Here’s something the world needs more of: a workshop on blogging as part of your larger communication strategy. And not just any workshop, but a 4 day workshop in a beautiful location with great food. (Priced quite fairly, I think, given how intensive it sounds.) Alex Samuel and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal are very smart people, I met them and enjoyed their company at recent South by Southwest and NTen conferences. Rob is a politically savvy and very funny guy. Alex has a PHD from Harvard and does online work around blogging, tagging, RSS, the international digital divide and lots of other topics. (And with Net Squared, where we’re both contracted.) This workshop isn’t about the technical side of blogging though, it’s about the strategic side of the medium.
I know that in my consulting practice, and I hear the same from other people all the time, many organizations can have a hard time grasping the ethos and potential of self-publishing on the web – of blogging! I find that the better I understand the whole story myself, the better I’m able to explain it to other people, to make it happen and to get the most out of the medium. That’s why something like what Alex and Rob are putting on makes sense to me.
You can read about the workshop on the venue’s web site and about Social Signal at socialsignal.com
It’s true. 
I love http://immedi.at and use it all the time to get IM mssgs whenever select RSS feeds are updated. Just learned about another option, http://www.rasasa.com. This one will send you an IM, unless you’re offline. If you’re offline then it will send your cell phone a text mssg, unless you’ve said you don’t want to be texted at the time, then you’ll get an email.