Drew B's take on tech PR

Lost and found

My cat Alfie came home last night. He turned up without a collar and smelling of perfume! My bet is someone tried to kidnap him and he escaped. Go Alfie! He's staying indoors for a while now, so they can't get him again.

Ricky Gervais podcast

Ricky Gervais is starting a free radio show podcast as of 5th December. It's available to download here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/rickygervais

Lost cat / found cat in West Reading

Personal message time now. I've lost my cat!

Poor little Alfie went for a walk last night and he hasn't come home. So I'm hoping that, in addition to putting flyers through peoples doors, putting a poster up in the local shop, and listing him as lost in the local vets and relevant agencies, that this blog might come up in a google search for a lost cat or lost cats in Reading. West Reading to be precise.

He's 1 year old, and is probably lost because we've just moved house. He's microchipped too. If you are reading this and you are local, or if you've seen him anywhere, email me to let me know.

Fingers crossed for Alfie.

Dilbert's guest writer

Just caught sight of Scott Adams' Dilbert blog, and he's thrown open the chance for a reader to be credited as co-author for one of the comics by writing a technology-related line about software interoperability. The winner is on Dilbert's blog here. (How many comments are there!!?)

Cyborg city

I read an article in this weekend's Saturday Guardian titled Cyborg City, and I reckon it's worth a mention here. It looks like it's been sold into the writer James Harkin by MIT's PR people as a meet-up in central London and a chat about all the technology that surrounds us, like WiFi, mobiles, CCTV, iPods and digital cameras. It has been covered as a full pager about the MIT man's opinions on the evolution of it all. Some really interesting stuff in there, like:

In [William J Mitchell's] graduate classes at MIT, all his students bring in wireless laptops, and many of them check Google to verify and enrich what he's telling them. The result, he claims, makes lessons much more open-ended and dynamic.

How about this though:

Further up St Martin's Lane, we stop for lunch. I turn my digital voice recorder back on, and it prompts a conversation about how difficult it is to escape leaving behind a data trail. But if we remain committed to the robustness and the inviolability of public space, Mitchell says, there is no limit to what could be done in the cyborg era. We could, for example, create electronic clouds of information, gossip and graffiti and attach them to public places to be read by other passers by. He could even, he says, review this restaurant for an invisible, wireless magazine - tipping people off, for example, that "this place sucks".

Reckon something like that could ever happen? Wouldn't it be cool if you could slate the bad hair cut or food poisoning you just got by blogging about it and to have your message flash up on a bill board outside the place!

I was having a discussion with someone yesterday as to whether Robert Scoble at Microsoft was hired as a PR blogger or as a technical staffer who blogs? This article clears it up.

Mr Scoble started blogging four years ago. At the time, he worked for NEC... Mr Scoble used his blog to converse with NEC's customers, giving tech support and listening to feedback... [Microsoft] figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So [they] hired him. Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at.

Courtesy of The Economist

Clogs

Just found a new blog called Clogger - really well written, its author takes a look at business bloggers from a PR stance. One Robert Scoble has already commented when Clogger incurred Scoble's wrath over calling him a PR bunny!

And another good one from Clogger:

I'm sorry, bloggers, but you're sitting at the big boys' table now. If you're in the fortunate position of having built up a large reader base through your hard work and sweat, all credit to you. You have an audience - this is a powerful thing. But with great power comes great responsibility.

New PR blog on the roll

I've added a new blog to my subscriptions, one called Renaissance Chambara, written by a London-based tech PR chap. This blog used to be quoted a fair bit on Spin Bunny, when it was around. Now, as the bunnny has gone, I'll have to keep an eye on Renaissance's blog myself. The post on Steve Ballmer is a particularly good read.

Who's a zombie-faced thumb man

Business Week has a superbly well-written article on digital communications, and what happened when one of a big bank's investment bankers OD'd on his Blackberry.

"The analytically gifted investment banker had morphed into a zombie-faced thumb man, wheeling through his engorged in-box as his last activity before going to bed and his first upon waking. ...He plucked his hyperactive BlackBerry from his silk-lined pocket and proceeded to smash it on the gleaming granite countertop of his London home. ...The onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster.

According to the article, firms like Kodak, Yahoo and Disney are using tools other than email, like Instant messaging, Wikis, RSS and blogs, in an effort to overcome the spam, time wasting and procrastination that email brings. I think that's a great idea, and work in a similar way myself. Don't think I could ever ditch email though!

UK Press on the map - Frappr

One of the moderators at the UK Press forum has created a Frappr map at www.frappr.com/ukpress. So far about 50 of the UK's media community - PRs, journalists, marketing people etc - have put a pin in the map with their name in it. Nice little application. Quite a few people have added links to their blogs and put their photos on there too. (check out Al Fox for a laugh)