News from Social Signal

Social Signal is moving!

Alexandra Samuel — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 10:12:50 +0000

As of March 1, Social Signal will be moving to new offices: a townhouse at 680 Citadel Parade in downtown Vancouver. Our new home is part of the Spectrum development, and gives us more space to work as a team and meet with clients. We'll post photos of our beautiful new space as soon as we've settled in.

Our office is just down the block from the Stadium SkyTrain station. We're nestled in between the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, behind the CBC. If you're driving, you're likely to find a parking space right out front (or ask us for a parking pass). View full map and get directions.

We look forward to welcoming you to our new home!

Announcing updates to the BC Hydro Green Gifts Facebook Application

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:04:18 +0000

Wow, it's hard to believe it's already been a year since we launched Green Gifts – the free virtual-gift-giving Facebook application we created for BC Hydro. That's a lot of water under the bridge (through the turbine? over the dam?) - this time last year, Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Democratic nomination, real estate was the can't-lose investment and the theme to Hockey Night in Canada was still the theme to Hockey Night in Canada.

Times have changed, my friends, and we're keeping up. So today we've updated Green Gifts with a fresher, greener look. Change Creative, which has been designing those gorgeous gift icons since day one, applied their talents to a whole new design for the app, and we couldn't be happier with it.

You'll find a lot of nice little behind-the-scenes improvements, too, that we've made with the help of our friends at Vancouver's Donat Group. We listened to the feedback we had over the past year, as well as looking at the way people used the app, and the result is - we hope! - smoother and easier to use.

We'd love to hear what you think. Check it out!

And while you're at it, have a look at the brand new BC Hydro site. It's been completely overhauled, with a terrific new set of green guides - step-by-step instructions and tips for reducing your energy footprint.

Best local sites for green living: BC Hydro, happyfrog.ca tie for silver in Georgia Straight readers' picks

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:24:02 +0000

There are a lot of smiles here at Social Signal's sprawling corporate headquarters. Two of our clients, BC Hydro and the happyfrog.ca Vancouver sustainability hub, just tied for second place in the Georgia Straight's annual "Best of Vancouver" awards.

The first-place finisher, DavidSuzuki.org, gives us a grin, too. Not just because the good doctor has been such an inspiration to us over the years, but because whenever we brainstorm a sustainability social media project with a client, there's invariably a moment where someone says, "Hey... what if we could get David Suzuki to blog on it?"

(Their award category, local web sites for green living, is near and dear to our hearts: "local", because we believe in the primacy of place, "green", because we believe in the imperative of sustainability, "web", because we believe in the power of social media, and "for", because it's such a handy preposition.)

It's great to know that these projects have made a difference for so many people. And it's a tribute to both BC Hydro and the crew at happyfrog, who've worked so hard to make their projects a success. Congratulations, everyone.

Now appearing on ReadWriteWeb

Rob Cottingham — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:51:50 +0000

A little horn-tooting here, because I'm really excited about this: Noise to Signal, my cartoon about social media, has been picked up by the fine folks at ReadWriteWeb. Here's editor Richard MacManus' announcement:

This is courtesy of the wonderful Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web. We thought we'd trial some of his cartoons here on RWW, especially in the weekend when you may not be in the mood to read long text posts. Let us know what you think.

W00t and FTW, as the cool kids say. (And not just because RWW is just about my favourite source of info on the latest Web 2.0 news; I'll be working alongside – in the virtual, not-actually-being-there-but-my-pixels-are-next-to-his-pixels sense – Marshall Kirkpatrick, a lead author at RWW, and a friend from past NetSquared and NTEN conferences.)

Bridging the virtual world and your information in Drupal

Rob Cottingham — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:25:36 +0000

From an illustration ©iStockphoto.com/Simfo

We're pleased to announce a brand new Drupal module...

...but first, the reason we created it:

No matter how appealing an online service is, users and developers alike always feel frustrated when their noses bump up against walls.

Facebook users feel it when they receive email messages notifying them that they've received Facebook messages... without saying what those messages contain. LinkedIn users have felt it when they try hunting for a news feed for their own LinkedIn Answers.

And Second Life users feel it when they want to find some way to connect their in-world activity in some way with the rest of the online world; with a few limited exceptions (and to their credit, Linden Lab is working hard to expand them), that can be an exercise in frustration.

Maybe we can help change that.

Introducing the Second Life framework, a free Drupal module that allows scripts within Second Life to interact over the web with applications running on a Drupal web site.

This is an enabling module, built for developers. It allows you to create new Drupal modules with cool Second Life-integration functionality, but doesn't add new functionality in and of itself. It's built to interact with scripts written in LSL, the Second Life scripting language. (We built it as part of a larger project within SL; more on that as it develops.)

The download package includes a sample module and a handy Second Life client emulator. (It lets you test your work even if you aren't running Second Life. That reduces development time and lets you write modules for SL even if your LSL scripts aren't ready yet.)

