Blogs | Social Signal

David Ng's talk on Phylo - a trading-card game inspired by the study showing kids can identify more Pokémon characters than actual local species - rocked the house, not least because he had us do Chewbacca impersonations.

Is there such a thing as too much clarity?

Updated: Thanks to Mitch Cohen for this comment pointing to a one-click bookmarklet - even easier!

I just got an email from the fine folks at SlideShare, letting me know they'll be featuring our free e-book on getting value from blogging on the front page of their business and management section for the next day or so.

For anyone who's been told to cut the blog from their communications proposal...

...for anyone who knows their social media activities could pull more of their own weight on the bottom line...

...for anyone who wants to take their blog from the experimental stage to having real-world impact - and real-world value...

...we have something for you.

Today we're launching Social Signal's first ebook, called 10 Ways Your Blog Can Provide Real Value to You, Your Organization and Your Brand.

Social media culture is all about transparency: tell the world about your last meal, your current location, your relationships, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams. (So far, to the best of my knowledge, there's no social network devoted to sharing recent digestive updates. No, I'm not going to go Googling for it.)

But at least you're conscious of what information you're choosing to share and with whom... right?

Twestival - the Twitter-organized fundraising evening that happens the same evening in hundreds of cities worldwide - is coming again to Vancouver, this time in support of Concern Worldwide. And Rob will be there once again, doing standup comedy about social media.

Tell me this isn't someone's dream internship:

Our friends (and The Big Wild clients) at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Committee are looking for an intern to help them make their web, email and social media presence a thing of grace and beauty. If that sounds like someone you know, do pass along the details:

Go directly to the latest Open SoSi release, How to create budget estimates for proposals and project management. >>

I'm hosting a conversation today at SXSW, Breaking it Open: Open Source Consulting Models. So this seemed like the right moment to return to the job of open sourcing our consulting materials.

As it turns out, the biggest challenge of open sourcing is actually organizing our materials in a form that is useful to share. Any programmer can tell you that documentation is often the most onerous part of sharing code, and we've found the same thing is true in our own open sourcing process. We could just dump a pile of documents onto the Internet, but we want to release them in a form other people can make sense of and apply to their own work. That takes time.