A news API could let users outside the BBC access BBC content for their own development projects.
The BBC will not be expanding its existing blogs aggressively according to Clifton but he said he hopes to launch a new blog to be written by BBC foreign correspondents around the world.
Clifton said the BBC will not be making new content for mobile phones however, it will be making more of the text, audio and video from the news website central to the expansion of its offering for mobile devices.
The Press Gazette offers more.The executive editor of Computer Weekly was a runner-up in last week's Paul Foot awards for what judges called "relentless investigation" into the £12.4bn NHS IT programme in the face of "consistent obstruction and obfuscation from the Government".
Collins told Press Gazette "We're seeing Government spinning more, Government departments using the FoI (Freedom of Information) Act not to answer my questions. They're referring me to the FoI Act to get them answered, but we're still waiting for a judgement for the request we put in in 2005, 18 months later. It's very useful for a press department to refer the journalist to the FoI Act because the chances are there won't be a decision on it for 18 months."Now we are getting a good idea about what local newspaper TV really looks like.
Four North Wales Newspapers titles have carried video footage on their websites for the first time.
The group used the web to publish footage of two "lunatic" motorcyclists riding erratically at 100 miles per hour along the main arterial highway along the North Wales coast.
The video, in which North Wales chief constable Richard Brunstrom describes the motorists as "crazy", and says the video remind him of an episode of The Wacky Races, was used on the websites of the North Wales Pioneer, North Wales Chronicle, Rhyl Journal and Denbighshire Free Press.
The opportunities for PR video stories are huge.If you agree with me about the importance of buyer personas in Web marketing, then the most important next step is you need to know what you want each of your buyer personas to believe about your organization.Absolutely right. Here he is talking about the nexus of relationships called a person going about the days toils, or a blogger, or author or wiki manager or Digg presence (etc).
TalkSPORT has achieved its highest audience figures in 18 months, allaying fears that speech radio is struggling across the board.
The nationwide talk station, which benefited from a boost in listening last quarter thanks to the World Cup, has managed to keep listeners tuned in after the final match — putting on an extra 176,000 listeners (8.4%) year on year.
Side by side isChannel 4's first foray into radio which has got off to a slow start, with the digital talk station OneWord losing 20 per cent of its listeners.
Figures released today by Rajar show Oneword's audience has fallen from 129,000 to 104,000 in the last 12 months.
Community, focused, passion filled audiences count - sound like social media to me.
A film highlighting how journalists in the UK have learned to deliver TV news in eight days has been nominated for an international award in Berlin.
The film 8 Days features eight regional journalists working on papers including the Hull Daily Mail, the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News, getting to grips with a murder case re-enacted by Cleveland Police.
The film, made by senior lecturer at the University of Westminster David Dunkley Gyimah, focused on journalists training at Press Association's video training course.
Press Gazette says that the Guardian is launching a new music site today which will be sponsored by computer firm Intel.
According Guardian digital boss Emily Bell, Intel will "integrate their brand" into the site, but she said it will retain editorial independence.
This is interesting because it is another way that a good media brand can generate revenue - sponsorship.
Sponsorship as a public relations practice is well established although it is worth remembering the cost of promoting sponsorship is not cheap.
They are supposed to be grassroots organisations repre
senting the interests of people with serious diseases. But Drummond Rennie, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, believes that some patient groups are perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments. "There's a crisis here," he contends.Rather than grassroots, the word Rennie uses to describe such organisations is "astroturf". Originating in the black arts of politics and public relations, astroturfing is the practice of disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous upwelling of public opinion.
With the launch last month of www.lphchat.com, Langham Place Hotel invites customers to build an online presence, posting thoughts on any topics close to their heart.
IPC Ignite!'s Uncut has overhauled its website, including a design revamp and the introduction of a daily news service, as the monthly music and film title battles to reverse a circulation slide for its print version.
The news pages of the website include exclusive stories and a blog by Uncut editor Allen Jones, with the first covering Bob Dylan's tour of North America.
Anthony Thornton, IPC Ignite! digital editor-in-chief, said: "Uncut's daily news service is the perfect complement to the distinctive world famous in depth coverage in the monthly magazine. Uncut's no longer a monthly event, it's daily."
