Drew B's take on tech PR

Joost the YouTube killer rocks

Am playing around with the P2P web TV platform Joost this evening and it rocks. Graham Holliday gave me a beta invite after reading my plea on Twitter (thanks Graham).

Joost's launch team has done the same trick as Gmail did. The hype's huge and everyone seems to be talking about it. The media is calling it TV on steroids, and the YouTube killer. I can see how it might be.

Will get some feedback from the office tomorrow to ground me a little, but I can see this linking in with my iSight cam, RSS faves, whilelists, OPML, ugc and lots more. Hopeing to see lots of that during the Joost beta fingers crossed.

Biggest is the best

BoingBoing is the biggest blog in the universe (and depending on how you measure it, by a good 50 per cent). This last few hours it's also been he best. If you do PR for random but useful things, you could do far worse than get them covered here - and there's a few corking inventions popping up today.

First, as I've been Twittering about all day, is the commuter jacket. Lets you sleep sitting upright. Genius.

Second is the beer can catapult that goes inside your fridge. Never again will you have to lean over into your fridge after you've opened it when looking for a tinny, cause that would be just too much effort.

And third... well this isn't an invention. It's a video about cats, which i can never resist to blog about when I come across a new one. This vid's about cats inside things they shouldnt be in. Wahoo.

Ouch

...ouch! I'm feeling for poor Mike Ottewell who has misspelt a press release about himself being a PR person, and caught the wrong end of an IT hack at The World's Leading...

Haymarket launches new Brandrepublic for PR and marketing good stuff

The online destination for PR and marketing types Brandrepublic has relaunched with a swish looking website and a set of bloggers including Antony Mayfield. The media, marketing and PR portal is a sister site to PR Week - they're both Haymarket's babies. It also has PR content of its own and takes content from Marketing magazine. So it's a little confusing to me what goes where online to be honest. I'll still go to PR Week online for PR news and opinion but will now subscribe to the feeds for Brandrepublic too. But I think this confusion needs to get sorted because I'm getting pulled in a couple of directions for my Haymarket PR stuff now.

Quicklinks to the best bits of Brandrepublic's new content for a PR type:
RSS for Brandrepublic's PR content
RSS for all Brandrepublics news
No RSS for blogs page (there's about 12 different ones) but here's the URL for the blogs page

Good luck with the blogging at Brandrepublic Antony and congrats.

links for 2007-02-23

• Last.FM rumoured acquisition by Viacom
  "If this turns out to be true this would be possibly the biggest deal to come out of London for an Internet startup for several years"

Review of CIPR's social media guidelines

• PR Voice: CIPR publishes social media guidelines
  Lionel Zetter, CIPR President, has announced his publication of a social media code of conduct. Below is an analysis of blogs that have picked up this news and their reactions.
• Neville Hobson: CIPR publishes social media guidelines
  "It’s a good document, in my view, one which will be of use to PR practitioners everywhere, CIPR members or not (if you do use them, remember to attribute your source of reference to the CIPR)"
• Jackie Vause: The Web Rules
  "The CIPR advises PROs to act transparently, honestly and with accuracy, and never knowingly mislead. I may be sticking my head above the parapet here but we all know that there are dedicated teams who are actively seeding blogs."
• ....the world's leading....CIPR...down with the kids...
  "The guidelines have been described to TWL by various PR blogging heavyweights as "crap" and "all a bit rubbish"

links for 2007-02-21

• Observatoire Présidentielle 2007 :: Blogopole
  This is the best dynamic graphical representation of a network of blogs I've seen. Even if you can't read French it's worth taking a look at.
• The cost of social media experts
  Tom Foremski reports that the cost of having a social media guru speaking at your event is astronomical: Tim O’Reilly gets paid $40,000. Chris Anderson gets $34,000. John Battelle gets $24,000.

FOWA first day, London

Today the big social media conference Future of Web Apps kicked off in London. Gutted I'm missing it. As usual though, as with all massive events at the moment, it's being covered by the bloggers in attendance. Blogger Mike Butcher is covering stuff in a fair bit of depth like what Digg, Del.icio.us and others are saying, over on Vecosys. Pics are up on Flickr already too.

If you have a shorter attention span, Plasticbag.com's Tom Coates has been Twittering all the way through. And a load of the geek media peeps are there, judging from my Twitter buddy list, like Simon, Bobbie Guardian and Suw. Reading the Google news updates brings just two articles (as of this evening - sure more will go up tomorrow) but blog searches have found me some gems. There's the usual grumbling about Wifi quality, a lot of people saying that Kevin at Digg was great, and a new buzz phrase emerges: "crowd-generated media" Sticky or not sticky you reckon?

More good stuff tomorrow, including posts on the future of mobile web apps, which I'll look out for.

links for 2007-02-19

• I blog, therefore I am £70,000 richer - TimesOnline
  Less than six weeks after starting to write about downshifting from London to rural Northumberland, a mother of three young children has landed a £70,000 publishing deal.
• Microsoft Hires Michael Gartenberg as New Evangelist
  The experiment with Robert Scoble as Microsoft’s blogging point man must have worked well, as the company has now hired two very high profile commentators to carry out functions similar to what Scoble did.

Social media roundup

A little round-up of social media goings on in the PR industry on a Saturday morning.

Movie sneak previews 2.0... It seems if you want to launch something by inviting bloggers first, you get Hugh Mcleod to help you. First Stormhoek, now, this movie. Hugh's talked a bit more about it here. Nice work Hugh.

Dell Hell.... Looks like PR agency GCI is makng moves to catch up with the demand for online / bloggy / social media services in our sector. In a strangely contradictory announcement, the agency says it needs to recruit some people that could enable it to provide this service, yet also says it has the expertise already? PR Week has more. Sounds a bit like they're a few years behind the curve, but then again I hear very little about this firm so maybe, as Dell's agency, they know all about blogs.

Buy A BLOG... Ashley Norris landed $4.5 million last month for his venture Shiny Media. One of the ways he said he would spend his money would be through buying some blogs. He isn't the only one. Steve Rubel has covered the news that ESPN has announced its purchase of formerly independent basketball blog, True Hoop.