Tomorrow I'm off to Reboot in Copenhagen which I'm really looking forward to. Last year was my first year at Reboot when I'd just started at Write Image.  I'd been reading blogs for a while just to get information but never really been aware... Read More

I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the... Read More

One interesting consideration occurs to me while I'm here at the Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit. During the week there's been alot of discussion about how we as PR practitioners interact with and manage, new and emerging channels for... Read More

Via Slashdot, a New York Times article about the culture shock that results when young people - used to sharing the details of their lives with the world through their blogs - enter the workplace, where the laundry is kept inside, thankyouverymuch. (Link... Read More

Steve Makofsky from the Platforms Incubation group at Microsoft recently asked a good question in his blog: Are products better because of blogs? Sure, blogging evangelists talk up the benefits of transparency, openness, conversations with your customers,... Read More

The blogosphere collective is still reeling after “new marketing” pop guru Seth Godin pulled his comments section. The marketing whizz defended his action with this statement: "First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to... Read More

Science Fiction writer William Gibson once said: 'The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." So it is with blogging, and the tools and technology to blog. Pundits claim that blogging is the next wave of social journalism, giving the... Read More

Jeremiah has a post about the Supernova conference he recently attended. In this he talks about a question that was asked of Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun. "should CEOs blog?"The notes on his answer are "John, refers to CEOs 5 years ago not... Read More

Last week Edelman lost its virtuous positioning among the bloggerati with the saga of its Wal-Mart blog - or indeed Flog as we now know it should be called. Uncovering the inside story on the blog has drawn an ugly reaction from the anti-Wal-Mart... Read More

Nah, of course not. We all know where bears go... and Monday we finally got confirmation it was indeed as we suspected. On Monday Edelman broke its silence on the Wal-Mart blog story that has exercised the blogging and PR communities. I was travelling... Read More

Yesterday, sitting among a gathering of the great and the good of UK tech PR (well the ones that work for the client who had pulled us together into a meeting, five agencies no less, all proper players, all the top talent in the room). The topic of making... Read More

Scoble has a post in which, among a whole load of other things, he talks about some info that came up at an MSN advertising conference. "I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at... Read More

James Governor takes a worthwhile tour around how the major tech firms currently engage with bloggers. James isn't quite the typical blogger, of course, so his experience is slightly different to the average Joe Blogger. But its an insightful snapshot... Read More

Technorati's Dave Sifry publishes the latest State of the Blogosphere commentary. Its worth reading. There's lots on growth, spam, splogs, etc, which is all good to know, but sort of taken as read - what surprised and / or interested me, was:... Read More

...the world's leading... a UK-based, Tech PR gossip site is in danger of joining me in sensible middle age. Recent posts have demonstrated a healthy dose of commonsense about the fluffy world of PR. Here commenting upon the burden of excessive... Read More

Nice wrinkle ahead. Having built a community around a blog, you now will be able to interact with them via online conference call capabilities, or Skypecasts, as Skype would have us call it. ZDnet ran the story here yesterday. Curiously, I haven't... Read More

As Microsoft blogger Quentin Clark eloquently put it, "Wow."At the recent TechEd conference in Boston, Microsoft previewed the Beta 2 release of the next-generation Windows file system (WinFS), which the company said would be available "later this year". ... Read More

from the Qumana blogeBay Canada have introduced member blogs to their community section.  With a bit of further digging these are also available under the .com  address, http://blogs.ebay.com,  and there is a link on the UK site, http://blogs.ebay.co.uk,... Read More

Lifehacker has a great story on some guys trying to build a start up business for just $500. Their idea - Weblogwire - looks like it may be relevant to anyone working in PR, or who has an interest in blogging. You can get outline details on their own... Read More

Hugh Macleod has a post titled "Best thing since Cluetrain" about a speech that Ben Hammersley gave at Les Blogs last December.  I was there and this speech was great. It was one of the few at Les Blogs where only one person spoke. I've seen Ben... Read More

Despite the amount of commentary and blog buzz (what I think of as old fashioned 'white noise') about Social Media, the Wikipedia entry is strangely short. In fact Drew Benvie, from London tech PR firm Lewis PR, seems to be the sole author of... Read More

Another sign of efforts to give Microsoft a more human face is this link to the team blog for Microsoft Codename Max and its simple, almost poignant statement, "We are not robots." (Coincidence, or a rebuttal to Hugh MacLeod's "total androids" cartoon?)It... Read More

Following on from Siobhan's post on PR 101 tools and lazy journalism colluding to serve up ropy stories to consumers. I'd ask the question, so will bloggers be able to keep vendors and traditional media honest? Maybe, if the experience of a recent... Read More

As many people have said,  Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel , Andy Lark, Stuart Bruce, Shel Holtz, Tom Murphy, to name a few -  Dell have launched a blog, One2One.Some of this has been positive some negative but it looks like it... Read More

Ahead of the launch of Office 2007, Microsoft Australia has wangled local vernacular into the Office 2007 dictionary. No more squiggly red underlining when Aussies type in the word Bogaroo. I like this idea. Yes, its obviously a PR tactic but its harmless... Read More

Read Michael Castellon's blog on a new initiative to defuse the alien threat to Nevada. Teaser pic below. But remember, back in June you read it here first. Tags: KFC, Aliens, Junk food... Read More

In this post BL Ochman continues to breathe life into the Edelman/Wal-Mart debacle (judging by the number of comments interest is tailing off). Here's a snippet: The theme here is PR agency cluelessness about new media. And here to the bandwagon response... Read More

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is responsible for lighting the blue touchpaper on this trivia (but its Friday after all).  Scott's post here debated that Bill Gates would make a reasonable President of the USA. An idea that becomes less preposterous... Read More

Reuters and Yahoo! have launched a citizen news and image publishing site called You Witness News located on Yahoo's site. The site opens for your news uploads tomorrow. Judging by the news story, its more about generating content for Yahoo! than... Read More

Jason Calacanis thinks so. He is on a crusade to out PR/marketing agencies who he suspects are paying top Digg-ers to recommend clients products. He has called for support in outing these companies and even put up a nominal $100 reward for information... Read More

Following on from Andrew's post from LeWeb3 about delegates' discontent with the political agendas that hijacked the event, the explosion of discontent continues to ripple outwards through various blogs and posted images. I don't know Loic... Read More

Fourteen A-list bloggers spent 60 minutes in the company. I found reports of the event from Niall Kennedy, Michael Arrington, Steve Rubel, Molly Holzschlag, Liz Gannes and Chris Pirillo. In terms of the PR mechanics of this experiment... Read More

I seem to recall that recently Gartner - to many people's surprise - scooped an award for its forays into blogging. Unfortunately, some corners of the Gartner empire seem to have been bypassed on the road to web enabled enlightment. Read here from competitive... Read More

There are two feeds that I read regularly which have just been through a site redesign. Jeremiah's web strategy blog and Lifehacker. Both of these have gone about it in different ways. Lifehacker went big bang and just changed the site overnight,... Read More

