Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

Later this month, we're packing up the tents, band instruments and trapezes, and taking the show down south to Portland, Oregon for a week to attend OSCON 2010.

I'll be cartoon-blogging the event - and Alex and I will be presenting a session on our Open SoSi initiative, the ongoing process of open-sourcing our intellectual property. It's Wednesday, July 21 at 4:30 in the afternoon, and we'd love to see you there.

Last week saw much gnashing of clothes and rending of teeth over the fact that Nike (which is not a World Cup sponsor) is outdoing Adidas (which is) in Twitter mentions, blog references and a few other social media metrics.

Nike isn't alone. Coke is beating out sponsor Pepsi in level of assocation with the World Cup, and Visa is knocking the stuffing out of sponsor MasterCard.

For Foursquare, the situation would seem to be straightforward: the more special offers, the better. And at first that's true.

But if the company keeps accepting deals like the Starbucks Frappuccino promotion - low-value offers available only to a tiny number of people - then that "Special Nearby" link will mean little more to users than "Come read some ads".

You're at a business event, meet someone, talk, and exchange business cards. A few days later, you discover they've subscribed you to their email newsletter. Is that legit... or is it spam?

Chris Brogan recently posted about his online business card... and about one of the reasons he's giving up on the paper kind: "Every time I give someone a business card, I have about a 70% chance of receiving someone else’s dumb email newsletter that I didn’t opt into receiving."

The CBC's Theresa Lalonde interviewed me back in January about social media trends for the coming year, and she was kind enough to replay one of my predictions that actually seems to be coming true (that people are going to become more attentive to how they use platforms like Facebook, and who they friend) in a piece about Quit Facebook Day.

We missed this last week when ReadWriteWeb reported it, but maybe you did, too. So here's something we've just discovered.

Long live face-to-face: one of the great things about conferences is reconnecting with old friends. I ran into Ian Capstick, a pal from my election campaigning days, at Northern Voice earlier this month.

He pulled me aside and shot a quick video for his company's blog, MediaStyle. We covered a lot of territory, much of it involving transparency and openness, in particular our Open SoSi project. Have a gander:

It's Tod Maffin on podcasting... which is to say, solid gold advice.

New media turning into old? It's not as counterintuitive as you might think, as Angela Crocker, Kim Plumley and Peggy Richardson of The Book Broads explained.