Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

We're hiring again... and if you're a social media strategist with a social-change frame of mind, then do we have the job for you:

One of the reasons we're seized with the power of social media is that we've seen its potential for engaging people in the most important conversations of our time. With such urgent crises as climate change on the global agenda, I draw a lot of my hope for the future from the way I see people coming together from a wide range of backgrounds - some of them unlikely - to tackle the big challenges.

The invariably astounding Northern Voice blogging/social media conference is happening February 20-21 here in sunny Vancouver... and they're looking for great presentations.

Google Reader, our newsreader of choice here at Social Signal (hunter-destroyer droids constantly prowl the premises, looking for holdouts still using Bloglines... there's one now! KABOOM!)...

...anyway, Google Reader has launched a redesign. It's crisper, cleaner, simpler and faster.

But apparently, there's a downside: you'll have a lot fewer friends.

Sort-of-a-Twitter-competitor Pownce will soon be shutting down their service. Bought by Six Apart, Pownce has announced they'll close the doors for good on December 15.

But there's a little nugget of goodness in that sad piece of news. They're making it easy for you to rescue your data so it doesn't go down with the ship:

Think for a moment about how much your organization spends to find out what its audience (a term we'll keep using until something better comes along, but it really isn't adequate in a social media age) is thinking.

Maybe you're doing opinion polling or focus groups. Maybe you have labs where your prospective customers are testing your newest products and services. Maybe you've hired consultants to mine your customer service logs for golden nuggest of insight.

The Washington Post's Clickocracy series has a piece on the Obama online campaign, and while the exclusive interview and anecdotes are well worth reading, it's the numbers that really tell the story:

Northern Voice, the two-day social media and personal blogging conference, is gearing up for 2009 in Vancouver. And first on the agenda is a call for speakers:

Times are tight, which is the polite way of saying that your communications budget has probably been handed to Freddy Krueger for a light trim. So whether your organization is already blogging, or just thinking about it, you need to make a strong case for your blog's ROI.