Fig. 1 - The KeyGhost board, which Dell does not install in its computers. Earlier, Siobhan wondered if Dell would address rumors about keystroke logging on the company's new blog. It has, and quite succinctly:Keyghost just won't die.  Just so we're... Read More

This year's Media Guardian 100 list, which ranks the most important and influential in British media, contains few suprises. New media has continued its steady climb to world domination, with an increased impact on the annual... Read More

In his latest Across the Sound podcast Joseph Jaffe mentions that he's doing it from a plane somewhere over the atlantic.GNER trains have wifi connections in the UK and I've blogged from a train but not from a plane, I don't travel upper class enough.What's... Read More

Yesterday one of our posts was linked to from boingboing and from there was on the digg home page as one of the most dugg stories of the day. Steve Rubel recently had a post about about the digg effect and how it can effect your site. Having just... Read More

Pew has published some research on bloggers that has gathered much news comment. Scott Karp also has some observations. According to the San Francisco Chronicle: "A popular notion about bloggers is that they're pajama-wearing partisan ranters... Read More

In the mix of participants on this blog, I seem to represent the voice of the entrepreneur. I'm also an entrepreneur of a certain age and experience. Perhaps that why I loved the sceptical tone of Dead 2.0. Anyone getting a little too carried away with... Read More

Microsoft has sparked another ethics debate for bloggers (or is it the same debate coming round again?). Either way, its a very familiar question to anyone working in tech PR: what's a review machine and what's a freebie? Microsoft... Read More

The Inquirer offers a good perspective into the Microsoft blogging 'scandal'. If you don't have time to read the full story, the clue is in the headline: Microsoft Ferrari furore is a load of old tosh. Although the sub head is pretty good too: Bloggers... Read More

Before Christmas I was getting a bit weary about the A-list circuit of bloggers that I had tracked. A lot of folk seemed to be getting bit too self important, and the conversation always seemed to be a bit heated to say the least. I was never one for... Read More

I missed this story in Saturday's Times Online but its subsequently stirred up a few comments at Church of the Customer and Slashdot. In outline terms, new EU consumer protection laws will prevent companies misrepresenting themselves as consumers.... Read More

Martin Moore starts the ball rolling here, Jeff Jarvis adds his bit - here - and the ..the world's leading... adds more of the same here. And my recent experiences are that they are bang on the money. Which is an uncomfortable point of view... Read More

Following on from some recent posts - my Friday evening moan and the KFC rats story - Jeremiah provides a more constructive commentary on these and other recent 'ugly' aspects of social media. The pertinent question is what are we each learning from... Read More

BBC Radio Four ran a good program this morning on the phenomenon of war blogging. In the program, called Iraq Online, BBC Defence Correspondent Paul Wood examines how social media is offering an immediate and firsthand glimpse into the wartime experiences... Read More

I'll follow up with a more considered post - day two starts shortly... In terms of highlights, keynote yesterday was Ben McConnell. Ben manfully overcame the worst that the evil god of AV snafus can do to a man in front of a big audience. Luckily thanks... Read More

As you might recall, last week I posted an entry about some anti-Microsoft Office bus ads that Sun Microsystems is running on buses that serve Redmond. Cheeky monkeys.Figuring that the folks at Boing Boing might appreciate the story, I submitted it... Read More

James Cherkoff on his Modern Marketing blog links to a PowerPoint slide which Jun Sato from Toshiba used while doing a presentation at MIT Media Lab.It show the number of creative commons licenses by country around the world.  What I find interesting... Read More

This post by Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent for the Guardian, brought my attention to a new venture - yet to launch - that is bang on the mark, given all my previous posts on new technology's impact on journalism and traditional... Read More

TNM would like to join the rest of the blogosphere in welcoming Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the series of tubes that we call the Internet. The BBC reports that Ahmadinejad has set up his own blog, posting in several languages, along with... Read More

For the last couple of weeks I've been on holiday and made a concerted effort not to turn on my laptop and watched very little TV.  I've come back and YouTube seems to have made the jump from online to offline phenomenon.On the way into work I read... Read More

Scoble has a post in which, among a whole load of other things, he talks about some info that came up at an MSN advertising conference. "I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at... Read More

I'm a novice golfer and have been playing for almost 2 years having been given some lessons for a birthday a couple of years ago.Each year I set my self some targets both of which I have done so far, I haven't worked out next year's suggestions welcome.year... Read More

I had a great time, learned a lot, met cool people, had my mind blown several times, and embarrassed myself in a multiplayer Castle Crashers game by hitting the wrong buttons on the game controller. (Hey, I roll old school, all right? In my day we... Read More

There are two feeds that I read regularly which have just been through a site redesign. Jeremiah's web strategy blog and Lifehacker.Both of these have gone about it in different ways.Lifehacker went big bang and just changed the site overnight, loads... Read More

One of the keys to success in blogging is commenting on other people's blogs, which is why I am not a successful blogger.* As I've taken on more projects within and without Metia I've gotten awful at commenting on other people's blogs. It's all I can... Read More

James Cherkoff on his Modern Marketing blog links to a PowerPoint slide which Jun Sato from Toshiba used while doing a presentation at MIT Media Lab.It show the number of creative commons licenses by country around the world.  What I find interesting... Read More

A few follow up thoughts on the two days in Denmark. Overheard comment from an American - "If this was in the US all people would be asking would be how we make money from this. Here in Europe it's about how good they can make something." Favourite... Read More

After the huge success of TechCrunch.com, which now has more than 100k readers  - well done, they have launched a UK site which will be focusing on UK based start-ups.Sam Sethi will be editing the site.One page which stood out for me was the events... Read More

Well on Technorati searches anyway. Tag: leweb3... Read More

Jeremiah has a post about the Supernova conference he recently attended. In this he talks about a question that was asked of Jonathan Schwartz the CEO of Sun. "should CEOs blog?"The notes on his answer are "John, refers to CEOs 5 years ago not... Read More

After an early start this morning and getting the train over from London I have now arrived at Le Web 3.It's a lot bigger than last year, much bigger venue and room, little mini conference outside.  However the same wifi problems.According to Gogelmogel... Read More

In the previous post I referenced Ben McConnell's red shoes - by the end of his presentation an essential prop. In bloggerazzi fashion, after meeting Ben I snapped him and his shoes.  What's the story with the shoes? Go here.... Read More

He has just left the building and the next panel has just started.  I don't know if people are thinking about what is being said now or what has just been said.When I arrived this morning you could tell something was going on as the number of police... Read More

I'm off to Paris in December to go to Le Web.  I went last year when it was Les Blogs, which was very interesting and hopefully this year should be too. Looking forward to seeing everybody there. I think the move to open it out to be more about the... Read More

Yesterday one of our posts was linked to from boingboing and from there was on the digg home page as one of the most dugg stories of the day.Steve Rubel recently had a post about about the digg effect and how it can effect your site.Having just gone through... Read More

