Drew B's take on tech PR

links for 2006-10-20

• UK MP joins the blogging phenomenon on a running start
  Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington, yesterday celebrated the launch of his new MySpace by simultaneously posting his first blog on both http://blog.myspace.com/tombrake, and in the History Matters, 'A Day in History' archive.
• Crap Headlines (from North London Newspapers) | LinkMachineGo
  Blog LinkMachineGo reviews a website that collects poor headlines from local London newspapers.
• Techcrunch » Microsoft and Yahoo Prepare to Battle Google
  Increased R&D and improving working perks are among the tactics being used to battle Google's domination of the online industry.
• CIPR blog workshop
  A blog workshop is taking place in Leeds on Thursday 19th Oct entitled Blogs and the New PR: the next big thing or a pain the RSS.
• MP opts to broadcast her own video clips - The Herald
  Jo Swinson, LibDem spokeswoman on Scotland, has become one of the first MPs to make video clips of her appearances in parliament available on her website.
• UK: Trinity Mirror to expand interactive local and regional sites
  The Trinity Mirror group plans to relaunch its 240 local and regional newspaper websites by the end of the year. The relaunch will concentrate on expanding interactive elements, particularly video.
• IBM breaks ground in Second Life - SL the new internet | CNET
  After attending IBM's UK labs last month, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's VP technical strategy & innovation, said virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games remind him of how IBM embraced the Internet and ebusiness a decade ago.

Economist censored

I, like Cory Doctorow, would be keen to see what was so offensive in this image in The Economist that the Iranian censors decided to scribble over it with ink AND cover it up with a sticker. This is one of a few examples given by a researcher who recently went our to Iran to see how bloggers are shaping the democratisation process out there. He found a load of magazines with crude scribbles over photos and pictures that the authorities deemed unsuitable to publish in their western form.

As Cory puts it: "I’m very curious as to what lies beneath here. It must be of considerable danger, considering the dual use of ink and sticker"

Free music at AllofMP3

The Russians do MP3s.

Business model:

• Selling albums for £1 online
• Reckon it's not against the law
• Visa reckons it's dodgy so there's now no legal way to buy the music even if you did want to buy it on the dodge for a quid
• Now they're giving albums away for free
• Get threatened by the US of exclusion from WTO

Turning rumours into news

Was talking to some bloke off TV today and we were talking about what it takes for rumours to become news. Good question. And part of the answer is the long tail of blogs and social media. I'm going to be reading this book, Rumour Psychology to see what the deal is with the psychology of rumours. BoingBoing says it covers issues like workplace rumours, social networks and why people believe them. It's by Nicholas DiFonzo, one of the world's leading experts on gossip, and management professor Prashant Borida.

UPDATE - Don't think I'll be rushing to read this book after all. It costs over £50!

"One minute... one minute news"

"One minute.... One minute news.... one minute... ONE MINUTE NEWS!"

Yep, that's the name of the segment in the For Immediate Release PR podcast (which incidentally lasts about 3 minutes) where LEWIS winning the global PR campaign for Second Life has been reported by presenters Neville and Shel.

Woohoo, I'm dead excited listening to this right now. Shel and Neville seem to be excited about the news. They'll be looking our for our work, they said.

links for 2006-10-17

• Products promoted on blogs: Sushi pillows
  Popular blog BoingBoing says it loves these sushi pillows. What's the impact on sales from the blog's endorsement?
• Products promoted on blogs: Space Invaders cufflinks
  Second of three products I will highlight that have recently been endorsed by popular blog BoingBoing.
• BoingBoing's book review - Play Money: memoir of a year selling game-gold
  Final of three products I am highlighting that have recently been endorsed by BoingBoing.
• Telegraph Blogs: News from nowhere - a survival guide
  How do media organisations, specifically newspapers, remain relevant when readers have more choices and less time?
• Regional breakdown of MySpace and YouTube audiences
  MySpace is very US-centric (92% users are in US) whereas YouTube is more balanced globally.
• The Guardian: Can Britain produce a success like YouTube?
  New dotcom entrepreneurs are lacing together bright ideas with shoestring budgets. Sam Sethi is interviewed, and Benchmark Capital says there's plenty of time for Brit dotcom millionaires.
• Business 2.0 - "I want social media"
  "The editor of Business 2.0 is asking every journalist at his magazine to create a blog."

