Walk away, walk away, walk away, walk away,
I will *click!*

(From U2′s new Ping-enabled iTunes page.)

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Open Source Living – a terrific directory of open-source software – ran a blog post a few weeks ago that aimed to capture the essence of open-source culture through 20 cartoons. And two of them were from Noise to Signal.

From the blog post:

Much of the challenge in convincing companies and individuals to adopt OSS lies in demystifying deep-seated stereotypes that have typically framed OSS as an affront to closed source alternatives. It goes something like this…

How could a project run by a geek in his (gender-stereotyping is rife in the OSS world) spare time, updated on an ad-hoc basis, free for all to use and manipulate (even repackage and resell!), housed on a pre-Web 2.0 site, how could this possibly be anything other than a hobby at best?

Ok, I exaggerate, but regardless, these fears and concerns do exist and do contribute to an OSS sub culture; an online currency of jokes and jibes coupled with more serious aspirations to the ideals of OSS. Part of this culture has filtered through to an increasingly wide range of tech-oriented comic strips.

By all means read the post. You’ll find some great cartoons from Scott McCloud, Randall Munroe, Jorge Cham and more. (Pretty cool to have a day when one of your cartoons is bumping up against Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome book.)

P.S. – Yes, I noticed the all-male thing too. I’m sorry to admit that my own tech-cartoonist feeds are woefully short on women; suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

NETS has produced a tool kit for organizations that want to take part in DSWW. And they asked me if they could use one of my cartoons.

The kit is impressively thorough: sample messages, posters, banners – even a daily activity sheet. (My cartoon appears on the sheet for Thursday, Oct. 7.) If you want to participate, just fill out a short survey and you’ll get a download link. (You can also follow the NTES on Twitter.)

By the way, the campaign has been blogged by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Five years ago, the idea of a member of the U.S. federal cabinet blogging would have blown my mind. Today, it seems perfectly normal.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

via socialmediatoday.com

That’s regular Twitter users, mind you – not regular as in “ordinary”, but regular as in “use Twitter on an ongoing basis”. But this chart makes a strong argument for reaching out to Twitterers if you’re looking for potential content contributors and online participants.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Stories abound of rock bands who produce hours and hours of music that deepens the soul, challenges the psyche and redefines human existence in a new, profoundly meaningful way.

And then they write one frigging novelty song, and that’s the one that chews its way to the top of the charts. You spend years writing songs about social justice and the human condition, but I Just Choked on a Tic Tac is the song that defines your life’s work.

This can happen in blogging, too. You’ll write post after post about your interests and passions, posts that draw on your unique expertise… but it’s that one post you dashed off about how to get gum out of your sofa’s upholstery that gets all the search engine traffic and inbound links.

Well, if life’s sending traffic to your lemons, why not let that traffic know about your lemonade stand?

That’s an issue near and dear to me, because I’m facing that exact situation. I’ve been blogging on my personal site as well as on Social Signal, and I’ve written a few tech how-tos that get an inordinate amount of search engine traffic. Four or five of those posts – about Firefox, Drupal, the iPhone, WordPerfect and Mac OS X – are especially popular.

People visiting those pages tend to take the information they need and then leave. After all, my blog really isn’t a tech troubleshooting site, and they’re here on a mission. But I also know there’s stuff I could show them that they might find interesting – especially from my cartoon.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do on those pages: add a few thumbnail images of relevant cartoons, link them to the cartoon section of the site, and invite visitors to check it out. (A related-content plugin could generate that material automatically… but I want to control exactly what I’m offering to the visitors on these pages, and gauge how they respond. Hence the manual approach.)

Most of the people visiting probably won’t click on those links. But my bet is that some will.

I’m trying this out today on the Apple-related pages. I’m annotating Google Analytics, and I’ll let you know in a few weeks how this worked.

But sooner or later l’addition arrives, and with it a little reminder that this holiday comes with a price tag.

That’s a message that North America has been sending to Europe loudly and with more than a little disdain over the past few years. Our governments and pundits have looked askance at European social programs; our news runs stories of cradle-to-grave ChocolateCare and iron-clad guarantees of job security, vacation time and wage parity with the cast of Grey’s Anatomy.

European societies may not meet with the demands of North American business elites for fiscal discipline. They may not have made the same tough (read service-and-benefit-cutting) decisions as Canadian and American governments.

