Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

Few industries have faced greater disruption from the digital revolution than publishing. From Craigslist's impact on newspapers' classified ad revenue, to the rise of e-books and the dominance of Amazon.com, huge changes are underway. And this is probably only the beginning; social media's influence has only just started to be felt.

Every summer, Social Signal gathers at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. And this year's lineup looks especially promising... but you don't have to take our word for it.

Social media are often called a disruptive innovation: one that surprises markets and, often, threatens market leaders.

A few nights ago, at Vancouver's seventh Democamp (blogged wonderfully by Raul Pacheco here), I caught a glimpse of what may be the latest facet of that disruption.

It was nestled among a series of other fascinating demonstrations - including our friend Kris Krug's use of NetVibes as a personal media monitoring platform; Anahita, a Joomla-based social network platform; and BuddyPress, which turns WordPress MU into a social network. All very cool.

But the thing that really caught my attention was the upcoming service LexPublica.

Hey, you've sponsored a conference – good for you!

Chances are good you wanted to help these folks out, and support some productive conversation, learning and networking. Chances are also pretty good you want to get some benefit out of the sponsorship yourself with goodwill and exposure.

And when they said you'd have an opportunity to speak to the participants, you jumped at it. And you have a great 15-minute pitch carefully crafted by the folks in marketing, including a PowerPoint video that hits all the key selling points.

So why do you have this nagging feeling of impending disaster?

Sometimes the niftiest tools are the ones that have been around for the longest time.

I just came across Aptivate's loband, a wonderfully handy web service that's been around since 2004. Loband lets you see highly-simplified versions of web pages, stripping out the fancy formatting and hefty graphics that can slow down users who don't have broadband Internet connections - mobile users, for instance, or people in developing countries.

Here's an event that looks terrific: a one-day conference in downtown Vancouver for women in social media.

The details:

Chicks Who Click, a conference and networking event for women engaging in social media, is expanding internationally and will host its next conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

I can't believe it!! Your organization isn't on Twitter? You don't have a Facebook page with discussion groups and a wall? You're not on MySpace, Bebo and FriendFeed?! OMFG, that's so weak! What are you thinking?!

Well, maybe you're thinking, "We don't have a large organization, and we have very few resources." Maybe you're thinking, "Some platforms make it easier to manage conversations than others." And maybe you're thinking, "I'm going to put our limited resources and finite attention where they'll do the most good."

You know what? Good for you.

A few weeks ago, Alex and I got bad news: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was being cancelled. And not just cancelled: the production studio isn't even shopping it around. (In Terminator terms, this is like pulling the chip out of the show's skull and incinerating it.)

I like to think there are lessons to be had from even the oddest event.

Take today's "holy-crap!" story currently making the rounds of the digital watercoolers: that poor guy in Georgia whose house was torn down by mistake. Reports say the demolition crew went to the wrong location, reducing a half-century-old brick house to rubble.