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	<title>Monster&#039;s Blog &#187; Michael A. Charles</title>
	<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com</link>
	<description>Online reputation management with the StepRep Spokesmonster.</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:36:28 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>StepRep and the secret plot for world domination.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hooo-ah. Just got back from bushwhacking through the far-right fringes of online conspiracy-theorizing.
It all started with StepRep. A while back, as part of our Great Dog Food Experiment, I &#8220;adopted&#8221; a used bookstore called the Book Bin, in Salem, Oregon. I created an account for the Book Bin and started monitoring their reputation using StepRep. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/08/steprep-and-the-secret-plot/</link>
			</item>
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		<title>Ads that pretend to be art.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A few days ago Jason Kottke linked to this list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever, a whole month&#8217;s supply of first-class procrastination material. It&#8217;s an excellent resource, though predictably heavy on stuff from the last twenty years or so: the late David Foster Wallace gets six (well-deserved) entries, while Tom Wolfe gets only two, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/07/ads-that-pretend-to-be-art/</link>
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		<title>Rethinking the Weebles.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What do you think about the Weebles?

That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve taken to calling the little faceless creatures who currently dwell on the main page of StepRep:

The Weebles have been there ever since the site was redesigned back in February. Given the many permutations the main page has gone through since StepRep launched back in January 2009, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/07/rethinking-the-weebles/</link>
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		<title>Edmund Burke, Agile thinker.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When visitors find out that we follow the Agile software development process here at VendAsta, they invariably ask, &#8220;What would the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke think of Agile?&#8221;
When this question comes up, we laugh and quickly change the subject to David Hume, with whom we feel on firmer ground. But I&#8217;ve been reading Burke [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/06/edmund-burke-agile-thinker/</link>
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		<title>Questionable taste and superior smell.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Before Christmas I started working on this idea for a MashedIn ad. I wasn&#8217;t trying to be tasteless. I&#8217;d recently read an article that talked about dogs&#8217; amazing sense of smell &#8211; possibly this review in the New York Times of Alexandra Horowitz&#8217;s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know &#8211; and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/06/questionable-taste-and-superior-smell/</link>
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		<title>Caricature.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Why are some faces easier to draw than others?
I&#8217;m not a real artist; my freehand drawings look like something a third-grader&#8217;s mom would hang on the less-visible side of the fridge. I illustrate by tracing from photos. Yet somehow even when tracing from photos I manage to get some faces completely wrong.
It&#8217;s funny. Sometimes I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/05/caricature/</link>
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		<title>Cartooning will take over your life.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This cartoon I recently finished for MashedIn is a little over three minutes long. At a frame rate of 12 frames per second, that means it consists of about 2,160 frames. Almost every one of those frames had to be drawn individually.
Each frame consists of multiple layers. For instance, this image of me checking my [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/05/cartooning-will-take-over-your-life/</link>
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		<title>MashedIn &#8211; folks still aren&#8217;t getting it.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Last week Jason and Dave were down at the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. While they were there they showed off a new app that the MashedIn team developed, which we&#8217;re calling Flutter.
It&#8217;s a mobile app for location-aware phones. Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar place &#8211; maybe at a conference in a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/04/mashedin-folks-still-arent-getting-it/</link>
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		<title>&#8220;Very Bad Trip&#8221;: an interesting diversion.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m on vacation, sunning on a patio in Palm Springs while my unfortunate colleagues shiver back home in Saskatoon.
But I&#8217;m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/02/very-bad-trip-an-interesting-diversion/</link>
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		<title>Cartooning around the office.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Since I don&#8217;t have time to make animated cartoons any more &#8211; and how&#8217;d that happen, by the way? &#8211; I&#8217;ve been spending a lot more time drawing static comics lately. At first I thought this would be a good deal easier. Since the images didn&#8217;t have to move, I figured, I could churn out [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2009/11/cartooning-around-the-office/</link>
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