But they have made tough environmental decisions… even if they weren’t necessarily deliberate ones.

Vehicles here are small – in part a function of narrower streets and pricier fuel. Appliances are smaller and more energy-efficient, and hot-water heaters are of the small, instant-on variety; again, small space and costly fuel play a role. Rail transit abounds, thanks to greater population densities, and bicycles are a viable and much-used alternative to cars.

Europe is still wrestling with the decisions that will allow them to grapple with the economic crisis. (Not all mean cutting services, by the way. For instance, Greece’s problems also stem from their astonishingly small number of people who actually pay the taxes they owe.)

But they’ve already made many of the sacrifices we’ll need to make to cope with a future of high-priced oil and strictly-capped carbon. It may well be that, before long, it will be the French who are shaking their heads over OUR lack of discipline… all the way into their early, comfortable pensions.

Seen in Vancouver on West Broadway near Vine.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

So now’s the time to adjust your privacy settings. It’s pretty fast and easy to do:

1. From the main Facebook page, choose the “Account” link in the upper right corner. Then click “Privacy Settings” in the menu that appears.
2. At the bottom of the section called “Sharing on Facebook”, click the “Customize settings” link.
3. Near the bottom of the “Things I Share” section, find the option for “Places I check in”. There’s a pulldown menu to the right that lets you choose whether to share with everyone, friends of friends, friends or just specific people. (You can also block specific people.)

The bottom line: Chances are you’re looking for the cartoon. It’s over here.

The second-to-bottom line: You can follow Noise to Signal on Twitter and on Facebook.

The background: I’ve been drawing Noise to Signal since 2007, and cartooning at ReadWriteWeb since 2008. (One of the things I love about this business is the fact that, despite the fact that ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are competitors, they link to each other – and each other’s contributors – without apparent hesitation.) Much of the drive to joke about social media comes from the fact that I work in it professionally, as one of the two principals of social media strategy firm Social Signal.

The venal pitch: You can support the rise and expansion of the Noise to Signal empire by buying things.

The immense gratitude: Many thanks to Mashable’s Amy-Mae Elliott… both for including N2S in her roundup (and making it the featured image, he added shamelessly), and for introducing me to a few great cartoons I hadn’t been known about. If you haven’t read her post, please do: it’s right here.

And then check out the other four cartoons: Tony Gigov’s twitter nonsense, the ever-popular Geek and Poke, my online pal Andrew Fowler, aka Guhmshoo, and Andrew Jones’ Status: This. (Update: And Dharmesh Shaw’s cartoons on the HubSpot blog; they’re the special bonus cartoon in the list – sorry I missed them!)

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Alex challenged this idea in a blockbuster blog post on Harvard Business Review, 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life, where she argued that this artificial division causes real harm – offline and online:

It’s not the Internet itself that leads to pathologies like cyber-bullying, spam and identity theft. Rather it’s our decision – individually and collectively – to separate the Internet from the context, norms and experience that guide human behavior. It’s our decision to engage in online interaction as if it were fundamentally different from offline conversation. It’s our decision to label the Internet as something – anything! – other than real life.

Alex was featured yesterday morning on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, talking about this in more depth with some examples – including how she took her own advice while responding to a hostile comment on the original blog post.

The conversation continues to unfold on Twitter, on Alex’s blog, on her HBR blog and on a growing number of other blogs. Why not join in?

Beautifully and simply designed, Flipboard presents the photos, news, blog posts and updates your social media contacts on Twitter and Facebook are sharing – along with a curated selection of updates from a number of sources such as GOOD and GigaOM.

Immediately bathed in glowing reviews from the likes of Robert Scoble and many others, Flipboard was the must-have app last week. And as soon as it was available, Flipboard’s servers were flooded with requests to connect users’ Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Flipboard couldn’t keep up. Instead of the promised glossy-magazine-like experience, users received error messages. A chastened Flipboard CEO published an apology. An updated version of the app started taking names on a waiting list for Twitter and Facebook integration. And a number of people started muttering under their breath (or in their blogs) about Flipboard stumbling out of the gate.

Now, underestimating the demand on your servers and failing to have a contingency plan are both serious mistakes.

But I’m prepared to cut Flipboard a few kilometres of slack. Because I’m excited – really, genuinely excited – about the potential of what they’re up to.