Andrew Warmsley says that
Corporate blogs have come in for a lot of stick in recent weeks - the latest being the efforts of Wal-Mart to persuade us that they are a nice bunch of people by sponsoring two bloggers to drive a camper van around the US, staying nights in the company's car parks.
What caused this one to come unstuck was its disingenuous nature. The blog neither revealed the backing of the firm (via a body called Working Families for Wal-Mart), nor the professional status of the participants, and in doing so broke one of the basic rules of blogging: don't hide the truth.
This rule has emerged not because of the high ethical standards of bloggers, but because they have learned that given the vast resources of the collective blogosphere, readers are going to find you out. So it is ultimately pragmatism that keeps bloggers on the straight and narrow, and while you will find inaccurate statements in blogs, you will almost always find them challenged and hotly debated.
While the experiences of the Wal-Mart bloggers were real, its credibility was fatally compromised. Eventually, the PR agency behind it, Edelman, apologised publicly amid derision online.
Most corporate blogs do not attempt to fake it on such a scale - but they are strangely unappetising nevertheless. They are one of those strange beasts that emerge from the internet from time to time - generally giving neither the personal views of a commentator nor the official corporate statement.
They exist in an odd limbo between these states, and it is this perhaps that makes them thoroughly unsatisfying.
In the UK, the marketing team behind one popular beer has maintained a blog for just over a year, talking about the brand and the events it sponsors. Full marks for effort, but as it attracts hardly any comment from real consumers, you find yourself asking why they bother. As a drinker of its brand, I am supremely uninterested in the fact that the marketing manager has 'had his head in spreadsheets' for the last few weeks - and as a marketer it looks like a clumsy attempt to put a human face to the brand.
Michael Parson at the Times warns of the end of the Web 2.0 bubble:
Social networking is one of the building blocks of the Web 2.0 dream: bringing together like-minded people online to create a community of interest that can share knowledge, information and resources and make useful contacts. However, we must not forget its older, fleshly incarnation – the real networking event. During the height of the dotcom boom you had to fight off invitations to internet networking events. Societies like First Tuesday, The Chemistry, and Land of the New Giants brought together badly dressed people with business cards to exchange lies about their website's readership and drink a lot of nasty white wine. After the crash, decadent gatherings like this became much less popular. Yet this week I've received invitations to several, which perhaps means it's time to start selling tech stocks again. It's a market top.
NHS Lothian lifted the award for Scottish Public Sector Team of the Year, with Glasgow-based 3x1 Public Relations taking the Consultancy Team of the Year and VisitScotland the In-house Team award.
The City of Edinburgh Council scooped three top awards, in addition to the Grand Prix: Issues or Crisis Management Campaign; Newsletter, Newspaper or Magazine; and In-house
campaign. Their Grand Prix award was for their work on the G8 Summit.
Collective Intellect has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public-relations executives. Start-ups like Monitor 110 provide similar services.
The idea is to give traders back the early and easy access to critical data that they used to have when this information came through many fewer channels. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Bloomberg terminal or subscriptions to news services could give you a jump on the hoi polloi. Today, it's the masses that often have the jump, thanks to blogs and other tipster sites.
"They aren't sure where a story will break and how it will break," said Don Springer, Collective Intellect's CEO. "Traders are going crazy."
Dan Gillmore wrote this week.....
Some PR and marketing folks have, as you'd expect, taken word-of-mouth as just another great opportunity to sell stuff. Fine, if it's up-front and honest. But word-of-mouth marketing should not mean, as Procter & Gamble and other companies have been doing with such cynicism, getting people to talk up products without disclosing the corporate inducements behind them. "Beyond lame" was one typical reader response to a P&G site, made to look as if it was written by users of its Secret Sparkle Body Sprays. In reality, the site is filled with advertising copy. If any friend of mine did this to me, that person would have one less friend.
A world of conversational communications can be so unstructured at times that the people who once thought corporate messaging was a command-and-control operation can't abide the inexactitude of it all. Understandably so, because they came to their positions in a simpler time, when the message went through a stratified system to specific people.