The module was created by Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits, our Drupal programmer of choice for brilliant coding. (Khalid is starting to take on mythic qualities. The other day, we mentioned to a friend who moves frequently in Drupal circles that we were working with Khalid. "Ah," the friend said, his eyes widening slightly. "'The Hammer.'" Apparently we aren't the only ones who think there isn't a Drupal problem out there that Khalid can't crack.)

He worked closely with LSL whiz Catherine Winters as they braved the idiosyncracies of LSL and mapped out the protocols needed for Drupal and Second Life to talk to each other.

We have our own cunning plans for employing this module, but we're eager to see how the community puts it to work. Exposing SL activity to the rest of the web? Bringing blog content interactively into SL? Using Drupal as a database for an SL script?

We hope this module will work alongside efforts like SLFeed to help break down the barriers that separate avatars from the wider world of the world-wide web. There's some amazing stuff going on in the walled gardens of the online world; it's time some of those walls came down so we can all have a look.

And if you're working with Drupal and Second Life, drop us a line. We'd love to know what you're up to.

Toronto workshop: Web 2.0 and Your Organization

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:03:02 +0000

Web 2.0 and Your Organization
July 24 & 25th, 2007
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto

How can your organization use social media tools to deepen your relationships with supporters, reach new audiences and raise more money? More than twenty people discovered the power of social media tools like blogs and wikis through a workshop I co-taught with Jason Mogus on Web 2.0 and Your Organization. Jason and I had so much fun teaching that March workshop in Vancouver, and got such a positive response from participants, that we will be offering the same workshop in Toronto this summer.

Here's the skinny:

Are you interested in how online communities like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube can empower your members and customers to carry your message out into the world? Could your organization benefit from deeper collaboration among your team members, clients, partners or the public? Could better knowledge-sharing, stronger relationships and closer communications inside your organization and with your core supporters foster more efficiency, insight and effectiveness?

The latest generation of "Web 2.0" or social web strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

This workshop is designed for communications strategists, marketing managers, and webmasters who are interested in how this evolution of the web can help evolve your organization's online strategy. We will give you the tools, knowledge, and most crucially, the vision for how your organization can use the web as a stronger agent of change. We’ll also cover the nuts-and-bolts, introducing the latest tools so that you know which options are most promising for your needs.

This workshop will take place from 6pm to 9pm on July 24th, and from 9am to 5pm (with lunch break) on July 25th.

Follow this link to register today -- space is limited.

For more information, please contact web2andyou@gmail.com. Or download our leaflet (PDF, 1 MB).

Supporting non-profit innovation through NetSquared: a Drupal module for Newscloud

Alexandra Samuel — Tue, 29 May 2007 17:33:38 +0000

Rob and I are spending the next two days at NetSquared, in the company of 21 outstanding teams working on projects that harness social media tools for social change. We met many of these folks for the first time yesterday, in a pre-conference session that brought the projects together for an afternoon of collaborative idea-sharing and relationship building, and we were incredibly impressed by the commitment and creativity that these folks are bringing to their respective projects. As part of the NetSquared Innovators Support Network we will choose to work with one of these projects on a pro bono basis, providing them with their choice of a customized community participation plan, a recommended community feature set, or complete specifications for a new custom Drupal module.

But one of the themes that emerged in yesterday's conversation was the desire to foster collaboration not only among the 21 finalist projects here in San Jose, but among the more than 150 projects who participated in this year's call for Innovation Fund submissions. Like a lot of the folks here, we got really excited about quite a few of the projects that didn't end up in the top 21, and we started thinking about how we might support their work.

That's why we've decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn't in the room today. Next month, we'll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. Jodie Tonita of ONE/Northwest recently introduced us to Newscloud's founder and driving force, Jeff Reifman, and we immediately saw Jeff's work as exactly the kind of technology innovation that non-profits need now.

Using Newscloud, an organization's members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day's issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too -- quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it's got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud's value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it's very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself.

Our clients and colleagues in the non-profit sector often ask us to help them integrate news into their online communities. They want a way to bring their members and supporters the news that is relevant to their issues and interests, and ideally, they want a way for their audience to interact with those stories and engage in meaningful conversation around the latest news. Newscloud offers that potential, but right now organizations need to either convene on the Newscloud site itself, or install their own version of the Newscloud platform.

We're going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud's features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we're going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites. We'll use our own clients' needs as the basis for developing the module's specifications, but we'd love to hear from other organizations about their own needs for news sharing and commenting, so that our specifications can reflect the needs of as many organizations as possible -- just leave your comments on this post, or e-mail me directly (alex at socialsignal dot com) to get involved.

We'll keep the NetSquared community posted on how this experiment evolves. And we hope that other members of the NetSquared community -- technology assistance providers, developers, funders, and participating projects -- will think about how they might help or collaborate with one or more of the 150 projects that have profiled their needs on the NetSquared sites. The time, advice and support of this community can help each and every one of these projects move forward, and advance the state-of-the-art in using social media for social change.