Before I get into my rant, here are the comics that I am ordering this month. Slim pickins.
Cholly and Flytrap #1
That's kind of sad. I'm going to hold off on my order for now in case I find something else to add. It's possible that I'm missing something good from one of the big publishers - I've been kind of ignoring them lately. Also, Local #3 and DMZ #3 should be out but I've already subscribed to both. That reminds me - this blog is good : http://goodcomics.blogspot.com.
I was toying with an idea and I wrote some code that downloads the latest Previews catalog and then tries to find blogs which mention each item code. The results were disappointing. For November, I only found one page which mentions a Previews item with a NOV05 code. Sheesh. I'm not exactly sure what this means. Is it...
- People aren't using the Previews item numbers when referring to upcoming comics. (eg. SLG, Oni).
- Google Blogsearch's index not as complete as I thought (I chose Google Blogsearch because it is easy to interface with, fast, and the results are pretty "fresh" when compared to Technorati)
- or... Creators and publishers just aren't writing about their new releases on blogs. Maybe I should try this on regular Google.
I was also thinking that if you wanted to be able to build such an index, there isn't really a great way to do it. You have to ask people to start using the item number on their sites. Luckily these codes are pretty unique and not really used by other people for other purposes. An alternative way to gather together these sites would be something trackback style where the person talking about the comic inserts some metadata that says "This page or part of page refers to item number X" and then they ping you. The ping part would be necessary because Google only indexes content. (This opens up a whole other discussion - doesn't the vision of the New Web require search engines to do something about metadata?) Should Diamond Previews really have such a central role in this? I'm using their item numbers because most of the comics in the US flow through them. Is there another good way to uniquely identify a comic and tie it to a release date and publisher?
I'm kind of rambling here. My basic point is that 1) It would be good to have some sort of unique identifier for comics that could be tied to data about the creators, publisher, release date and looked up as easily as an ISBN. 2) It would be nice if web content creators had a way to express "this page (or paragraph) refers to about comic [ID # whatever]".
(PS - if you aren't a comic person and you have no idea what "Previews" is, maybe my comic book day post will help)