But the complexities don't justify retreat. They do justify appropriate caution, especially in the kinds of enterprises where proverbial loose lips actually sink ships, such as the military. In the end, the conversation is about culture. If senior people don't believe in the value of conversational communications, they won't happen. But bloggers aren't going away, and younger employees, customers, et al, now think this kind of communication is natural. And it's worth remembering a simple demographic fact: They are the future.
The majority of companies spend too much time worrying about unfiltered comments getting out. They should be more concerned with what happens when lawyers, executives and PR/marketing folks get the notion that blogs and other such media are nothing more than a new way to manipulate information.
COMPANYNEWSGROUP - CONTACTS - www.companynewsgroup.com makes a number of points about Europaen financial reporting. The news is better but it highlights the need to integrate XPRL with XBRL in financial reporting.
Generally speaking, this year listed companies have improved the quality of their Investor Relations websites. There is a 15% increase in results over all of the indexes studied and a 20% increase over the indexes in the Euronext zone.
Also noticeable this year is the appearance of new practices such as financial glossaries, business-sector statistics, Investor Relations forums and RSS feeds.
European listed companies have very good practices when it comes to publishing their basic data: 100% of companies put their press releases and annual reports online and 96% have a section on "corporate governance" for their investors.
We also note that 95% of companies give their market price on their website and 65% place it directly on their homepage.
This year has shown an improvement in websites' interactivity. Companies are making increasing use of dynamic documents and rebroadcasting audio/video of their financial events: 55% of companies offer their annual report in Html/Flash format, 65% broadcast the webcast of their analysts' meetings and 30% rebroadcast their Shareholders' Meetings online.
With regard to interactive services, although 65% of the sites studied offer press releases via email, only 30% make it possible to receive email alerts for financial events and 34% of companies offer a portfolio-simulator service.
The comprehensiveness of the information given on companies' websites is generally satisfactory: 93% of companies disclose information concerning analysts' meetings and 87% disclose information concerning Shareholders' Meetings. Although 75% of companies publish management biographies, they are less willing to disclose management dealings (26%) and management compensation (24%).
We also note that tools linked to market price are little used by companies: 35% provide a technical analysis tool, 25% enable comparison of their market price to that of their competitors and 9% have a market-price graphic linked to the news.
Google just acquired web video sensation YouTube for $1.65 billion.I would only add, this is another case for the fast development of XPRL
Google — webcasted it earnings call yesterday using investor relations website outsourcing service Shareholder.com, a company owned by Nasdaq.
Visitors to Google’s investor relations pages have only two choices to access the call. Windows Media Player and Real Player. And in neither case is the call indexed to make it easier to review.
No YouTube? The audiocast archive is available only in Windows Media Player or Real Player formats and there’s no transcript here.
There’s also no podcast option (available free at EarningsCast!) or MP3 for playback in a Flash player.
But what’s stopping Google’s investor relations people putting a video camera or webcam in the conference room?
They could live videocast the call and then post the archive on the site as an embedded YouTube video.
Even little Telecom New Zealand has been doing something like that for ages.
Seeking Alpha transcript sucks away Google IR’s traffic
Here’s another irony. Right now, one of the most linked-to items about Google’s earnings call is nothing that Google itself provides.
It is the earnings call transcript provided by Seeking Alpha, the blog network. Like about 87% of other companies, Google itself doesn’t offer transcripts of its earnings calls.
Actually, if you go to Google’s page on Google Finance, you’ll find a link to the Seeking Alpha transcript buried at the bottom of the page below the fold under the heading “More Resources.” But that’s not indicated anywhere on the company’s main investor relations site.
Drinking your own “Kool-Aid”
Google isn’t the only company that should do a better job of communicating with investors by using its own technology.
Microsoft also uses Shareholder.com for its earnings calls. Funny thing here is that when I tried to load the Q4 webcast in Microsoft’s just-released IE7 browser I got an Active X warning telling me that the website wanted to run Quicktime from Apple Computer Inc. (see the screenshot below)
The warning in IE 7 reads: This website wants to run the following add-on: Quick Time from Apple Computer Inc.
