Truly a thing of beauty — First Dog on the Moon Twitter avatars

Social media is a strange thing, par­tic­u­larly when it comes to the notion of memes, those lit­tle outward-​​reaching, super-​​powered thoughts that per­vade our online life. Just look at Ken Lee, Matt, the Danc­ing Guy, or Numa Numa, or the Star Wars Kid…

Hell, look at them all!

As with all memes, some­times, some­thing gets a lit­tle out of hand in a good way. If you’re a Twit­ter user, you may have noticed that a fair num­ber of the Aussies now have these odd lit­tle car­toon avatars. They’re all drawn by our favorite polit­i­cal car­toon­ist and Crikey (if you don’t read Crikey, you should) con­trib­u­tor, First Dog on the Moon (@firstdogonmoon).

It’s all a con­se­quence of a minor action on Twit­ter itself:

I should be clean­ing my office. But here is my hand knit­ted twit­ter aggre­ga­tor and diy elec­tronic white­board. http://​twit​pic​.com/​w​w3y #

That link led to a pic­ture of a white­board cov­ered in sketches of sev­eral Twit­ter­ers as imag­ined by First Dog. Nat­u­rally, we all begged, pleaded and bitched until we had our own First Dog avatars. You can see the results for Mark Pesce, Stil­gher­rian, Jo “Medi­a­mum” White, Sean Car­mody, Dekrazee1, Zuzu and others.

EDIT: More for the list — Andrew Bar­nett, Kate Car­ruthers, Pete Davis, Linda Gehard, Jin­jir­rie

And, as is often the case with social media involve­ment, First Dog is doing this for us because he wants to and because we asked nicely (mostly). Of course, there are larger con­se­quences. First Dog built on the already sub­stan­tial social cap­i­tal he has in our com­mu­nity. Peo­ple like me blog about it, intro­duc­ing oth­ers who might not be famil­iar with First Dog to him. Peo­ple start won­der­ing where all these weird lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phic draw­ings came from and go look­ing, dis­cov­er­ing First Dog for them­selves. It’s all very self-​​feeding and vir­tu­ous and a liv­ing exam­ple of the power of these tools and the way we live our lives through them.

Wild pre­dic­tion for 2009 — (at least in Aus­tralia) First Dog becomes the #1 Twit­ter car­toon­ist, eclips­ing @gapingvoid him­self, Hugh McLeod.

I’m get­ting a copy of mine for the office — printed, signed and framed, no question