Ouch. Edelman apologises.

Robert Scobles just took a phone call from the CEO of Edelman. Richard Edelman got Scobles to say the following:

"[Richard Edelman] says 'this should not have happened.' He also said he didn’t respond until he had all the facts, which is why both him and Steve Rubel hadn’t responded until now. Now that he has, he says that they didn’t do a good job here and he’s working to educate his staff so this doesn’t happen again.

This is about the disastrous blogging campaign of Edelman on behalf of Walmart. Robert Scobles originally said: "If you don’t disclose you’re being paid to blog, you’re gonna create a mess, like Edelman and Walmart did."

Chinese gamer-sweatshop

Virtual reality gaming is scaring me. I'm going to start reading this book which I read about on BoingBoing today. It's scary. Scary scary scary. Wadds must also read it so he can see how it absorbs people's lives. Cory sez:

The author's charm is that he loves the game and loves gamers -- their trash-talking camaraderie, their furious grudges, the ticklish surreallity of an entrepreneurial strategy that needs to take account of where the scariest in-game monsters are, which arcane pseudo-medieval trades are likely to contain the largest quantity of exploitable, undiscovered bugs, and whether the IRS will class the in-game ore your bot mines for you as taxable (because it is like a prize on a game-show), or exempt (because it's imaginary) -- and whether the fact that you sell some of that ore for hard currency makes a difference.

Dibbell's quixotic journey (in one year, earn enough from in-game trading to truthfully report to the IRS that he's making more as a virtual-goods broker than he ever has as a freelance writer) is fascinating and terrible. His marriage collapses (he insists it's unrelated). His friends tell reporters that he's become gold-obsessed. He is ripped off by hackers in Malaysia and identity thieves of unknown origin. His teenaged mentors come to him for advice on their love lives or desperate to unload some gold for cash so that they can score some weed in time for their birthday.

The other brokers are the most fascinating part of the book -- some of them driven loons with dozens of computers in racks, some semi-anonymous Chinese "biotech executives" hoping to start a Chinese gamer-sweatshop with Dibbell as frontman. They're aggro teenagers or retired software engineers -- all of them doing this ineluctably weird and wonderful thing, turning games into bucks.

Games may exploit some deep evolutionary leftover that causes us to be mesmerized by the steady brain-reward from constrained tasks with measurable goals and the need to groom other primates to achieve them. Exploiting that seems a little -- well, mercenary. But perhaps the same can be said of all our trades: music, visual art, storytelling, these answer a human need that originally evolved to keep us in harmony with our fellow monkeys, or to keep us striving for better foraging ground, or to keep us in the running for prime mating opportunities. If turning a buck off of the compelling nature of play is cheap, is it any cheaper than turning a buck off the compulsion of a good story?

"Generation blogger" wierd survey

Have a look at this piece of reseach published The Guardian. Think it might be a bit misleading?

It says that "millions of internet users are now moving beyond using the web as a tool for shopping, information and entertainment and are creating their own content, downloading music and video and sharing photos online." Yes, can't argue with that. But the stats are a little on the sensationalist side. 

But the article goes on to say that one in four Brits read blogs, amongst other digi-facts. But the stats seem pretty skewed. What the Guardian should have said is one in for people who would fill in an online survey reads blogs. Now that, I don't find surprising. I imagine the kind of people that fill in online surveys are the kind of people that spend enough time online that they have read blogs too.

Thanks Antony Mayfield for the link

The two other kinds of blogging

So many firms I speak to about the fundamentals of blogging think that it's all about creating and publishing a company blog. They miss the other two main channels of activity. Here are the three kinds of blogging activity you can engage in as part of a communications strategy:
1. Blogging - its all me, me, me
2. Blogger relations - getting the blogosphere to talk about you
3. RSS for competitive intelligence - find out what your staff are saying, what the papers are going to be publishing tomorrow, what your competitors are selling and what direction your industry is moving in