Drew B's take on tech PR

The Guardian celebrates Gmail's anniversary

Gmail will soon be 1 year old, and The Guardian is celebrating.

Times Online tech section & new UK tech PR blog

Just got wind of a new UK tech PR blog - Dan Leach Dot Com. Nice blog, and good to see the UK tech PR industry growing in its online presence. 

Dan tells us about Time Online's new tech section. And for those that didn't see it yesterday, I saw that Ben Hunt is the new editor of FT-IT. Andrew Baxter is now a senior writer for all special reports (like the Understanding Series etc).

Is AMD shopping for a new PR agency?

If you read the UK Press forum then you'll see that an unnamed PR agency has incurred the wrath of a certain ZDnet journalist by sending him an unsolicited email media audit questionnaire thiongy about AMD. "Which semiconductor companies have a clear enterprise strategy?" Etc etc. Surely you CALL journalists about this kind of thing. And journalists you could have a chat with. Apparently this agency didn't even attempt to say hello first!

I won't quote the forum up here, as UK Press is a subscription only forum, and this is the Internet after all. But it looks like whatever agency did this has made it known that AMD may either being advised on repositioning or it might be changing PR agencies.

I'm now watching the updates on UK Press to see if the journalist names and shames the sender.

PR bloggers enter the Media 100

New York PR man and blogger Steve Rubel points out that Media Week has published its Media 100 - the list of people to know in the media world. Seven of the top 100 are bloggers! And Steve is on there.

UK analyst relations blog comes to light - and Supervolcano!

A blog called Analyst Insight has just launched, written by David Rossiter, covering UK technology analyst relations. Good one David.

I'm off to stock up on water and canned grub now - just watched Supervolcano on BBC1 followed by the making of it on 2. Have scared myself by looking it up on the web and finding this page, which says that according to 'bible code' we'll get a supervolcano erupt in 2010!!! Aargh!

(photo courtesy of BBC)

Funny bunny

I'm loving Spin Bunny at the moment - the secret PR blogger has started slagging off a certain well-known tech journalist and he's just found out.

What's with this pink and white Livestrong wristband craze?

These wrist bands seem to be the new big fad. Just saw on TV that they're starting to be banned from schools now - what great PR!! How come everyone wants one? they're all over eBay? Was it the Radio 1 beat bullying thing that kicked it all off, getting celebs to wear them as a PR stunt? But they were the blue bullying ones - and everyone's on about the white and pink wristbands now. Livestrong ones, breast cancer ones, Tsunami - you name it... Just take a look on Google to see how much demand there is for them.

What's with this pink and white Livestrong wristband craze?

These wrist bands seem to be the new big fad. Just saw on TV that they're starting to be banned from schools now - what great PR!! How come everyone wants one? they're all over eBay? Was it the Radio 1 beat bullying thing that kicked it all off, getting celebs to wear them as a PR stunt? But they were the blue bullying ones - and everyone's on about the white and pink wristbands now. Livestrong ones, breast cancer ones, Tsunami - you name it... Just take a look on Google to see how much demand there is for them.

UK RSS press rooms

As part of a project I'm working on I've been researching the use of RSS in UK press offices. Journalists in the UK are now starting to cotton on to the fact that many of them have an overwhelming amount of emails clogging their inbox. Charles Arthur is one journalist that has been talking a fair bit about email overload and the potential for RSS in PR. But the UK is way behind the US. You just have to take a read of Steve Rubel's blog to see that - his agency even has a department specifically catering for blogs.

So which UK press offices (tech firms or otherwise) have realised there's a trend taking shape and have stuck RSS on their press releases? Here's few.

• BT
• Ofcom
• Talis
• Newcastle Uni
• British Marine Federation
• Wiltshire Police
• Bristol Uni
• Woking Council
• Aberdeen Council
• ... actually there's loads, and mostly in the public sector. So what about some of the big tech firms like Oracle, Nortel (check out the garb below the boilerplate! Nice), Citrix, Morse, Cisco and Samsung (you can vote for how bad Samsung's website is), well, the tech industry isn't really leading the RSS evolution.

US PR squirm - UK tech PR update - IBM's 2800 blogs

It's not nice seeing a PR agency get bad press for itself and its client. It makes you squirm to read it. Media Guerilla has a story on how the massive gadget blog Engadget turned on Tivo's PR firm, Outcast. Ouch.

What else, has been going on... The World of High Tech PR tells us a lot more about the UK technology PR contacts being landed. Lots on Lewis, Mantra is ditched by Blinkx and BT's most recent in-house PR appointment.

And retrospective futureologist leads us to a story on storage and visualisation technology that looks a bit like the stuff off of Minority Report.

This is really interesting to see - Nevon has written about how IBM is using approximately 2,800 blogs for internal project management, communications and linking to web resources (which is the reason I first started).