Well-known VoIP analyst Andy Abramson was critical of eBay back in July for not using its own Skype services to host its earnings conference call.
To quote him: “In my view not using the technology you tout …shows a real lack of belief in the technology.”
Investor relations people, especially at consumer Web companies like Google, need to understand that they don’t operate in a vacuum.
Investors can also be your customers, your suppliers or your employees. How management handles its investor communications can make a big impression on their opinions of your company in other areas as well.
"Increasingly, it appears that companies are being sucked into a
quagmire of risky Web communication practices.
PR firms set up front
organizations and websites to say nice things about their clients and their
products. People using these sites are supposed to be deceived into
thinking the sites and the information they provide are
unbiased.
Marketers offer money to
people who will write nice things about products and companies on the Web,
without disclosing that the company bought their opinions.
Companies
infiltrate message boards to post nice things about themselves or their products
and services. They do so under fake names so that people will think they’re
unconnected to the company.
Sleazy practices go unquestioned!
Then there are practices in the IR industry that are just
plain sleazy.
For-profit agencies dress themselves up as “associations” or “societies” and hand out undeserved awards to companies who fail to ask questions.
A consulting firm pretends to have a glitzy New York address when in
fact it is merely renting a “virtual address” and its real head quarters are in a place most people can’t spell. </P>Over 100 American companies use technology to compile detailed reports on the online habits of individual visitors to their websites, never stopping to ask if this might be an invasion of privacy.
Sometimes deception and dishonesty seem harmless. If it’s not illegal or it’s not personally or monetarily injurious, it’s seen as acceptable. A minor inconvenience to the user.
We’ve dabbled in a bit of “minor inconvenience” deception ourselves here at IR Web Report. I’m not proud of it. We used to use our articles to link to pages on
the site that promote our services.
We might say something like “In our recent research on online annual reports, we found that…” The problem here is that there’s no indication that the link goes to a sales pitch for our membership plan.
Nothing wrong with that, right? Lots of people do it, from the Web’s
usability guru to a former SEC lawyer who uses it to pitch subscriptions to
his online services.
But it’s absolutely not ok. All it does is lead someone to click on a link that they might otherwise avoid. They immediately feel cheated after you “get” them to do what you want. It’s a stupid tactic, isn’t it? Someone who has just been deceived >by you is hardly softened-up to become your customer.
This is but the tip of the iceberg.
Pick any press release and read it. The content, claims and syntax is transparently hyped. This as a document given to a journalist, is patronising, arrogant, elitist. Here, the company, one partner in the communication process, is demeaning the other. Talking down, assuming journalism and journalists need to be fooled. What kind of partnership is this? What kind of people is the company prepared to partner with - some hack journo who cannot check if 'world leading' is meaningful? Would the company really partner with such people?
What sort of company is this? Elitist, deceptive, manipulative and prepared to work with second class partners. This is what the PR industry is prepared to recommend to its clients.
PR by the very documents it shows to the world condones elitism and perpetuates the divide between communication partners and yet in a second breath will talk about diversity.
Take this as an example statement from the PR Industry:
It’s really the sense of most blogs being first jottings and half thought
through that bothers me. I value the language of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and
Hemingway too much to see its daily massacre. ‘Blogs’ seem in many cases to
spring straight from a semi-engaged brain on to the page. I cringe at the
inability of people to stand back and critically assess their thoughts before
committing them, arrogantly, world-wide (or so they think – most get read by a
few saddies and surfers).
Here we see the PR industry commenting ill of and ill prepared to learn about, understand adopt or use a channel for communication and a form of social interaction. It makes demeaning comments about people whose first trade is not writing. It even is disdainful of the blogging editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Once again, PR shows how elitist, arrogant and, perhaps ethically at odds with a readership as big as the national newspaper industry it has become.
Alongside these issues there are concerns about atroturfing (passing off) which is another case of bad practice endemic in PR practice... it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products. There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend. There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts. Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads. (Yes, this is a real problem.)
The fact of Internet Porosity, Transparency and Agency firts put forward by Anne Gregory (2) and outlined here in a sequence of posts (click 'next' at the bottom of each post).
