Blogs | Social Signal

This week, I return to the questions I recently posed about social media and social enterprise:

This episode, Rob talks about the release of Google Sites... which Alex hasn't had a chance to check out yet, leading her to ask, how do you keep up with the news in your field when everyone's so busy these days?

We come up with six questions to ask about keeping up to date with the latest developments, and propose that Feb. 29 become World Catch-Up Day... when everyone has a chance to catch up on the reading they've missed, and the creation of new content is strictly prohibited.

Wondering what happened to Google's acquisition of hosted-wiki-on-steroids-provider JotSpot? You're looking at it.

This episode, we take on wikis: when you should use them, and when you should try something else.

In a nutshell, Alex wants to know why the left doesn't have more really funny stuff up on YouTube.

Rob suspects fear has something to do with it... and, judging by some of the stuff passing as funny, lack of practice.

But we both salute the lefties who are out there - often independently - creating genuinely bust-a-gut-funny stuff.

And then we go to sleep.

Rob has had it, had it, had it with multiple versions of the arbicidal Yellow Pages showing up on our doorstep. Alex confesses a shameful Luddite secret.

This morning's first session, led by AdHack's James Sherrett, was a lively discussion of the role that advertising has – or, maybe, doesn't have – in blogging.

Friday at Northern Voice is the unconference day, a self-organizing but surprisingly unchaotic event.

The turnout is impressive, and I miss getting a seat for the first session... which is cool. There are plenty of corridor conversations to be had... so many, in fact, that I miss the second session.

So I'm hell-bent on making the third session, which turns out to be a well-run discussion on multilingual blogs and web sites.

Session leader Jim DeLaHunt walks us through a conversation that, sadly, lasts only half an hour. We've only scratched the surface, but it's enough to make me want to explore further. I'm especially intrigued by the mechanics sites use for determining what language to present to a particular user:

The early afternoon is PhotoCamp. Funny thing how it seems Northern Voice has always had a huge photography component. I've never seen so many digital SLRs in one place. It nearly overwhelmed the presenters...

Miranda Lievers warns us about how strong overhead sunlight can cause a subject's eye sockets to be in dark shadows, and describes the condition evocatively as "raccoon eyes."

More than one speaker has a Facebook status update notification pop up while they're presenting... including one by a friend whose status line indicates they're watching the presentation.

The last session I hit is Megan Cole's Social Media Mecca - a long-overdue conversation about collaboration and community among social media consultants in the Vancouver area. Good on her for bringing it up; I only wish there'd been another two hours to keep the discussion going.

This time out, we talk about the kind of writing that makes good blog posts, telling stories and finding a conversational voice.

That, oddly enough, leads us to a new speech recognition option for the Mac. Alex notes that Richard Powers, the author of The Echo Maker and Galatea 2.2, uses speech recognition to write. And Rob launches a passionate defence of video walkthroughs.