Widgets are The Future of The Comic Strip
Growing up, reading comic strips was my major reason to read the newspaper. To this day, I still enjoy reading the comics within the Style section of the Washington Post. Mainly, I read Garfield, Peanuts, and Dilbert.
But I have the feeling that the physical newspaper isn’t long for this world. (I think my home town newspaper is getting small enough that it will qualify as a pamphlet.)
People are turning to the Web for their information. Web applications like personalized home pages are becoming the view port into the world. The Web can give me what I want… where I want it
If the comic strip wants to succeed, it needs to be modular so that its content can be syndicated in whatever environment a user desires.
Well… Dilbert has done just that. There is now the Official Dilbert Widget.
You can post the Dilbert widget to your personalized home page, your social network, or your blog side bar easily. From within the widget, you can search view today’s comic strip (pane by pane) or you can view past comic strips.
I think it’s wonderful. It’s on my iGoogle page.
And… Yes, the Official Dilbert Widget is powered by Clearspring Technologies. (Disclosure: I’m joining the staff at Clearspring.)
What do you think of the Dilbert Widget? Have you installed it somewhere yet? Could you make it better? How could you take the future of publishing comic strips to an even better level?
I’m like viewing comics through RSS feeds. It’s nice waking up in the morning to a half dozen web comics.
Only if we could get everyone to use RSS.
the future of comic books is also interesting, marvel has been embracing the flash paper style comic book 2.0 for sometime now. check it out if you havent. They have coined the term dotcomics. http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/hq/