Offline validation of the online spirit

I totally stole this!
To complete the joke, Dan Walsh should send me a cease and desist letter.

So, "getting it" is a problematic phrase thrown around way too much by folks who work on the web. It's a shorthand way of saying, we're smarter than "they" are because we're all hip and with-it and we have iPods.

Except when used over beers (or in post-meeting bitch sessions after investors have left the room), it's lazy and more than a little arrogant and cliquish. If you're really all that smart, define what "it" is and explain just what "they" don't get about it.

I thought as much.

Moreover, the secret thing about the Web is that it keeps on changing all the time so no one really "gets it" (except of course Kevin Rose).

So, with that qualifier in mind, a lot of people who are tasked with moving non-Web stuff online are slow to understand the differences in how business can or should be done. I'm looking squarely at you, record labels.

So it's nice to see that Jim Davis does in fact get it. Jim Davis is the guy who created the most syndicated comic in the world, Garfield. Dan Walsh, who seems like a net native, is the guy who had the idea to remove the eponymous cat from Davis's strips leaving just a portrait of his crazy, haunted owner Jon Arbuckle. The result is a distressingly funny meditation on lunacy and modern loneliness that makes me want to laugh and cry in about equal parts. It's better than Cats.

Now, in the usual course of affairs (Hasbro, I'm looking at you now, you jackasses) Jim Davis and his publishers would swoop in, shout sort of heedlessly about intellectual property rights, and crap all over everyone's parade. However, Davis did nothing of the sort. He declared that he liked it and with the help of Ballantine books (who publish Garfield) he's doing a joint project with Walsh.

You just have to breathe a sigh of relief. After Hasbro decided that they were going to shut down Scrabulous rather than ask for a percentage of the profits, it's encouraging to see someone coming from an offline medium who freaking gets it.