It is time to look at the ethical issues from the inside out (note 3). The essential is this:
Now, and
increasingly in the future, trust will be
imperative. Ethical PR will need to
prevail. Part of the ethic will be deliv-
ered by technology, and only then will
a brand be able to survive electronic
navigators able to compare efficacy dis-
passionately. The wider implications
for ethics will then come into play.
Part of ethical practice will be in the
management of reputation. Essentially
this is management of transparency,
porosity and agency in all aspects of
corporate governance. When, because
of ethical misdemeanour (whether
actual or perceived), trust is lost, com-
panies lose competitive advantage.
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.
The EU is not alone in looking at ways to regulate technology it doesn't approve of: Iran, too, hopes to stem dissenting voices, this time by taking the drastic step of banning high-speed internet connections.The Guardian reports Iran has 5 million internet users. This worries the country's fundamentalist mullah leadership, who worry that these impressionable young minds are open to the evil influence of western culture. This, they says, "undermines Islamic culture" in young minds.
Almost two-thirds of UK employees say they are allowed to act independently, but less than half feel they contribute to their company's overall mission, research has found.
An international survey of more than 9,000 workers by software provider NetReflector also revealed one in 10 UK respondents said they were unlikely to recommend their own company to a friend. The global average is about 8%.
"I've never seen things changing as much as they are now," says Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of trade magazine Advertising Age and a 40-plus-year observer of marketing. "Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass."
Ad-zapping devices — and a decrease in consumer attention spans — have created doubts about the effectiveness of traditional TV, radio and print ads. In response, marketers have become increasingly invasive.
"It's out of control," says Jenny Beaton, a mother of three in Westlake, Ohio. "I don't know how advertisers can think they're selling more products. It's just annoying everybody."
Many, such as Beaton, are tuning out.
"Advertising is so ubiquitous that it's turning people off," Crain says. "It's desensitizing people to the message."
The more consumers ignore ads, the more ads marketers spew back at them, says Max Kalehoff of marketing research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "It's like a drug addiction. Advertisers just keep buying more and more just to try to achieve prior levels of impact. In other words, they're hooked."
Bebo, the popular UK social networking site that is rivalling social networking giant MySpace in share of UK visits, looks set to overtake eBay as the most searched-for UK brand according to the latest analysis from Hitwise.
Tech Digest tells us that..."There's huge amounts of interest around mobile social networking right now, and in particular over who's best placed to make the most of it. Following Tech Digest's feature on the issue, and the follow-up interview with MTV's Angel Gambino.
A new survey has found that the number of CIOs sitting on the operational board has increased to 46%, from 43% last year.
Harvey Nash got KPMG to survey over 500 CIOs from leading UK businesses -- average salaries were up to £104,000 from £84,000 last year
Daniel Terdiman celebrates"A few years ago, it was considered an article of faith that massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds struggled to the million subscriber mark.
Then along came World of Warcraft, which quickly disabused the world of that notion.
Now, Second Life has joined the seven-figure club. On Wednesday, the so-called metaverse, which launched in 2003, passed the million mark.
And its growth -- it was at 963,212 accounts midway through Tuesday, and sits at 1,014,617 at the time of writing -- is continuing at a brisk pace of at least 20 per cent a month."
Pension customers at Legal & General have access to a three-minute podcast, which offers information and advice on their contracting out decision for the 2006-07 tax year.
Sony Pictures has launched an interactive campaign to promote the release of its latest film 'Marie Antoinette'.
The online campaign is targeting 16- to 25-year-olds with banner, MPUs and flash overlays, which will run across youth-orientated and social networking sites such as Piczo, Get Lippy and Refresh.
The sites will run interactive promotional activity including SMS and instant message campaigns in addition to competitions offering users prizes such as a trip to Paris and Sony Walkmans.
Natalie Wilkie, account director at Spinnaker, said: "Our challenge was to speak to our target audience, creating a strong campaign which encompassed the aspirational nature of today's youth culture and the decadency of the period in which Marie Antoinette is set.
