Alex and Rob's blog | Social Signal

This blog post is part of our series on Social Media for Social Enterprise: How non-profits can earn revenue with Web 2.0.

This episode finds Alex and Rob with some company in bed: the kids. (Parental discretion advised: contains explicit sounds of complaining toddler.) We talk about what happens when your favourite online community members participate just a little too much... and what you can do about it.

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.

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 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.

Break out the propeller beanies: it's a gear-heavy episode this time. It starts with Rob talking about the swishy new voice recorder that will soon be replacing the combination of a 4th-generation iPod and Griffin iTalk. That'll mean much nicer sound... and the end of that hard-drive-spinning-up whine that we're guessing you won't miss at all.

Valentine's Day has come and gone, but we're not going to let an arbitrary deadline conspire with the flu to rob the Internets of the chance to hear a few more bedtime conversations from Alex and Rob.