In his latest Across the Sound podcast Joseph Jaffe mentions that he's doing it from a plane somewhere over the atlantic.GNER trains have wifi connections in the UK and I've blogged from a train but not from a plane, I don't travel upper class enough.What's... Read More

As many people have said,  Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel , Andy Lark, Stuart Bruce, Shel Holtz, Tom Murphy, to name a few -  Dell have launched a blog, One2One.Some of this has been positive some negative but it looks like it... Read More

from the Qumana blogeBay Canada have introduced member blogs to their community section.  With a bit of further digging these are also available under the .com  address, http://blogs.ebay.com,  and there is a link on the UK site, http://blogs.ebay.co.uk,... Read More

Tomorrow I'm off to Reboot in Copenhagen which I'm really looking forward to.Last year was my first year at Reboot when I'd just started at Write Image.  I'd been reading blogs for a while just to get information but never really been aware of how... Read More

Kotaku's take, and Joystiq's take.My favorite comment on Kotaku: "40+ year old balding white men hate blogs."You hear that, Steve Rubel? Give up this charade: The blogosphere is ON TO YOU.While we're on the subject, I'd like to give shout outs to Kotaku's... Read More

After the huge success of TechCrunch.com, which now has more than 100k readers  - well done, they have launched a UK site which will be focusing on UK based start-ups.Sam Sethi will be editing the site.One page which stood out for me was the events... Read More

Another panel of interest that I attended at the 2006 Penny Arcade Expo was "Forums, Blogs and Fanbois: The Role of Community and PR in the Game Industry". Here are my notes from the event. Although the discussion focuses on gaming fans and game development,... Read More

In another example of the new tyranny of direct customer interaction, US social networking site Facebook has outraged members of its community with some site enhancements that have been interpreted as threatening the privacy of users - see adaywithoutfacebook.... Read More

Bloggers at Metroblogging Bangkok are providing a citizen's-eye view of the military coup in Thailand, in which the army has removed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra from power. (The most recent posts suggest that the Thai people see this as a Good Thing.)... Read More

Frodo of The Weekly Geek - one of my favorite podcasts - examines the fruits of Nintendo's blogger-oriented marketing campaign for its upcoming Wii gaming system, and finds what he believes to be a deep flaw.Nintendo has recently rolled out a new marketing... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

Apologies for this blog going further up the cul de sac of self interest but to answer some questions... When selecting a new name we specifically set ourselves the following six requirements: No puns No risk of legal trauma No flaky meaning to... Read More

Tom Glocer CEO of Reuters has a blog.  On it he says "We are all subject to a lot of official communications these days from companies, governments, celebrities and others.  All too often these are ghost written passages concocted by overeager... Read More

Hugh Macleod has a post titled "Best thing since Cluetrain" about a speech that Ben Hammersley gave at Les Blogs last December.  I was there and this speech was great. It was one of the few at Les Blogs where only one person spoke. I've seen Ben... Read More

ABC News posted an article entitled "100 Blogs We Love". Wow! I bet those bloggers really appreciate the...um... ...links. D'oh!   (via Kung Fu Grippe)... Read More

One of the keys to success in blogging is commenting on other people's blogs, which is why I am not a successful blogger.* As I've taken on more projects within and without Metia I've gotten awful at commenting on other people's blogs. It's all I can... Read More

I'm delighted to learn that Jon Silk, Head of Creative Media Services at LEWIS PR and former scourge of cloggers, is blogging energetically again at copypunk. Jon's new blog contains an impressive amount of Wil... Read More

In his post Covering an Apple press event, Robert Scoble offers sage advice on how to get your coverage noticed. The bad news is that it requires a team of four to five people: "TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re... Read More

I've been blogging less, lately. Of course, "less" for me might still be "an ungodly huge amount" for you. Why? Well, until now, blogs did the heavy lifting for nearly everything I wanted to do online. With blogs I could keep in touch... Read More

Hey, it's one of those "meem" things! I remember those. Jon Silk invited me and a few others to list "Five Tools You Can't Blog Without", something he asked us last year as well. My List in 2006 Blogger Flickr iGoogle Ma.gnolia Technorati... Read More

USA Today has a good wrap up on current legal cases around libel and blogging. It serves as a salutary reminder that while you may think you blog in a virtual world, your home and other assets exist in the real world. The one with all those lawyers.... Read More

You mean you haven't heard of Jonathan Coulton? C'mon! Surely you've heard his music on podcasts like the Little Gray Book Lectures, or Escape Pod.Or you've spotted his CafePress t-shirts.Maybe you've read his blog, where he collaborates with his readers... Read More

BusinessWeek has revisited a post from 2005, Blogs Will Change Your Business. It has now, of course, become, Social Media Will Change Your Business. The gist remains the same though: you have to get involved, so overcome your cynicism and get... Read More

Once again Reboot was very enjoyable but due to some hardware issues I wasn't able to get online, I think this may have made it more enjoyable it certainly meant I paid more attention to what people were saying.This year seemed to be the year of white... Read More

It would appear National Australia Bank (NAB) stuck a toe in the waters of social media, and liked it so much they jumped right in. But then jumped out right again, very shortly afterwards. Story here. More salutary lessons on how large organizations... Read More

eMarketer lifts some interesting data from TNS on the online activities of UK internet users in an article on Advertising on UK Social Networks. As ever data throws up some curiousities - 76% have used online banking, but only 16% have viewed, or contributed... Read More

Fascinating guest post from one of the founders of Shiny Media on TechCrunch UK. The post and the ensuing comments give a useful tour of many of the participants of the UK blogging scene (or should that be 'industry', ah, there's the rub), their issues... Read More

Interesting image from Scamp about how the US Air Force responds to blogs Tags: Scamp, US Air Force ... Read More

I have about seventy-three million high-priority writing assignments on my desk this morning, but I wanted to thrust a handful of links at you before I ran off (courtesy of Hugh MacLeod). The story in a nutshell: Johnson & Johnson... Read More

Steve Broback breaks the news that this year's event in Chicago is canceled: Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers... Read More

On Twitter: gapingvoid: There should be a "Twitter This" on blog entries. Instead of leaving a comment, you send a Tweet to the blogger automatically. debroby: but twittering instead of commenting on blogs closes the conversation. gapingvoid:... Read More

From the Life of Leo (Laporte) blog, a link to Virgin America's new online ads featuring cartoon versions of well-known bloggers.  Pictured: Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Pete Rojas, Alex Albrecht, and Kevin... Read More

You see, all you scoffers and naysayers? Social media produces measurable results! Before social media: no jacket. After social media: jacket. That is a 100 percent increase in jacket presence. Now I wonder if social media can cause a sandwich to... Read More

Ike Pigott of the American Red Cross created a blog to provide media outlets with up-to-date information about the Red Cross response to the disaster. Ike didn't use proprietary software, deployed on the Red Cross network and configured by a developer... Read More

I will be in fabulous Las Vegas on November 7-9 at the Blog World and New Media Expo. Honestly, I was going to give BWE a pass at first. When I looked at the conference schedule the panel offerings seemed pretty thin, and the schedule for Friday... Read More