And it’s not for the reasons you’ve probably heard, like the way Flipboard brings print-design beauty and elegance to online media (although may I just say “wow”)… or the way it cuts through the noise of activity streams to bring you nothing but signal (I’m not sure how much I buy that second one, come to think of it).

What I really like about Flipboard is how it may push back gently across the boundaries of our comfort zones.

Remember what Nicholas Negroponte famously referred to as the “Daily Me”? It was the idea that consumers can now filter our news to just those things that truly interest us. The fear, of course, is that we end up restricting our information diet to those stories, facts and ideas that reinforce our beliefs, and filter out anything that could challenge our worldviews. (Well, I call it a fear. Fox News calls it a business model.)

Filtering doesn’t have to happen because of an active aversion to certain topics, by the way. Often we just never think to look at the latest news on food security and urban chickens, or about how sleep patterns can affect mood, or what the military junta in Burma is up to. Either way, the filters that digital technology help us to erect can also keep us from the learning and growth that come from being challenged; they act as a barrier to serendipity.

One of the ways information can bypass those filters is when it’s carried through our social networks. I might try to avoid hearing word of, say, human rights abuses in the manufacture of my favourite gadgets, in which case I’d probably avoid subscribing to news sources that are likely to carry that kind of thing.

But that news might still slip through because someone I’ve followed on Twitter because we’ve swapped cartooning tips does follow those news sources, and shares an article.

Chances are good, though, that I’m still not going to see it, because of the sheer volume of links being tweeted, liked and otherwise shared on any given day. Especially if all I see is a short headline and a shortened URL.

But show me an intriguing excerpt and an accompanying photo, and I might be drawn in despite my initial reservations (the fact that the article comes with my fellow cartoonist’s recommendation doesn’t hurt, either). And depending on Flipboard’s algorithm for sharing links, that could be exactly what happens: the occasional something that broadens – or at least nudges – my horizons.

I won’t know, of course, until my name rises to the top of my waiting list. But I’m willing to wait patiently.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

Another day, another bunch of people seeing their content vanish without warning.

According to the BBC, when blogging site Blogetery suddenly disappeared – taken offline after the FBI warned their hosting service about alleged Al Qaeda-linked material posted there – it took with it the posts written by more than 70,000 bloggers.

Make that 70,000 really unhappy bloggers.

They join the users of iPBFree.com, whose users found the forums the site used to host were gone as of last week.

In both cases, explanations were sparse, and didn’t (perhaps couldn’t) offer too much useful or comforting information – and there’s no idea when more information will be forthcoming.

This hardly the first time an online service has closed its doors with little or no warning. Business models come and go; venture capitalists run out of patience; entrepreneurs run out of steam and interest… and sites go offline.

How can you keep your content safe – or relatively safe – in case the service you’re relying on takes a dive? Here are several options. You may not want to do all of them… but the more you can do, the greater your peace of mind.

• Before you commit to a platform, look for export/backup features. How easy will it be to make regular backups? How quickly can you do it if a shutdown is imminent?
• Look for services that can export your data to an open format, such as XML or a comma-separated text file, so you have a choice of other platforms to turn to if the worst happens.
• Look for thoroughness. Metadata like tags, dates and descriptions may be even more important then the original files. And comments and friend lists can be just as key.
• Look for stability. It’s great to try out startups and edgy innovators. But if you’re going to commit a lot of time and energy to your content and community, you’ll want to see a solid track record… and enough backing to know these folks will still be around in a few years. (Not that big, established players are above shutting a service down; but when they do, they know their brand equity is on the line, and are motivated to minimize the disruption to users.)
• Back up regularly. You’re doing regular backups of your hard drives, right? (Right?) You’ll want to start doing the same thing to your online content as well, and save those backups somewhere safe.
• Subscribe to the site’s blog or “What’s new” feed, and check it regularly. This is part of your early-warning system. And when things go bad, there may be very little notice that you need to get your data off the site.
• Make a separate, full backup at the first sign of trouble. Online hiccups? Big layoffs? Takeover or sale rumours? Get a copy of your data somewhere safe.
• Build your new home before you need it. At the very least, you should have an idea of where you’ll take your content if the service you rely on goes dark. But if you want people to be able to find you, create a bare-bones presence on that site now – if only to reserve your name (so your flaky-dead-service.com/yourname audience can find you at shiny-new-service.com/yourname). Test it so you’ll know how to restore your content quickly and reliably.
• Calculate the tradeoff. This isn’t a trivial amount of work; you need to weigh the effort against the cost of losing all of that content. If we’re just talking about a few fun, ephemeral posts, you may not be worried at all. But if you’re sinking a lot of effort into an online presence – and asking your friends, supporters, customers or users to do the same – then the time you put into backing up may be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Flaky wireless connections are a fact of life for bloggers on the move. If it isn’t tortoise-slow downloads, it’s a password that never seems to “take”. If it isn’t a connection that keeps dropping, it’s a router that refuses to give you an IP address.