CONTROVERSIAL Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom is to face an inquiry over his use of the North Wales Police blog to label people "idiots".
The issue will be discussed behind closed doors by the police authority's professional standards committee next week.
Authority member Darren Millar, a Conservative candidate at next year's Assembly elections, said there had been complaints from members of the public about the Brunstrom blog, which the Chief Constable updates just about every day.
Recent entries have criticised opponents of a needle exchange scheme as "nimbys" and called a driver a "dangerous idiot" after she broke the speed limit going to a speed awareness course.
So this is what it's come to. After years of scribbling in notebooks, using typewriters and mastering keyboards to produce stories on a screen for newspapers - I have been launched into the brave new world of online journalism. This is the first day of a Bucks Blogger's diary I hope you enjoy what will follow!
Voices.com, the voice marketplace, has produced a web-based guide for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to start their own podcast, including complimentary pre-recorded podcast episode numbers.
The Financial Times will next week launch FT Alphaville - a digital news and commentary service.
The sub-site of FT.com, which will feature blogs and rolling discussions, is aimed at finance professionals working in hedge funds, private equity and investment banking.
Lionel Barber, FT editor, said: "Our readers need timely and tailored news - FT Alphaville will do just that.
"The '6am cut' will allow readers to pick up vital financial news either on their way to work or as soon as they get into the office and the rolling blog and online discussions will mean FT Alphaville will constantly be on top of breaking financial news, giving readers core relevant information when they need it."
Vodafone may be under the cosh from shareholders but it emerged today as a world-beater when it comes to corporate social responsibility.The mobile phone giant led by the embattled Arun Sarin has been ranked as the world's most accountable business in a survey by AccountAbility, a London thinktank on organisational and corporate accountability, and csrnetwork, a British corporate responsibility network.
Research, carried out by DJG Marketing indicates that visitors to the OPA sites bought more frequently and spent more money across several major categories including, entertainment, financial services, travel and automotive.
On-line Publishing Association president Pam Horan believes her members’ sites offer value for advertisers because:
“This study demonstrates that branded original content sites deliver more valuable buyers than portal and search sites. OPA sites allow advertisers to be where consumers are eager to learn, more likely to buy, and more willing to spend."
Advertising executives may take a different view. Advertising on portal sites gets products and services seen by a larger audience and also allows them to target potential customers through paid search marketing.
In anticipation of the forthcoming debut single ‘I Know U Like Me’, from Mr Skillz and his Crazy Girls, EMI Music UK label, EMI Liberty,has launched "a multi-channel campaign" with interactive website and WAP site.
Andy Way, Digital Media Manager for EMI Liberty, explains, “We have created a cross-platform campaign with a strong viral element, to appeal to a young fan-base. The interactive website enables fans to interact online. However, as we will be attracting a young audience, all submissions to the site will be strictly moderated at all times
CEN comments on PR pride....Now it is in the bloggershpere....The story had jumped from the press to bloggersphere and has another life in a new channel..... a lesson for PR people everywhere ....
"Hurt pride has made the PR team at Cambridge-based WAR withdraw from the latest Chartered Institute of Public Relations Pride Awards.
One of the region's premier media agencies, WAR has pulled out of the contest after not getting two of its campaigns short-listed this year.
As a result, the agency has withdrawn all its entries and says it is concerned about both the judging process and the standard of entries.
WAR's PR team swept the board last year, picking up 10 awards, including PR Consultancy of the Year."
Google has given a boost to the blogging community by highlighting its blog search service on Google News.
The move, which took place over the weekend, has seen links to the one year old service added to the front page of Google News and at the end of search results.
Blogs have become a way of life on many websites and we now have the facility to do the same here on The Bolton Blog.
So if you feel like letting off steam or would just like to go public on anything let us know.
There's no money in it (naturally), but you can always let the fame go to your head . . .
Reply to Internet Editor Chris Sudlow if you would like to be a Bolton Blogger.