One Twitter, one blog post, and one good idea equals instant community. Jeremiah Owyang (there ought to be a limit on how many times I can refer to him on one day) urged social media/marketing enthusiasts with Twitter accounts to leave... Read More

Hat tip to Puffbox that 10 Downing Street is soon to be releasing a new website, looks like a big improvement.You can read their post here but in short Wordpress basedMore videoStreamlined navigationno go live date as of yet  Tags: 10 Downing... Read More

Twitter is full of grumpy journos often (rightly or wrongly) blasting PR people for their lack of skills and insensitivity to their needs. Here's a cautionary tale - National Post Reporter has Total Twitter Meltdown - on what it looks like when... Read More

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use VistaTo what if Apple... Read More

A few people have posted about the pros and cons of excessive tweeting. Tom called it Twitter Tourettes. So if a 'tweet' captures a thought or comment, then surely a 'twitch' is a compulsive nervous tic expressed through Twitter.... Read More

I signed up to Mr Tweet. The strength of Mr Tweet is also its weakness. Mr Tweet analyses who you follow via Twitter, and then suggests other people to follow, based upon who the people that you follow, are in turn following themselves. If you follow... Read More

Compared to a couple of years back, I have less and less enthusiasm for wasting time contributing to the noise around which type of agency is best placed to serve and support the growing social media arena.  The latest example is this... Read More

A few comments recently on corporate blogs have confirmed my view that most corporates are still working to understand whether blogging fits into, or perhaps alongside, their communications activities. The Wall St Journal reports on the dire... Read More

There have been some interesting, vaguely connected, posts this week contributing to the discussion around where we are with the adoption of social media, particularly among larger or more conservative organizations. A bit too much to... Read More

Okay, that was dorky. But I was just looking at the Web site for a musician who performs under the name A Fine Frenzy and was intrigued by how it ties together various types of social media. A lot of the site's content consists... Read More

This is how it's done. At 7:30 AM Cory Doctorow writes a post on BoingBoing about a reader's difficulty with Amazon's MP3 downloads, and the bewildering response from customer service. At 3:17 PM, an Amazon employee on the MP3 development team leaves... Read More

Ahoy, bloggers! I'm going to be attending the Blog Business Summit in downtown Seattle this Thursday and Friday. If you're going to be there too, be sure to flag me down and say hello.The fact that I'm not completely sure what to wear to this event says... Read More

My notes from today's first panel, fresh from the oven. (When I take notes on people speaking, I tend to wander between first and second person. I've tried to shift everything back to first person, and apologize if I missed any.)I'm not sure that I can... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

The other day, a designer asked me for a few examples of blogs that I think are very well designed.It's funny how some things never occur to you until someone asks an innocent question like that. If he'd asked me to give him examples of well-designed... Read More

Al Gore may have invented the Internet and Howard Dean may have discovered how to use it to organize supporters and raise campaign funds; but I think we're seeing Web 2.0's maturity as a political tool at the Web site of Tom Vilsack, Iowa governor and... Read More

Who says good magicians never reveal their secrets? Today's Blogsmart news e-mail from blogging guru Dave Taylor gives subscribers a look behind the curtain, at how he crafts his writing for good search engine results.Dave Taylor (far left) at the 2006... Read More

When is news too old to write about on your blog? Well, if AdJab can post about this amazing Diet Coke and Mentos video, I can mention Gizmodo's shaggy dog story of mid-December. The gadget blog posted on December 14th that the iPhone would be announced... Read More

Over at TechCrunch,. Michael Arrington comments on a post that Sab Kanaujia, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC Digital Media, deleted from his blog. In the post, Kanaujia discussed NBC's plans for a homegrown social networking platform that fans of NBC... Read More

I'll be posting updates from the South by Southwest Interactive festival over the next few days. But there will be plenty of times when it's just not convenient to plunk down in a chair with my laptop and do a proper post. So like many attendees, I'm... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

After using Twitter for a while, I'm becoming convinced that many blog posts--maybe most blog posts--would be vastly improved if they were only 140 characters long.Some posts require extra room to tell a story, explain an idea, or convey a complex emotion.... Read More

Leonidas from 300 has a MySpace page. It's a good page, featuring a video of the trailer, screensavers, wallpaper, and icons. So far this is standard stuff for a movie tie-in Web page; but the promotion also enriches the MySpace experience by gifting... Read More

The My Coke Rewards promotion turns codes printed on Coca-Cola bottlecaps into GOLD! (If by "gold" you mean NASCAR hats and coupons for movie popcorn.)One day, I innocently posted a minor gripe about the promotion on my personal blog. I was astonished... Read More

As a regular listener to This Week in Tech and a frequent Twitter user, the news that TWiT mastermind Leo Laporte was abandoning the service amid talk of trademark infringement rocked a small corner of my online world.I can't see how someone would confuse... Read More

OK so everyone hates the 2.0 attachment, but also everyone knows what we - loosely speaking at least - mean by it. A couple of articles on the subject of enterprise 2.0 caught my eye in the past day or two. Bill Gates took time in his last CIO Summit... Read More

is well, viral. As opposed to the blatantly planned, stage managed and marketed that shouts, I'M VIRAL, VIRAL ME. OK, there has to be some plan from either a random spotty student or by Global MegaCorp Inc's agency, or no virals would ever get... Read More

                  As Twitter ends a creaky week of sporadic downtime, BusinessWeek has an article on Why Twitter Matters and explores the potential for it to emerge into a 'social media powerhouse'.... Read More

Pete wrote this post on the Top Ten Most Irritating Phrases. What struck me was that this Telegraph article accumulated 2,484 comments, more than I'll get in a lifetime. Whick proves irritating phrases rattle cages. So what other posts are in the list... Read More

Personally I'm not a big Twitter user and don't need to write lines like Hugh's cartoon. I see the benefit of Twitter, my lack of usage is mainly due to the amount of time I have available rather than anything else. From a company point of view a lot... Read More

I've been to many conferences over the years which have set up a dedicated back channel which has always added to my experience of the conference.Twitter seems to be the back channel for SxSW and most people seem to be using it. I have an account but... Read More

Well, not really. In fact, it doesn't review Apple's corporate blog, or any blogs by Apple employees, because there isn't a corporate blog at Apple or any legit employee blogs. A point discussed by Joe Wilcox here at AppleWatch. Joe contrasts... Read More

The Forrester posse is full of their new report on B2B buyers use of social media. Josh Bernoff says: "If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, this report means you're late." "This is your chance to stand... Read More

Obvious Corp. founder Evan Williams has posted some news at the Obvious blog:As I've mentioned before, the plan for Obvious is to build a series of products, which hopefully gain from being part of the greater whole. I also said, "When justified by growth,... Read More

After a midnight finish and a 4:30am start this morning I've made it to Reboot, my favourite conference of the year. It has great presenters who are articulate and passionate about their subjects.  It always makes you think about new and... Read More