Okay. So the connection’s too unreliable to let you post to your blog, and your mobile contract doesn’t include tethering. Don’t let that keep you from blogging. Here are five ways you can work on your blog, even when you aren’t connected to hive mind:

1. Outline your next blog post. Maybe you can’t do the research you want, find the URLs of the posts you’d like to link to, or hunt down the perfect Creative Commons image to illustrate your post. But you can sketch out the bare bones, and add the muscles, organs and stylish accessories once you’re back online.
2. Clean up your hard drive. If you’re like me, you have little snippets of blog ideas and drafts all over the place. Bring them together in one folder, or one text file (your workflow will vary), and you’ll be miles ahead of the game next time you’re stumped for a post idea.
3. Raid your subconscious. Break out the mind-mapping software, open up your Moleskine or just scribble on a napkin – but brainstorm ideas for your next five, ten or fifty posts. Don’t try to assess them at first; just get as many down as possible. Then, once the storm peters out, pick out the best and add them to your idea file.
4. Make a to-do list. Chances are there are things you’ve been meaning to do for your blog: add a Delicious feed, check out an e-commerce plug-in, create a promo card to hand out at conferences. Set priorities according to the effort each task will require and the impact you expect each one to have, and you’ve just built yourself a development queue.
5. Doodle. Draw something funny, or funny-ish. Then snap your doodle with your camera phone or digital camera. Once you’re online, upload it as a blog post. Hey – it works for me.

It can be hard to admit, but blogs have a life cycle – and, in some cases, a best-before date that may be well in the past. Your passion for the subject matter wanes; other interests beckon; your readers and commenters, maybe sensing your faltering commitment, move on to other venues.

And that’s okay. There’s no shame in saying that a blog has run its course. But as Allison Boyer wrote in a post on BlogWorld a while ago, even the most moribund of blogs may not be beyond resuscitation (and she offered a few suggestions for virtual CPR).

If you’re starting to notice the unpleasant smell of decay whenever you visit your blog, here are a few more ideas for bringing it back to life:

• Redefine the subject. If your interests have changed, then let your readers know you’ll be introducing a new topic, and shifting the emphasis there.
• Redefine the scope. If your blog died because you couldn’t keep up with the expectations you set around frequency, depth or comprehensiveness, then dial that back. Focus your energies more narrowly. Maybe instead of daily wall-to-wall coverage of a subject, you want to post twice a week on one aspect of it – and one of those posts is a collection of links, instead of your usual 20-paragraph essays.
• Call in reinforcements. If you don’t think you can do it alone, but you have one or more colleagues or friends with similar interests and solid blogging skills, see if they’d be interested in joining your blog. The mutual encouragement can go a long way to getting you past a slump.
• Hand it over. Find someone who shares your passion – or the passion you once had – and transfer the blog to them. You’ll know that all your hard work will still be alive and appreciated; they’ll be able to launch with a built-in readership and traffic stream to build on.

Still not feeling it? If you’re sure it’s time to close the doors and turn off the lights, then go ahead. But let your readers know you’re doing it. And give serious consideration to keeping your blog online (with comments switched off if you don’t plan to reply to them, or weed out spam). It’ll serve as a resource for others… and, if your interest should be rekindled or your spare time suddenly reappear, you’ve left the door open to a return from the grave.

Influence is weighing heavily on the social media community’s collective mind right now. I’ve noticed a surge in Twitter and blog chatter around Klout, a tool that aims to measure influence on Twitter.

Klout’s a pretty sophisticated tool, going way beyond a follower count:

Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.