Blogged by: Andrew Stroehlein
Khartoum has ordered Jan Pronk, Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN in Sudan, to leave the country by Wednesday because of comments Pronk made on his blog. Some may dismiss this as hardly surprising because diplomacy and openness don't exactly mix. I'm always a bit cautious of claims about the revolutionary character of blogging, and in some respects, I remain so in this case. After all, a diplomat can get kicked out of a country for saying the wrong thing in any forum, and annoying a host in a blog is little different from doing so in a media release or op-ed. But there has been something unique about Pronk's blog. While it hasn't been as casually written or as frequently updated as many bloggers' fare, it has provided a running log of a high-level diplomat's thinking quite unlike anything we have seen elsewhere. What other top envoy dealing with such delicate matters of conflict resolution regularly pens such an ongoing account and commentary?
A football fan site that has links to YouTube showing Premiership goals has been told to stop this practice, according to reports.
NetResult, the company monitoring internet activity for the Premier League has warned the website 101greatgoals.blogsport.com to not put any more links on the site.
Cisco has a new 'telepresence' product which uses three large-screen televisions with a resolution of 1080 vertical lines. It requires a high speed network connection of 10 megabits per second.
Telepresence is essentially videoconferencing on steroids, using high definition (HD) streaming video on large-screen televisions.
"Telepresence can do for business networking what Myspace and the other social networking sites is doing for social networking," said Marthin De Beer, general manager of emerging markets for Cisco.
"It will create new relationships with people you may have never met before and enable you to do business in a much broader circle than what you are able to do today."
A new training workshop for PR (Public Relations) executives explains the well-intentioned behaviour that consistently annoys journalists in contact with them – and how to avoid many of the most common errors when seeking to place a news story or feature, to secure media coverage for PR clients. The post goes on to list many of the things Journos hate...
Here is another wiki application. It provides information for campaigners and other interested bodies.
NHS 23 wiki (http://editthis.info/nhs_it_info/ ) is a dossier of documents, reports, letters and press coverage about concerns with the direction and progress of England's National Programme for IT in the NHS.
The digital divide is deepening in the UK, with the most tech-savvy households embracing the internet while a growing number of standouts are being left behind, according to new research. The reasons for not getting internet access were found to fall into three broad groups – lack of need or interest; cost or other material constraints; and lack of the necessary skills. Almost everybody has at least heard of the internet, but only 26 per cent of respondents from non-access households believe they have a good knowledge of how to use the internet.
Symbian's research VP, David Wood had an excellent comment reported by Guy Kewney.
He is reported as saying:
"In Web 2.0, the network itself has intelligence, rather than just being a bit-pipe for pre-cooked information".
Ashley Friedlein talks about measurement for online marketing: He says: "My own feeling is that the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should still apply, be they ‘hard metrics’ like sales, clicks, conversion rates, or ‘softer metrics’ like brand favourability, purchase intent. Engagement metrics need to be understood in terms of how well they contribute to delivering these KPIs, rather than be seen as the KPIs themselves.
But what how can we measure “engagement”? A few thoughts:
- Number of friends, connections etc. on social media sites
- Volume and quality of mentions in the blogosphere
- Network analysis of the above, as well as inbound link mapping and analysis
- Dwell time on site / Depth of visit / Page views per session / % repeat visits
- Customer satisfaction (e.g. how likely are your customers to recommend your brand to a friend of theirs?)"
Interesting to find that the newspapers' blogger' becomes a news story in the newspaper.
"It occurred to me while sifting through the winners in this year’s Hollywood film Awards on Monday just how pointless these ceremonies seem to have become, writes our Movie Blogger Carl Jones.
Dominic Ponsford has found that a new Dutch daily newspaper is attracting thousands of new young readers – but unlike most other new dailies around the world, it is paid for.
NRC Next is attracting “young, well-educated people who were not regular newspaper readers” – according to the World Association of Newspapers.
Jeff Jarvis makes the point that opinion is cheap and there are now new rules in publishing. He says:
"The problem with old guys on newspapers trying to attract young people is that they pander and insult the people they so desperately want to attract. They create lite products because they think the young have no attention span when, far more likely, the young have no patience for the overlong blatherings of the old"
Well, I have been working with on/off electricity at home with teaching and so I am late with this great news. Good luck to Joseph Jaffe, veteran communicator Shel Holtz and podcasting pioneer CC Chapman Gary Cohen, Aaron Greenberger, Chris Trela and Michael Denton with Neville Hobson for thier new company crayon,
We will hear a lot about this new company and its a great venture.