Jeremy Beadle died of Leukaemia this week. The sub head of his obituary in the Independent was: Loved and Loathed TV Prankster. Which is both a blunt and accurate statement for his obituary. I can't honestly say I was one of his fans. ... Read More

I saw this list of icons at the bottom of a blog post recently. In there you have Digg Del.icio.us Newsvine Furl Blinkbits Blinklist Blogmarks Co.mments Connotea De.lirio.us Fark Feedmelinks Linkagogo Ma.gnolia Netvouz... Read More

I'm a novice golfer and have been playing for almost 2 years having been given some lessons for a birthday a couple of years ago.Each year I set my self some targets both of which I have done so far, I haven't worked out next year's suggestions welcome.... Read More

For the last couple of weeks I've been on holiday and made a concerted effort not to turn on my laptop and watched very little TV.  I've come back and YouTube seems to have made the jump from online to offline phenomenon.On the way into work I read... Read More

That seems to be the general consensus at Le Web 3 today.Three times today we have had the conference interrupted by politicians.  The first Shimon Peres talked to us.  He came across well, talked openly, took questions, had gravitas and I think... Read More

I hate to interrupt the grownups when they're talking about implementing customer reference programs, but I need to take a moment here to discuss soda pop.I recently wrote that a throwaway post about My Coke Rewards on my personal blog had gotten a surprising... Read More

Much discussion about the role of Twitter in reporting on the recent Mumbai attacks. Forbes.com reports: Mumbai: Twitter's Moment Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC puts some perspective around the more outrageous claims for Twitter in Twitter - the Mumbai... Read More

I'm delighted to learn that Jon Silk, Head of Creative Media Services at LEWIS PR and former scourge of cloggers, is blogging energetically again at copypunk. Jon's new blog contains an impressive amount of Wil... Read More

The People's Daily Online reports that Chinese authorities have set up a summer camp to cure youngsters addicted to the internet. The report says: "According to research by Shanghai's youth affairs office, those seriously addicted to the web should receive... Read More

In his post Covering an Apple press event, Robert Scoble offers sage advice on how to get your coverage noticed. The bad news is that it requires a team of four to five people: "TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re... Read More

I've been blogging less, lately. Of course, "less" for me might still be "an ungodly huge amount" for you. Why? Well, until now, blogs did the heavy lifting for nearly everything I wanted to do online. With blogs I could keep in touch... Read More

Hey, it's one of those "meem" things! I remember those. Jon Silk invited me and a few others to list "Five Tools You Can't Blog Without", something he asked us last year as well. My List in 2006 Blogger Flickr iGoogle Ma.gnolia Technorati... Read More

I have about seventy-three million high-priority writing assignments on my desk this morning, but I wanted to thrust a handful of links at you before I ran off (courtesy of Hugh MacLeod). The story in a nutshell: Johnson & Johnson... Read More

Steve Broback breaks the news that this year's event in Chicago is canceled: Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers... Read More

I was just weeding out my inbox and came across a set of notes from SXSWi that I didn't know I took! As you might remember, I had some trouble taking notes because my laptop battery was only capable of holding 20 minutes worth of juice. Apparently I managed... Read More

I hate to interrupt the grownups when they're talking about implementing customer reference programs, but I need to take a moment here to discuss soda pop.I recently wrote that a throwaway post about My Coke Rewards on my personal blog had gotten a surprising... Read More

BL Ochman continues with her tough love approach to converting corporates to better blogging practices in The Real Reasons Why Big Companies Don't Link to Their Blogs from Their Corporate Home Pages. We can duck BL's ire - we do link from our home page... Read More

I was just weeding out my inbox and came across a set of notes from SXSWi that I didn't know I took! As you might remember, I had some trouble taking notes because my laptop battery was only capable of holding 20 minutes worth of juice. Apparently I managed... Read More

BL Ochman does everyone a service again. Here with some great advice for PRs. Learn from the mistakes of others.... Read More

After a midnight finish and a 4:30am start this morning I've made it to Reboot, my favourite conference of the year. It has great presenters who are articulate and passionate about their subjects.  It always makes you think about new and... Read More

Interesting to see Hugh MacLeod was invited along to the brand launch of the London 2012 Olympics. Hitherto, I've only noticed bloggers being invited along to incestuously tech-related Blog Opportunities, What does that say about the transition... Read More

A few follow up thoughts on the two days in Denmark. Overheard comment from an American - "If this was in the US all people would be asking would be how we make money from this. Here in Europe it's about how good they can make something." Favourite... Read More

Venerable UK journalistic institution, John Humphrys caused a kerfuffle around making his first tweet today - here on the BBC web site. UK Govt got slammed (wrongly) for reportedly appointing a Twitter Tzar - here the story put to rights by Charles Arthur.... Read More

Dell has hired Andy Lark as its new VP Global Marketing & Communications. My headline is a bit of an overstatement, I'm certain Andy wasn't hired just because he is a blogger, but given Dell's experiences in recent years it can't have been a disadvantage.... Read More

News that Hugh MaCleod's Blue Monster thingy (idea? activity? initiative? movement?) has evolved into a branded Stormhoek wine caused a run on FT servers this morning. I was greeted with... Luckily the story is on GapingVoid too. Tags: Blue Monster,... Read More

On Twitter: gapingvoid: There should be a "Twitter This" on blog entries. Instead of leaving a comment, you send a Tweet to the blogger automatically. debroby: but twittering instead of commenting on blogs closes the conversation. gapingvoid:... Read More

Google just bought Jaiku. Scoble reckons its a giant leap for Google who are prepping the next wave in social media. The comments thread on Scoble's article provides a nice snapshot of sentiment around different social network sites and tools. Next wave?... Read More

From the Life of Leo (Laporte) blog, a link to Virgin America's new online ads featuring cartoon versions of well-known bloggers.  Pictured: Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Pete Rojas, Alex Albrecht, and Kevin... Read More

Every now and again stir up PR agencies (preferably on a Friday afternoon). Then sit back and watch the response. Tags: Tom Foremski, PR is dead (again)... Read More

Something a bit strange about following the wise words of Forrester's marketing team blog over many months, and then finding someone from a PR agency - Chris Thilk of MWW - suddenly joining the conversation on the site. All completely transparent... Read More

The excellent Jeff James has spent the past week or two talking readers through his Facebook learning experience.  In today's post he explains far better than I could why social networks are not just for kids/students.  I mostly work... Read More

The Friendly Ghost has published a list PowerPR Index of bloggers. We are way down (I assume it might be us down there at #65?). TFG's list owes its heritage to Todd Andrlik and his Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs. Again, we don't feature, even... Read More

Follow up to the previous post, I am just getting introduced to The Friendly Ghost's blog and so far I like it. I also like ..the World's Leading... which makes me wonder about the pros and cons of anonymity in blogging. These two seem to handle... Read More

True to form, in recognizing twelve months of his Web Strategist blog, Jeremiah Owyang shares all those private little datapoints about the site. This isn't surprising because Jeremiah shares a lot. Jeremiah's site is one of my very few must... Read More