The reports are detailed and interesting… and I’ll admit I’m also charmed by the way Klout elaborates on its assessment, using phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a job application letter, performance review or LinkedIn recommendation: “@RobCottingham has worked very hard to successfuly build a large, highly engaged network.” “@RobCottingham is effectively using social media to influence their network across a variety of topics.” (Hey, thanks! It almost salves the wound of having dropped nine points in the last week.)

Klout’s newfound, well, influence has landed it a special place in the heart of Twitter web app HootSuite. (By the way, I’ve been using HootSuite heavily for the past few days, and can report it’s amazing.) You can now filter the people you follow so you only see updates from those who surpass a certain Klout threshold.

That’s a great way of seeing what the A-listers you’re following are talking about. But if you’re going to use that feature, may I recommend a healthy dose of caution?

There’s a risk with measurements like these that they become self-fulfilling prophecies, and reinforce attention hierarchies. If enough people use Klout to divide the world between the influential and the non-influential, and listen mainly to the former, then the influential will continue to be influential – because audiences aren’t hearing other voices.

And you’ll miss out on some below-the-radar surprises. Because as cool as Klout is, it doesn’t take into account the fact that your influence on Twitter is going with one segment than with others. It doesn’t account for long-tail phenomena: people who are leaders in their particular communities. And it doesn’t account for the kind of influence that isn’t so easily measured automatically.

Ultimately, Klout gives you one number – derived from many factors, true, but it’s a single number, aiming to measure something that is insanely multidimensional. I don’t want to take anything away from what they’ve built – it’s a great tool, it’s elegant, it’s beautiful, it’s engaging, and I can see myself obsessing over it in the weeks to come – I really want to get more badges - but don’t let it dictate where you direct your attention.

Influence is weighing heavily on the social media community’s collective mind right now. I’ve noticed a surge in Twitter and blog chatter around Klout, a tool that aims to measure influence on Twitter.

Klout’s a pretty sophisticated tool, going way beyond a follower count:

Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.

The reports are detailed and interesting… and I’ll admit I’m also charmed by the way Klout elaborates on its assessment, using phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a job application letter, performance review or LinkedIn recommendation: “@RobCottingham has worked very hard to successfuly build a large, highly engaged network.” “@RobCottingham is effectively using social media to influence their network across a variety of topics.” (Hey, thanks! It almost salves the wound of having dropped nine points in the last week.)

Klout’s newfound, well, influence has landed it a special place in the heart of Twitter web app HootSuite. (By the way, I’ve been using HootSuite heavily for the past few days, and can report it’s amazing.) You can now filter the people you follow so you only see updates from those who surpass a certain Klout threshold.

That’s a great way of seeing what the A-listers you’re following are talking about. But if you’re going to use that feature, may I recommend a healthy dose of caution?

There’s a risk with measurements like these that they become self-fulfilling prophecies, and reinforce attention hierarchies. If enough people use Klout to divide the world between the influential and the non-influential, and listen mainly to the former, then the influential will continue to be influential – because audiences aren’t hearing other voices.

And you’ll miss out on some below-the-radar surprises. Because as cool as Klout is, it doesn’t take into account the fact that your influence on Twitter is going with one segment than with others. It doesn’t account for long-tail phenomena: people who are leaders in their particular communities. And it doesn’t account for the kind of influence that isn’t so easily measured automatically.

Ultimately, Klout gives you one number – derived from many factors, true, but it’s a single number, aiming to measure something that is insanely multidimensional. I don’t want to take anything away from what they’ve built – it’s a great tool, it’s elegant, it’s beautiful, it’s engaging, and I can see myself obsessing over it in the weeks to come – I really want to get more badges - but don’t let it dictate where you direct your attention.

1. Create a unique link on their site
2. Get as many people as possible to click on that link
3. Whoever gets the most clicks wins

…doesn’t really capture the full nuance of influence. After all, your “influence” isn’t just a raw number: you have greater influence over some people than others, in some topics than others, at some times than others. (Amber Naslund delivers a particularly crushing – and persuasive – critique.)

All well and good. But chasing raw numbers is so completely compelling that any hope this thing won’t be huge – that the eventual Prom Queen and King winners won’t be lionized as gods – is futile.

Besides, this is basically the way we choose an American Idol; it just removes the overly onerous requirement that voters have the skills to key in a four-digit number on a mobile phone. So how can it go wrong?

In other words, count me in. But on my terms.

