We got sent some cartoons today by an older American cartoonist. I won’t reveal his name, but his work appeared in all the major cartoon publications in the 70s and 80s notably The New Yorker and Playboy.

I have a very geeky confession.

Today's blog will be about blogs. Or more precisely what use of our cartoons is permitted on blogs. The media scene had changed immeasurably since CartoonStock was set up 8 1/2 years ago when sales of cartoons were virtually all for use in hard copy print publications or in presentations.

I've kind of taken it for granted over the years that everything gets busy in November and December. But why should it be?

A designer friend of mine, who's also snowed under, hit the nail on the head yesterday when he said "everyone makes Christmas a deadline".

Yesterday's Web 2.0 revelation was Zopa.com. I'd never heard of it before so I'm going to bang on about it a bit - apologies to those of you who may already be familiar with it.

Much of this invariably involves counting the pennies, but there are other resources involved too, creativity and people among them. Some resources are harder to quantify than others; there is a saying in HR these days that troublecomes on two legs. People are not always as easy to manage as say, numbers, as it is not always possible to predict what they are going to do.

Crowdsourcing, as it's known (getting millions of members of the public to provide intellectual property very cheaply rather than paying more to a professional "expert") is becoming a popular use for the web. News sites ask for members of the public to send in mobile phone photos of accidents or newsworthy events, YouTube gathers video content from all and sundry. Wikipedia gets all it's knowledge from you and me.

Thankfully this embarrassing secret is lessened by the fact that when I talk to other professional cartoonists they don't seem to have much of a clue either. Terminology is important to any industry. Management consultants are able to charge much higher fees for their ability to state the obvious, because they state it in a way the rest of us find incomprehensible. Cartoonists are generally self taught and work away from each other and don't always feel confident about the terms they use, but if they aren't confident of the correct terms who will be?

My job (as well as bossing people around) is to make sure the level of cakes being consumed by the staff here at CartoonStock is kept to the minimum.  I know that whilst Cornelius is busy communicating with our cartoonists and co-ordinating with clients he does consume desserts of worryingly high fat and sugar proportions.  Although everything in moderation is fine, what I want is to see more fruit and veg being consumed....mung beans even!

It strikes me that there are a lot of parallels here with the work of our cartoonists.

I have always threatened to compile a book, not of rejected cartoons by professionals (as Matthew Diffee recently did in "Rejection Collection" concerning New Yorker cartoons) but the really 'out there' stuff sent in by non-professionals. I have always liked to believe that there must be some material that is 'so bad it's good' or in our case so bad it's funny. However my actual experience to date is that when a cartoon isn't funny, however not funny it is, it doesn't get so unfunny that it comes all the way round to being funny again. It just stays not funny.

One of my main jobs here is moderating the cartoons that come in to us on a daily basis.  I have to check them for typos and grammar, make sure the captions are centralised, add in extra keywords if necessary and basically ensure that the image is as close to perfect as possible before it's added to the website.  (As editors and publications download directly from the site, the images have to be ready for them to use immediately).