In an article today CIO Magazine offers up Seven Reasons for your Company to Start an Internal Blog. My first reaction was: how'd do you mean, start? But on reflection they are right. They are speaking to the mass majority. And the majority of... Read More

Following a series of gripey sounding posts (here, here and here - and there have been others) about the failings of PR as an industry to get its act together in an environment fundamentally changed by social media, here are a couple of... Read More

The story so far. A small storm erupts on Friday night around a Microsoft ad campaign running across Federated Media's syndicated blogger sites (FM is kind of an ad sales clearing house that sells space for a group of independent... Read More

A clutch of interesting links on social networks from the weekend and Monday: Danah Boyd is academic about class-ism on Facebook and MySpace - summarized on BBC Online. Tom Murphy starts to hang with the kidz on Facebook. He has... Read More

A naive question I know, but interesting to read that Richard Holway - formerly of Ovum and the eponymously named Richard Holway Ltd - now regards himself as an influencer not an analyst. And that he aspires to be a trusted influencer. I've paid... Read More

You see, all you scoffers and naysayers? Social media produces measurable results! Before social media: no jacket. After social media: jacket. That is a 100 percent increase in jacket presence. Now I wonder if social media can cause a sandwich to... Read More

Pinsent Mason's legal newswire, OUT-LAW News has a story on upcoming Italian legislation covering "editorial products", that may require bloggers to register with the government simply to publish a private blog. I suspect the keyword is *may*. One has... Read More

Mashable's list of top US election resources, reminded me of some thoughts I had on the subject of politics and online when I was in the US last week.  First, I was amazed how much media bandwidth the whole topic was already consuming, despite... Read More

Ike Pigott of the American Red Cross created a blog to provide media outlets with up-to-date information about the Red Cross response to the disaster. Ike didn't use proprietary software, deployed on the Red Cross network and configured by a developer... Read More

I will be in fabulous Las Vegas on November 7-9 at the Blog World and New Media Expo. Honestly, I was going to give BWE a pass at first. When I looked at the conference schedule the panel offerings seemed pretty thin, and the schedule for Friday... Read More

Wal-Mart is venturing into the blogosphere again. Previous forays gave the US retail giant (and its PR agency) a bloody nose. Not being an American, I don't quite understand the degree of antipathy toward Wal-Mart. It certainly seems that if they slip... Read More

One Twitter, one blog post, and one good idea equals instant community. Jeremiah Owyang (there ought to be a limit on how many times I can refer to him on one day) urged social media/marketing enthusiasts with Twitter accounts to leave... Read More

Okay, that was dorky. But I was just looking at the Web site for a musician who performs under the name A Fine Frenzy and was intrigued by how it ties together various types of social media. A lot of the site's content consists... Read More

This is how it's done. At 7:30 AM Cory Doctorow writes a post on BoingBoing about a reader's difficulty with Amazon's MP3 downloads, and the bewildering response from customer service. At 3:17 PM, an Amazon employee on the MP3 development team leaves... Read More

It seems these days corporate crises are played out in full view of the public. The FT Alphaville team live blogged SocGen's conf call this morning - the one in which the management 'explain' where the euro 5bn went. I've never really got... Read More

Last week Edelman lost its virtuous positioning among the bloggerati with the saga of its Wal-Mart blog - or indeed Flog as we now know it should be called. Uncovering the inside story on the blog has drawn an ugly reaction from the anti-Wal-Mart... Read More

Nah, of course not. We all know where bears go... and Monday we finally got confirmation it was indeed as we suspected. On Monday Edelman broke its silence on the Wal-Mart blog story that has exercised the blogging and PR communities. I was travelling... Read More

Ahoy, bloggers! I'm going to be attending the Blog Business Summit in downtown Seattle this Thursday and Friday. If you're going to be there too, be sure to flag me down and say hello.The fact that I'm not completely sure what to wear to this event says... Read More

My notes from today's first panel, fresh from the oven. (When I take notes on people speaking, I tend to wander between first and second person. I've tried to shift everything back to first person, and apologize if I missed any.)I'm not sure that I can... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

Yesterday, sitting among a gathering of the great and the good of UK tech PR (well the ones that work for the client who had pulled us together into a meeting, five agencies no less, all proper players, all the top talent in the room). The topic of making... Read More

James Governor takes a worthwhile tour around how the major tech firms currently engage with bloggers. James isn't quite the typical blogger, of course, so his experience is slightly different to the average Joe Blogger. But its an insightful snapshot... Read More

Technorati's Dave Sifry publishes the latest State of the Blogosphere commentary. Its worth reading. There's lots on growth, spam, splogs, etc, which is all good to know, but sort of taken as read - what surprised and / or interested me, was:... Read More

...the world's leading... a UK-based, Tech PR gossip site is in danger of joining me in sensible middle age. Recent posts have demonstrated a healthy dose of commonsense about the fluffy world of PR. Here commenting upon the burden of excessive... Read More

Nice wrinkle ahead. Having built a community around a blog, you now will be able to interact with them via online conference call capabilities, or Skypecasts, as Skype would have us call it. ZDnet ran the story here yesterday. Curiously, I haven't... Read More

I'm off to Paris in December to go to Le Web.  I went last year when it was Les Blogs, which was very interesting and hopefully this year should be too. Looking forward to seeing everybody there. I think the move to open it out to be more about the... Read More

Ahead of the launch of Office 2007, Microsoft Australia has wangled local vernacular into the Office 2007 dictionary. No more squiggly red underlining when Aussies type in the word Bogaroo. I like this idea. Yes, its obviously a PR tactic but its harmless... Read More

Read Michael Castellon's blog on a new initiative to defuse the alien threat to Nevada. Teaser pic below. But remember, back in June you read it here first. Tags: KFC, Aliens, Junk food... Read More

In this post BL Ochman continues to breathe life into the Edelman/Wal-Mart debacle (judging by the number of comments interest is tailing off). Here's a snippet: The theme here is PR agency cluelessness about new media. And here to the bandwagon response... Read More

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is responsible for lighting the blue touchpaper on this trivia (but its Friday after all).  Scott's post here debated that Bill Gates would make a reasonable President of the USA. An idea that becomes less preposterous... Read More

Reuters and Yahoo! have launched a citizen news and image publishing site called You Witness News located on Yahoo's site. The site opens for your news uploads tomorrow. Judging by the news story, its more about generating content for Yahoo! than... Read More

After an early start this morning and getting the train over from London I have now arrived at Le Web 3.It's a lot bigger than last year, much bigger venue and room, little mini conference outside.  However the same wifi problems.According to Gogelmogel... Read More

The other day, a designer asked me for a few examples of blogs that I think are very well designed.It's funny how some things never occur to you until someone asks an innocent question like that. If he'd asked me to give him examples of well-designed... Read More

He has just left the building and the next panel has just started.  I don't know if people are thinking about what is being said now or what has just been said.When I arrived this morning you could tell something was going on as the number of police... Read More