I know the kind of influence I have. My parenting record establishes clearly that I’m much better at keeping people from doing stuff than getting them to do things.

Therefore, my goal will be to influence people not to click my link.

And I would like my final score to be computed according to the following formula:

Score = ( Number of people with a web connection minus Number of people who click on my link ) x 16

(Why multiply by 16? Because a reasonable extrapolation of the value of pre-emptive action – based on the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – suggests that every non-click on my link is worth 16 clicks on other people’s links.)

Here’s my link. Please don’t click it.

Postscript: For another way of measuring influence, do check out our Influ-a-rama-matic.

Twitter’s relatively new Lists feature can be a handy way of teasing a melody out of the cacophony of incoming tweets, as well as compiling a collection of worthwhile voices on a particular subject.

But it has some frustrating limitations. You can’t create more than 20 lists. There’s no function to combine lists, and managing list entries is only slightly less difficult than if you’d chiselled them into marble.

And - wha’a? Twitter doesn’t offer RSS feeds for them.

Crazy, right? True, they offer a widget, but if you want to style incoming tweets, or parse them in some cool and innovative way, you’re twit out of luck.

Or you would be… if not for the kind offices of Alex Kessinger, who created a simple web app called Twitter Lists 2 RSS. Copy the URL for any Twitter list, paste it into a field on the app, and with one click, you get an RSS feed.

He’s @voidfiles on Twitter. Give him a quick thanks if you find it useful.

via lasagnachildren.com

Get a bunch of webcomic artists together, have them donate original artwork, auction it off online and donate the proceeds to the Colbert Nation Gulf of America Fund… pretty damn good idea.

Posted via email from Rob Cottingham’s posterous

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 Thursday, July 22 at 5:20 in the afternoon, and we’d love to see you there.

Here’s the description:

Last fall, Social Signal principals Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham took a hard look at our company, and realized something.

While we’d been telling clients for years to be as open and free with information as possible, we’d been doing the opposite with Social Signal’s intellectual property. Like any good consultant, we were keeping our tools and methodologies under lock and key – away from the eyes of competitors, but also away from people who could be putting those tools to good use.

So we began a process that turned the consulting model on its head. Instead of keeping our knowledge under wraps, we published it. We not only tolerated the idea that competitors might adopt our tools and potential clients might DIY instead of hiring us, but welcoming it. And we started with our flagship service, the workshop-centered Concept Jam.

Everything went online: templates, annotated PowerPoint decks, how-tos, scripts, reports and more.

Participants in this workshop will hear about what worked for us, and where we ran aground. They’ll learn the same hard lessons we learned about how much work it can be to document a resource to the point where it’s genuinely useful to others. And they’ll hear the surprising outcome: that far from wiping out demand for the Concept Jam, our initiative – dubbed Open SoSi – dramatically increased inquiries and leads, not to mention goodwill and our reputation.

We’ll work with the audience to draw out practical steps for any business hoping to harness open-sourced methodologies to their sales process. And we’ll hope to inspire others to free their internal IP, especially in emerging fields where sharing information can help all of us succeed.

But you don’t have to draw on it for too long to start cursing the iPad’s limitations, even as you marvel at its abilities. And high on my wishlist for the iPad are two items: 1) pressure-sensitivity and 2) being able to draw while resting my palm on the iPad’s surface.

It turns out those two issues are pretty high priorities over at Ten One Designs, too. They make the Pogo Sketch, the handy little stylus I’ve used on most of my iPad cartoons. But they also develop software, and they now have a demo that shows you can have both pressure sensitivity and what they call “palm rejection” (where the iPad distinguishes between your hand and the stylus when you’re drawing, and ignores your hand).

Click here to view the embedded video.

They can’t make those features available yet, though:

We plan to release this capability as a free software library so it can be included in any application. However, this may not be possible for a while as the library now uses a private function call to access the required information.

We hope the UIKit framework can be updated to make the required information available, but there are no guarantees this will ever happen. In the meantime, we hope the video provides some insight into what is possible on this amazing piece of hardware.

I have a cramped wrist that’s eagerly awaiting word that Apple’s willing to either accommodate Ten One or release their own solution.

(Thanks to Mike Kelly for pointing me to this!)

Postscript: There’s a darkly funny irony that a new feature of the iPad – the successor to Apple’s failed Newton, the original PDA – might be called “Palm rejection.”