Rob Cottingham
- Location
- Vancouver, Canada
- Title
- Principal
- Company
- Social Signal
- Bio
- Cartoonist. Speaker. Social media enabler.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Poll cats
November 03, 2012 02:29PM - A small request
November 03, 2012 03:26AM - Knowing enough to be useful is
enough.
October 31, 2012 03:32PM - Does commenting have to be a
despair-filled swamp of angry
ranting? …Maybe not.
October 28, 2012 02:59PM - Cartoon-blogging Cory Doctorow
and William Gibson
October 22, 2012 11:21AM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Firechick, that's
terrific! (Good lord,
Tangerine Dream
played there
last year!!)…”
May 25, 2012 06:25PM - “Thank you, everyone -
and I'm truly sorry I missed
all these
comments when they
f…”
January 17, 2012 03:08AM - “A lovely post, Patty.
And this - "I may not have
served in
Afghan or Iraq,
b…”
October 06, 2011 01:00PM - “It's... you know, it's
been four months, and I'm
still not
quite sure how I
feel…”
January 24, 2011 07:26PM - “Oh, and seriously: check
out http://delicious.com. It's
a
great way of not just
s…”
November 07, 2010 11:02PM
Rob Cottingham's Links
Knowing enough to be useful is enough.
Lauren Bacon shares a personal demon (possibly a genetic one!) about public speaking and imposter syndrome:
My mother [is] a brilliant and successful woman who has spent her entire career in the nonprofit housing sector, and who runs an organization that she has built up from a small nonprofit with a
… Read full post »
Does commenting have to be a despair-filled swamp of angry ranting? …Maybe not.
Old media often see Internet as a cesspool. While we can find that stuff if we want to, Coates tells us that the Internet can offer amazing opportunities to find and curate positive community. He tells us the story of one of his commenters who would write amazing, beautifully-written
Cartoon-blogging Cory Doctorow and William Gibson
Here are my notes from Saturday’s event with Cory Doctorow in conversation with William Gibson. (I attended with Dave Eaves, which meant I got to experience two terrific conversations that afternoon.) The hour and a half ranged over everything from the First-World problems of book tours to… Read full post »
For everyone who wants Obama to be more animated…
Now, this represents a lot of work — not just the raw animation and graphics work, but the tremendous visual imagination driving them.
But it’s a superb example of how you can reach far more people with your speech than the audience alone. Creating a digital… Read full post »
Just a browser. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
A web browser is a fantastic thing. I try imagining how I’d have felt in my 20s seeing the kind of tech I take for granted today, and wind up on the floor hyperventilating in panic.
But it’s still just a browser.
You know what I love
Measuring the Networked Nonprofit has arrived
A few weeks ago, I let you know that Measuring the Networked Nonprofit was on its way, bringing with it the combined wisdom of Beth Kanter and Katie Paine on how nonprofits can measure their impact in an era of free agents and networked activism.
It’s a momentous book. Organizations from… Read full post »
Almost out of whiteboard
At the AFL-CIO, volunteers earn points toward cool… budget clout
TechPresident reports that the AFL-CIO’s Super PAC, Workers’ Voice, is rewarding its volunteers with a points system: registering gets you 50 points, and agreeing to receive text messages scores 14 more.
Amass enough points, and you can start redeeming them. But
Cartoon-blogging at Google Engage Vancouver
Google Engage for Agencies came to Canada a year ago, training agencies in AdWords and other Google products so they can then offer those products to their clients. Yesterday Google celebrated the program’s first Canuck birthday with a four-city conference, connected by Google Hangout, lookin… Read full post »
Resolution: quote more women
So often, when I’m reaching for a stirring quotation, I wind up with something a man said. (Or, in the case of Gandhi, didn’t say.) You may find the same thing.
If so, and you’d like to redress that imbalance a little, bookmark The Eloquent Woman Index of Famous Women’s Speec… Read full post »
The new iPhone’s killer feature
I’m picturing Tim Cook on the stage, wrapping up: “So: a new iPhone with our biggest display and best camera ever, a new line of iPods, and a whole new iTunes.” He starts to stroll off the stage, then stops and turns to the audience. “Oh, and one more thing…
̶… Read full post »
Live-tweeting for the first time… or the fiftieth? Check this list out
5. Research speakers’ Twitter usernames beforehand. Keep them on a piece of paper or notepad for easy reference.
6. Confirm the event hashtag. Find out what the official hashtag for the event is, and make sure you use that watch out for typos. If there’s isn’t one, make a nice short
… Read full post »
Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot on the science of Facebook for non-profits
After reviewing 1,000 Facebook posts and updates from 20 non-profits with large followings on the site, Capulet‘s Theo Lamb and Darren Barefoot can report
- a) that it’s a really good idea to get other people to tally the metrics for 1,000 separate posts – something they achieved through … Read full post »
What you can learn from Bill Clinton, speechwriter
One of the most valuable things you can get back from a client after they deliver a speech you’ve written is the marked-up text – the changes they’ve made from what you wrote. You may not agree with every edit, but they’re very clear cues to what your client feels comfortable… Read full post »
And in the end…
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinbeck/
In a great wide-ranging report on a National Speakers Association convention panel from Ian Griffin, these two sentences seized my attention:
Dychtwald claimed he gets more accomplished in the last 60 seconds of a speech than in the first 30
… Read full post »
Run-time error
That looks painful, I know. But there’s no easy road to six-pack apps.
As someone who struggles with going to the gym, electronic devices may well prove to have been a life-saver for me. Without an ingrained workout ethic, it’s been hard for me to see a half-hour on a stationary… Read full post »
Measuring the Networked Nonprofit hits bookshelves in October
Every once in a while, titans team up. Sometimes the results are catastrophic (Lex Luthor, meet Brainiac) — but once in a while, you get something so wonderful (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”) it’s almost enough to rehabilitate the word “synergy”.
Here’… Read full post »
Ian Reid wants Americans to know the truth about Canada’s health care system… and their own
For several years now, my friend Ian Reid has been fighting an extremely rare breed of tumor called a chordoma. He blogs about it at The Real Story – along with his posts on politics.
A few days ago, those two topics converged in a remarkable post bluntly but accurately titled
Liveblog: Communications lessons from Obama’s speech
It’s hard to think of many other occasions when more is riding on a speechwriter’s craft than the moment when a presidential candidate officially accepts nomination.
My biases are probably pretty clear, but for the record, I dearly hope President Barack Obama is re-elected. That said, I�… Read full post »
Automattic releases liveblogging plugin for WordPress
You can find it here. I’m going to take it for a spin, liveblogging a pre-recorded episode of Nikita.
NOW can we use @#$# teleprompters again?
Mars needs megapixels!
Everybody’s been ooing and aahing over the engineering triumph of Curiosity’s landing – which was, admittedly, pretty nifty. But to my mind, the real triumph doesn’t belong to the engineers. It belongs to the project managers.
Can you imagine how hard it must be to prev… Read full post »
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