That seems to be the general consensus at Le Web 3 today.Three times today we have had the conference interrupted by politicians.  The first Shimon Peres talked to us.  He came across well, talked openly, took questions, had gravitas and I think... Read More

Jason Calacanis thinks so. He is on a crusade to out PR/marketing agencies who he suspects are paying top Digg-ers to recommend clients products. He has called for support in outing these companies and even put up a nominal $100 reward for information... Read More

Following on from Andrew's post from LeWeb3 about delegates' discontent with the political agendas that hijacked the event, the explosion of discontent continues to ripple outwards through various blogs and posted images. I don't know Loic... Read More

Fourteen A-list bloggers spent 60 minutes in the company. I found reports of the event from Niall Kennedy, Michael Arrington, Steve Rubel, Molly Holzschlag, Liz Gannes and Chris Pirillo. In terms of the PR mechanics of this experiment... Read More

Al Gore may have invented the Internet and Howard Dean may have discovered how to use it to organize supporters and raise campaign funds; but I think we're seeing Web 2.0's maturity as a political tool at the Web site of Tom Vilsack, Iowa governor and... Read More

Who says good magicians never reveal their secrets? Today's Blogsmart news e-mail from blogging guru Dave Taylor gives subscribers a look behind the curtain, at how he crafts his writing for good search engine results.Dave Taylor (far left) at the 2006... Read More

Microsoft has sparked another ethics debate for bloggers (or is it the same debate coming round again?). Either way, its a very familiar question to anyone working in tech PR: what's a review machine and what's a freebie? Microsoft... Read More

The Inquirer offers a good perspective into the Microsoft blogging 'scandal'. If you don't have time to read the full story, the clue is in the headline: Microsoft Ferrari furore is a load of old tosh. Although the sub head is pretty good too: Bloggers... Read More

Before Christmas I was getting a bit weary about the A-list circuit of bloggers that I had tracked. A lot of folk seemed to be getting bit too self important, and the conversation always seemed to be a bit heated to say the least. I was never one for... Read More

When is news too old to write about on your blog? Well, if AdJab can post about this amazing Diet Coke and Mentos video, I can mention Gizmodo's shaggy dog story of mid-December. The gadget blog posted on December 14th that the iPhone would be announced... Read More

Over at TechCrunch,. Michael Arrington comments on a post that Sab Kanaujia, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC Digital Media, deleted from his blog. In the post, Kanaujia discussed NBC's plans for a homegrown social networking platform that fans of NBC... Read More

I saw this list of icons at the bottom of a blog post recently. In there you have DiggDel.icio.usNewsvineFurlBlinkbitsBlinklistBlogmarksCo.mmentsConnoteaDe.lirio.usFarkFeedmelinksLinkagogoMa.gnoliaNetvouz - don't quite know why this is... Read More

I missed this story in Saturday's Times Online but its subsequently stirred up a few comments at Church of the Customer and Slashdot. In outline terms, new EU consumer protection laws will prevent companies misrepresenting themselves as consumers.... Read More

Martin Moore starts the ball rolling here, Jeff Jarvis adds his bit - here - and the ..the world's leading... adds more of the same here. And my recent experiences are that they are bang on the money. Which is an uncomfortable point of view... Read More

Following on from some recent posts - my Friday evening moan and the KFC rats story - Jeremiah provides a more constructive commentary on these and other recent 'ugly' aspects of social media. The pertinent question is what are we each learning from... Read More

I'll be posting updates from the South by Southwest Interactive festival over the next few days. But there will be plenty of times when it's just not convenient to plunk down in a chair with my laptop and do a proper post. So like many attendees, I'm... Read More

BBC Radio Four ran a good program this morning on the phenomenon of war blogging. In the program, called Iraq Online, BBC Defence Correspondent Paul Wood examines how social media is offering an immediate and firsthand glimpse into the wartime experiences... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

After using Twitter for a while, I'm becoming convinced that many blog posts--maybe most blog posts--would be vastly improved if they were only 140 characters long.Some posts require extra room to tell a story, explain an idea, or convey a complex emotion.... Read More

Leonidas from 300 has a MySpace page. It's a good page, featuring a video of the trailer, screensavers, wallpaper, and icons. So far this is standard stuff for a movie tie-in Web page; but the promotion also enriches the MySpace experience by gifting... Read More

The My Coke Rewards promotion turns codes printed on Coca-Cola bottlecaps into GOLD! (If by "gold" you mean NASCAR hats and coupons for movie popcorn.)One day, I innocently posted a minor gripe about the promotion on my personal blog. I was astonished... Read More

As a regular listener to This Week in Tech and a frequent Twitter user, the news that TWiT mastermind Leo Laporte was abandoning the service amid talk of trademark infringement rocked a small corner of my online world.I can't see how someone would confuse... Read More

Obvious Corp. founder Evan Williams has posted some news at the Obvious blog:As I've mentioned before, the plan for Obvious is to build a series of products, which hopefully gain from being part of the greater whole. I also said, "When justified by growth,... Read More

I'll follow up with a more considered post - day two starts shortly... In terms of highlights, keynote yesterday was Ben McConnell. Ben manfully overcame the worst that the evil god of AV snafus can do to a man in front of a big audience. Luckily thanks... Read More

In the previous post I referenced Ben McConnell's red shoes - by the end of his presentation an essential prop. In bloggerazzi fashion, after meeting Ben I snapped him and his shoes.  What's the story with the shoes? Go here.... Read More

BL Ochman does everyone a service again. Here with some great advice for PRs. Learn from the mistakes of others.... Read More

Interesting to see Hugh MacLeod was invited along to the brand launch of the London 2012 Olympics. Hitherto, I've only noticed bloggers being invited along to incestuously tech-related Blog Opportunities, What does that say about the transition... Read More

The excellent Jeff James has spent the past week or two talking readers through his Facebook learning experience.  In today's post he explains far better than I could why social networks are not just for kids/students.  I mostly work... Read More

I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the... Read More

One interesting consideration occurs to me while I'm here at the Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit. During the week there's been alot of discussion about how we as PR practitioners interact with and manage, new and emerging channels for... Read More

Lifehacker has a great story on some guys trying to build a start up business for just $500. Their idea - Weblogwire - looks like it may be relevant to anyone working in PR, or who has an interest in blogging. You can get outline details on their own... Read More

Following on from Siobhan's post on PR 101 tools and lazy journalism colluding to serve up ropy stories to consumers. I'd ask the question, so will bloggers be able to keep vendors and traditional media honest? Maybe, if the experience of a recent... Read More

I seem to recall that recently Gartner - to many people's surprise - scooped an award for its forays into blogging. Unfortunately, some corners of the Gartner empire seem to have been bypassed on the road to web enabled enlightment. Read here from competitive... Read More

Pew has published some research on bloggers that has gathered much news comment. Scott Karp also has some observations. According to the San Francisco Chronicle: "A popular notion about bloggers is that they're pajama-wearing partisan ranters... Read More

