Blogs | Social Signal

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.

Setting aside my bias (like I could actually do that), I think Alex rocked this talk - and the audience did too. Check out the Twitter stream.

Here are my notes on how Alex uses social media to cope (as opposed to coping with the stress of social media!):

Chris Messina, Google's new open web advocate, just wrapped Northern Voice's second keynote with a call for the defence of the open web from the gatekeeper mentality. (Which is why I just hit "publish" on my last blog post - it covers some of the same terrain, and I'd like to contribute to that conversation.)

I'm liking this no-PowerPoint thing a lot. Here are my notes from Chris's speech:

Buy an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and you get to choose from thousands and thousands of "apps": software that ranges from full-blown business applications to games to novelty items. But before an app can make it to your iPhone, it has to make it onto the virtual shelves of the App Store... and that means convincing Apple that the app is worthy of inclusion.