I have spent a great deal of time over the past three years being the voluntary manager of a voluntary crew, and in that time I have developed a pretty solid management strategy. It’s based on the idea that at the end of the day everyone wants to feel like a Unique And Special Snowflake — they want to know they matter and are appreciated. This strategy has the additional benefit of being shortened to ‘the U-ASS treatment’, which I admit I am not above saying to myself when someone is being particularly fussy.

This applies well to websites too. Amazon rose above its competition back in the day because it created such a personalized shopping environment. People love individual homepages, like iGoogle, or all the ‘look, I am likable!’ features of your average social networking site. We’re ego-driven creatures, we can’t help it, and we like it when whatever we’re looking at reflects ourselves back at us a bit.

All this is a really long winded excuse for spending two hours online yesterday making little personalized icons of myself. It’s human nature, okay? Plus, oh, how I love the self-absorbed satisfaction of pondering which tiny element best represents me — “That hairstyle is pretty close, but it really doesn’t capture my slight insouciant streak or the fact that I care very deeply about the plight of whales.”

But where, you say, can you make little digital versions of yourself?! Face Your Manga will let you make a cartoony version of your head. The features are somewhat limited, but not bad overall. At The Simpsons movie website you can turn yourself into a denzien of Springfield. Not very realistic, but fun. The eLouai Doll Maker site looks and feels like it was translated poorly into English at some point, but if you bash around the interface enough you can make yourself into something resembling a 12 year old Japanese kid ready for MySpace.

All those sites were fun, but at the end of the day I was most satisfied with the South Park character generator. She doesn’t really look like me, but there’s something about the way South Park Jessica is looking at her little Blackberry with trepidation that makes me quite happy.. and at the end of the day, it IS all about me.

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Arrrrgh! I missed this year’s Vancouver Zombie Walk too. Judging by the photos everyone looked awesome.

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