it has had on their lives. Who they knew, loved and lost in the events of the day or the wars that followed.

I could talk about hearing of it at work from someone dialed in to a meeting and then rolling a television into that meeting in time to see the second tower go. I could remember the anguish of watching hours upon end of coverage at home on my couch. I could share the grief of my miscarriage that took place the next week.

Instead, I think I’ll enjoy a quiet morning with my wonderful girl who just turned nine years old two days ago. I’ll recall, like Freshly Squeezed did, that we always have and always will live in a dangerous world.

Then, I’ll go to church, where I’ll pray for those who lost much more than me, thank God for how he’s blessed us, and ask for his continued guidance, support and love as we face what’s still before us.

Related articles

• Sunday comics plan unique 9/11 tribute (cnn.com)
• 9/11 anniversary: Comic strips remember the heroes, victims (herocomplex.latimes.com)
• Funny Pages Turn Serious for 9/11 (abcnews.go.com)