Neville's Blog post describes more here.
The NHS 23 wiki, available at http://editthis.info/nhs_it_info/,
features links to articles tracking problems with various suppliers and coverage
of the academics' open letter and the agreed statement. It was developed over
the past few months as a resource and reference tool for those interested in the
progress of National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
However, a quarter of the 2,122 people surveyed earlier this year were unhappy with the standard of customer service offered by their internet providers.
The two websites are Bolt.com and Grouper, the latter being the website that Sony agreed to buy in August for $65m (£35m). Universal Music has stated that it is retaining the right to add Sony Pictures to the suit.Of course, Universal is shooting itself in the foot. The key to getting revenue is more outlets not less.
The Telegraph's integrated multimedia newsroom
We can now expect every publishing house to begin to deliver news in a huge array of formats. They will all broadcast with podacst radio, TV and video on-line and there will be print. There will be blogs and wiki type resources, file and picture sharing, story forwarding and sharing facilities. News to cell phones will include text sound and video and much more.
Why?
Because the same story, reformatted automatically will have a revenue stream attached to it.
In the past in print, there was one opportunity to sell advertising alongside several editorial stories. Today each story can have a dozen advertisements attached to it in a range of formats through an array of channels. Furthermore, where once a story had no market the day after it was published, today it stays on a server for people to access and use in perpetuity (with a brand new add attached).
The best editorial, the fastest news the best journalism will gain market share.
The market, once largely limited to UK audiences, can now reach round the world, the audience opportunity is far greater.
The PR industry now has a big challenge. We have to understand these forms of publishing. We have to be able to offer content that is optimised for this new form of publishing.
We will need to re-adjust to news being published as a continuous flow 24/7. The first edition will be published every few minutes and there will never again be a second edition. We have to monitor news all the time. Not once a week or day but every hour, every minute.
We also have to recognise that reach has changed. Half of news across Europe is first read online. In fact only half of the readership of newspapers sees the print version. The readership, audience and demographic is completely different.
Value added will come from the further opportunity to attach relationship values to these stories and give them added life among our client constituencies. We can do this with our own media. It might be hyperlinks on blogs, wiki posts, content in Second Life but whatever additional channels we use will be enhanced by using highly regarded content from the new and reformed publishing houses.
These are exciting times.
Toni, we see here the break between old and new PR paradigm.
These concepts are significant to the constituencies involved. The exchange also demonstrates that we have a lot to lean about the nature of conversational relationships.
Historically, a person would provide a paper and circulate it for approval and comment – and that is what happened.
Now, there is a different way.
What if the paper is made available using any of the many forms of social media. It needs to be in one of the formats that can be progressively opened up for wider consultation, contribution and participation. It can be surrounded by debate and discussion (email, IM, Blog, wiki, Skype conference, meeting, congress etc), progressively it becomes the common property of all active, aware and latent participants.
This is not soft v hard, old v new it is just a way of creating a conversation. It is as old as mankind and as new as the Internet.
Well entrenched and robust views are still available in this model and progressively more evidence, research and resource can and should be added to enhance its value (peer reviewed knowledge added to any property enhances its value). Reasoned consideration can be in the hands of all participants – even the whole world.
The new way needs avail contribution to a conversation among active, aware and latent participants.
The nature of transparency, porosity and agency is the at the heart of this way of doing business.
As it turns out, you posting the papers, is a move in this direction but suppose the debate and discussion used modern communications tools. Would that not be more useful powerful and relevant?
The very fact that the initial paper is an old fashioned word processed document set the agenda.
The medium affected the message as much as the contribution by the participants.
One alternative might start like this: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhd98n6g_26f2twh2 and can then be moved to any number of channels for communication such as as a wiki, word document attachment by email, an email, a web page, a blog post, an instant message or even as (dead tree) paper.
Public Relations is changed but we have to walk the talk.
Ignorance, of course, is no defence when the participants are …… communicators?