Drew B's take on tech PR

Review of new live mobile video social media site, Qik

A new social media mobile video service called Qik.com is starting to build some momentum amongst the tech early adopters.

It only works on Nokia phones right now, but here's how it works. You install Qik on to your handset and you get a “Qik” icon in your apps folder. Then you turn it on and it connects your phone video camera live, with just a few seconds delay, to the web via your Qik page (www.qik.com/blah). Then you can embed your Qik vids to your blog, social network or wherever. Sounds a bit mental that you can stream video from a mobile to the web in such an amateur and social way.

I can really see bedroom bloggers, music fans and the web conference junkies using this site. I'm not going to be using this service myself right now as I don't have a Nokia, but here are a few reviews.

[Scoble: Freaking amazing. Wait until I hook this sucker up with Twitter]

[CrunchBase: Company review]

Top 100 fashion blog list

A list of the top 100 lifestyle blogs has been created and published onlline over at Shiny Media. I met up with the boss over there Ashley Norris when I was in Paris last week, and he said his empire's fashion blogging is second to none. While the facts he reeled off don't spring to mind his team are obviously doing a cracking job.

Here's the top 100 blog list and remember no spamming!

My digital resolutions

I'm wondering what my new year's work-related digital resolutions should be? (Lots of caveats eh?). Some bloggers have been publishing their 2008 predictions and reviews of the year. Well I'll keep it a bit more personal.

I'm planning on relaunching a couple of blogs. Just a couple for starters. Poor blogging's taken a back seat in all this social networking and micro-publishing (Twitter / Jaiku) malarky.

I'm also hoping to do a lot more audio visual stuff. Not just YouTube and Seesmic talk-into-the-camera stuff. There are some cool things gathering momentum around online social pics, video and podcasting, like Ffffound and Kyte. Worth having a play huh! Like I always say, I get it wrong first so my clients don't have to. Fail fast and all that.

And lastly I'm going to try to use just a bit less hardware. Argh the grief. I currently carry five bricks averywhere I go and can only, at a push, survive without a couple. Think I may need to do some streamlining.

That's it for now. Sure I'll come up with some more after the Christmas break.

London's Web 2.0 party week

This week is London's Web 2.0 party week. Google, Moo and Dopplr all had press parties in a week that resembles a silicon valley summer. Wondering, seeing as I went to a grand total of zero, which one was the best? Looks like Mike Butcher of TechCrunch went to two, and Bobbie Johnson went to the other. So what's the score guys? I have a few to plan for the new year :-)

Here are some pics of them. Dopplr party on Flickr

Two weeks ago I was thinking of axing Facebook...

There's an article in this morning's edition of The Guardian that asks what's so special about Hugh MacLeod that he gets so many people asking to be his friend on Facebook, "Britain's most successful Facebooker" is the header. What an irony. Hugh's a blogger with a lot of readers. Many more than the number of Facebook friends he has, so that's why he has a lot of friends on there.

If you follow Hugh, and readers of my blog know why I do, you'll see the irony in this Guardian article.

Here's just a few recent MacLeod quotes.

"Mssg to Frank Paynter re. your attempts to "friend"me on Facebook. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Asshole." [link]

"Watching the anti-Facebook feeding frenzy with a certain glazed, numb interest" [link]

"The more apps they come out, the more you realize ALL FACEBOOK PAGES LOOK AND SOUND THE SAME." [link]

"Two weeks ago I was thinking of axing Facebook..." [link]

And this last quote is a picture, so tells many words etc.

But I'm wondering about all this. Since when was having a group of virtual friends numbering in the thousands seen as normal. Real life, this isn't. That's not Hugh's fault, of course. You can see his angst in this rollercoaster. It's the way the social network is built, where the value of social photos, statuses, contact details gets ruined by the hundreds of spams, randoms and intrusive apps. Will we revert to something still social but more intimate, similar to real life. Maybe we'll cull our Facebooks. Or maybe the next big thing is around the corner.

Day one at Le Web Paris

Just got back from a very cool work trip to Le Web in Paris. What an exhausting day.

It was a little surreal to see all the faces you see blogging away, on Twitter, Facebook, at the big Web 2.0 events speaking (like I saw today) and in the press. All in one place. It was well worth the trip, but bits of it could have been better. 

First the good bits. One day there and I got to see the world's biggest names speak, then go and have a chinwag after. I had a great chat with JP Rangaswami and his team, met Scoble, saw guests like Kevin Rose, Philippe Starck, Doc Searls, Rafi at Nabaztag, Om Malik, and caught up with guys like Ashley Norris, Dennis Howlett, Mike Butcher and peers Stuart Bruce and Jonathan Hopkins who was there with Facebook. Didn't quite manage to find Graham Holliday or Neil McIntosh who were there for The Guardian. And I'm sorry Hugh MacLeod couldn't make it.

The bits that could have been better for me? Not many british media there. The reason I was there was because of client business. As a PR my job is to set up introductions to the people I work for, and with a programme focused on drawing people into two tracks of presentations with just a few breaks, when people came up for air it wasn't easy to grab a few minutes with the people you want to. But hey, I'm nitpicking. The bigger issue was that not so many UK media actually went. The blog-savvy were there, but not the extended family, so to speak.

See what others are saying: Graham Holliday is blogging for The Guardian, Mike Butcher on startups for TechCrunch UK,Neville Hobson does a good review back from blighty: "Paris and Le Web 3 the place to be right now", and this is the link for the live video feed for tomorrow's action.

Off to Le Web this week

I'm off to Le Web in Paris this week, the one European event that sees most of the world's social media powermongers congregate for spectators like me to drool over. I'll be there on client business too, of course. But hoping to say hi to a few famous faces from the line-up.

If you're there, let me know. I'll be on email all day on drew.benvie @ hotwirepr.com or IM me on Twitter/drewb

New PR blogs to subscribe to

I've just added some blogs and feeds to my subscriptions:

Raw Stylus - a blog by Chis Hoskin of Salmon. Chris is an old client and a  smart marketeer. He's got some nice write-ups of  web marketing anf geek events. 
PR Geek - an anonymous blog, accompanied by a Twitter account. I used to work with this particular PR geek so I'll let him reveal himself in his own good time.
The tale of Winky - a very winky little blog on digital media from someone who came to the NMK PR event the other week.
And I've added the RSS feed for my Dopplr friends into my RSS reader. It gives me updates on where people I know are travelling to and when. Dopplr is a very simple social site, but nicely done. It is clean and elegant and integrates with other sites to add photos to your travel records for example. (This is something I find a bit strange, and it happens with Facebook too. I can share the RSS feed of my friends' updates with anyone and I could publish it online. I used to publish my friends' Facebook updates to Jaiku which let me get them on SMS to my mobile, but you could see them in Google and a few people asked me to take it off. But people think their updates are private, shared only with their friends. Kind of lulls you into a false sense of security doesn't it.)