In the mix of participants on this blog, I seem to represent the voice of the entrepreneur. I'm also an entrepreneur of a certain age and experience. Perhaps that why I loved the sceptical tone of Dead 2.0. Anyone getting a little too carried away with... Read More

In another example of the new tyranny of direct customer interaction, US social networking site Facebook has outraged members of its community with some site enhancements that have been interpreted as threatening the privacy of users - see adaywithoutfacebook.... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

Apologies for this blog going further up the cul de sac of self interest but to answer some questions... When selecting a new name we specifically set ourselves the following six requirements: No puns No risk of legal trauma No flaky meaning to... Read More

USA Today has a good wrap up on current legal cases around libel and blogging. It serves as a salutary reminder that while you may think you blog in a virtual world, your home and other assets exist in the real world. The one with all those lawyers.... Read More

The Friendly Ghost has published a list PowerPR Index of bloggers. We are way down (I assume it might be us down there at #65?). TFG's list owes its heritage to Todd Andrlik and his Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs. Again, we don't feature, even... Read More

Follow up to the previous post, I am just getting introduced to The Friendly Ghost's blog and so far I like it. I also like ..the World's Leading... which makes me wonder about the pros and cons of anonymity in blogging. These two seem to handle... Read More

True to form, in recognizing twelve months of his Web Strategist blog, Jeremiah Owyang shares all those private little datapoints about the site. This isn't surprising because Jeremiah shares a lot. Jeremiah's site is one of my very few must... Read More

In an article today CIO Magazine offers up Seven Reasons for your Company to Start an Internal Blog. My first reaction was: how'd do you mean, start? But on reflection they are right. They are speaking to the mass majority. And the majority of... Read More

Following a series of gripey sounding posts (here, here and here - and there have been others) about the failings of PR as an industry to get its act together in an environment fundamentally changed by social media, here are a couple of... Read More

The story so far. A small storm erupts on Friday night around a Microsoft ad campaign running across Federated Media's syndicated blogger sites (FM is kind of an ad sales clearing house that sells space for a group of independent... Read More

A clutch of interesting links on social networks from the weekend and Monday: Danah Boyd is academic about class-ism on Facebook and MySpace - summarized on BBC Online. Tom Murphy starts to hang with the kidz on Facebook. He has... Read More

The People's Daily Online reports that Chinese authorities have set up a summer camp to cure youngsters addicted to the internet. The report says: "According to research by Shanghai's youth affairs office, those seriously addicted to the web should receive... Read More

News that Hugh MaCleod's Blue Monster thingy (idea? activity? initiative? movement?) has evolved into a branded Stormhoek wine caused a run on FT servers this morning. I was greeted with... Luckily the story is on GapingVoid too. Tags: Blue Monster,... Read More

Google just bought Jaiku. Scoble reckons its a giant leap for Google who are prepping the next wave in social media. The comments thread on Scoble's article provides a nice snapshot of sentiment around different social network sites and tools. Next wave?... Read More

Every now and again stir up PR agencies (preferably on a Friday afternoon). Then sit back and watch the response. Tags: Tom Foremski, PR is dead (again)... Read More

Something a bit strange about following the wise words of Forrester's marketing team blog over many months, and then finding someone from a PR agency - Chris Thilk of MWW - suddenly joining the conversation on the site. All completely transparent... Read More

A naive question I know, but interesting to read that Richard Holway - formerly of Ovum and the eponymously named Richard Holway Ltd - now regards himself as an influencer not an analyst. And that he aspires to be a trusted influencer. I've paid... Read More

Pinsent Mason's legal newswire, OUT-LAW News has a story on upcoming Italian legislation covering "editorial products", that may require bloggers to register with the government simply to publish a private blog. I suspect the keyword is *may*. One has... Read More

Mashable's list of top US election resources, reminded me of some thoughts I had on the subject of politics and online when I was in the US last week.  First, I was amazed how much media bandwidth the whole topic was already consuming, despite... Read More

Wal-Mart is venturing into the blogosphere again. Previous forays gave the US retail giant (and its PR agency) a bloody nose. Not being an American, I don't quite understand the degree of antipathy toward Wal-Mart. It certainly seems that if they slip... Read More

It seems these days corporate crises are played out in full view of the public.The FT Alphaville team live blogged SocGen's conf call this morning - the one in which the management 'explain' where the euro 5bn went.I've never really got much... Read More

BL Ochman continues with her tough love approach to converting corporates to better blogging practices in The Real Reasons Why Big Companies Don't Link to Their Blogs from Their Corporate Home Pages. We can duck BL's ire - we do link from our home page... Read More

Dell has hired Andy Lark as its new VP Global Marketing & Communications. My headline is a bit of an overstatement, I'm certain Andy wasn't hired just because he is a blogger, but given Dell's experiences in recent years it can't have been a disadvantage.... Read More

Last week I posted on the power of the niche in building community among professionals in vertical industries but at the time I missed this post from Richard Holway. It covers some of the same territory and also flags that the FT is planning to launch... Read More

The price of not blogging for three months (blame it on the end of financial year; Christmas; snow on the keyboard, whatever) is to have to sit and delete 52 pages of spam comments. Still some of them are noble attempts at English as a foreign language.... Read More

In a move that reflects the increasingly prickly debate over the role of social media in the workplace, Nasa has ordered the Phoenix Mars lander to cut back on its social media activities and ‘get on with some real work’. Since Phoenix landed in the... Read More

Interesting to see in this post from Carter Lusher that Jeremiah Owyang's estimable blog - Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang - gets more traffic than the whole of Gartner.com. Well, actually for that matter, more than the whole of Gartner.com... Read More

Dale at Freeform Dynamics has shared some data on the use of social media based on an online study of 1,456 IT professionals undertaken in September 2007. Six months is probably a long time in social media, so it would be great if Freeform... Read More

Its a busy day to update our blog - but we did it anyway. Already we can see a few extra nips & tucks we want to make, but tell us what you think. And many thanks Damon, Laurence and Karen.... Read More

Having glibly introduced the subject of Phorm in the previous post, I spent a little longer looking at the storm brewing around it. Its interesting on a number of levels. Phorm looks to be following Dell's well trodden path to online purgatory. Of course,... Read More

Up against it today. So, not much time to comment on these stories that caught my eye recently. Blogs can sometimes be just so much more lipstick on the proverbial pig. Jeff Jarvis rails against Wal-Mart. The lesson: companies are judged... Read More

The Observer posted a list of the World's 50 Most Powerful Blogs. Most lists/tables of blogs leave me a bit cold but the pen portraits here are great and prompted me to widen my reading. Interesting thoughts: How many were written/started by Brits.... Read More

The BBC has found a colony of Penguins that can fly. You can see the video on their iPlayer site OK so this might be an April Fool.The teams at Google/YouTube seem to have gone to town with a whole range of stories.Search the future - http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.htmlYouDigg... Read More

ABC News posted an article entitled "100 Blogs We Love". Wow! I bet those bloggers really appreciate the...um... ...links. D'oh!   (via Kung Fu Grippe)... Read More