Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

Late last night, I received the e-mail from Google. No message, just a headline: "Google Page Creator: sign up!!" It's still in an invitation-only beta, but here's what I found:

There's a lot of innovation going on in the new web right now, with ground-breaking applications coming from individual developers as well as big, well-funded companies. It seems like every day, there's a new service out there giving you a new way to collaborate, create, tag or remix.

Keeping track of it all – or even knowing where to start looking for a particular kind of service – has been a daunting challenge... until now.

Here's a quick link for political bloggers and their followers: the CBC's blog columnist in the last election, John Bowman, recaps blogging's impact on the campaign in a Policy Options magazine article (PDF).

At last week's 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, I sat on a terrific panel led by Matt Blair, with Marnie Webb and Marshall Kirkpatrick, on the security implications of the new web. It was one of those amazing sessions where the audience was so engaged from the start that we had no need for the usual opening-presentations-plus-Q&A structure; we got right into a very cool 90-minute conversation.

I don't think anyone was recording the session, but I thought I'd share the notes I'd prepared for my presentation.

The lectern has been disassembled, the coffee cups are cleared and the crowd has moved on to their afternoon agenda. The major speech you worked on for weeks is over, and you can’t help but think: is that it?

For all the work we do preparing for them, speeches go by with unnerving speed. This issue, I try to suggest a few ways you can get the most from your next big speech — well beyond the actual delivery itself.

So two speechwriters walk into a bar…