The end of Knitting as we know it

Well, you know... that jumble of wires behind your desk. The power for the wifi connections, the camara power cable, the phone charger... knitting behind the desk.
It could all just go away according to BBC reports.
Imagine... full .... no batteries... mobile.

Mobile Moguls Mashup

What happens if you bolt on services and charge for it.
Customers leave in droves.
3G technology was seen as just such an opportunity by the cell phone companies . No one played. It cost a fortune.

Now

At last

Beeb tells us 3 says it is going to make the mobile internet more interesting.

It is launching a partnership with internet firms including Skype, Google and eBay.

The promise is that users will be able to make free internet phone calls, watch their home television on their phone and tap into their home computers on the move.

The price for all these services will be a flat-rate monthly fee.

What took so long guys?

Now we can run some serious integrated (mashup) PR campiagns.

Pearson write a book using a wiki

Pearson the publisher is going to have a crack at writing a business book using a wiki and an online community dedicated to churning it out.

The book called "We Are Smarter Than Me" will look at how businesses can use online communities, consumer-generated media such as blogs, and other Web content to help in their marketing, pricing, research and service.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the project is being controlled through the WeAreSmarter.org web site. Chapter headings and a few starter pages were penned to direct the project. The big idea is that the community writes the information and provides more anecdotes.

Not the first but interesting to see a big publisher using social media.

AIM 6.0

AOL has launched AIM 6.0, an enhanced version of its instant messaging service. As one of the most used IM services this is a channel that is important in Public Relations and features offering deeper integration with the ISP's social networking needs to be noted.

AIM 6.0 offers a mobile dashboard to forward instant messages to users' mobile phones, and an expanded Buddy List which can now hold up to 1,000 contacts.

Automatic tagging

Every person who has digital photos faces the problem of forgetting valuable information about people or objects captured on an image. Moreover, as the number of images grows, an ability to quickly find the desired image becomes crucial. Now you can annotate individual elements or parts of the image. Its a really handy idea for tagging photos in social media. It is something PR people need to be able to manage large photo libraries and tag them for use on the web.

Users can place easy-to-hide annotation tags directly on a picture in order to describe specific objects. Each tag can have an arbitrary location and contain a free text capturing the names of the people, links to Web sites or other images, explanations, translations of inscriptions, and more. The tags can be hidden in a click of a button so the original view is never spoiled.

As images are annotated, FotoTagger lets users easily find people or objects by their names or other text typed in the tags across piles of digital pictures.

To let users share annotation with an image wherever it goes, annotation tags are embedded in an ordinary JPEG file meaning the image content description always stays with the image itself. Users can publish tagged photos to Blogger.com, LiveJournal, as well as to their own Web sites, Flickr and other social media.

More information from www.phototagger.com.

Interactive video

The Agent Provocateur film, will be the first viral film that allows viewers to click on objects within a moving video and be directed straight to the relevant information webpage/site.

The viral trailer is being distributed this week by NovaRising via interactive video email, which opens directly within the receiver’s email application. Initial click through rates of up to 56% have been recorded so far in the campaign.

In the meantime, in the interests of factual completion, I thought you may like to see the video in YouTube.

It cuts out the email middleman.

Integrate email and cell phones plus mobile video and podcasts

Allisblue has announced a partnership with European Telecom, to offer its 'SMS2mail' service in the UK.

The technology creates a link between SMS and email and transform all types
of mobile telephones into Web remote controls.

By sending an sms (or placeing a a call) to initiate the transfer of content, applications can include:
News briefs, administrative forms, access to a contest, downloading of an MP3, Video clips, Manuals and even a video game.

This will be a useful tool for all kinds of PR activity including issues and crisis management, information for journalists, podcasting and lots of other things.

PR TV now playing

PR practitioners can now host their own on line video Screening Rooms, inviting others to watch high-quality video content, while they control the video experience.

Online portal Lycos has launched a new site that lets users watch video content and chat with other users at the same time.

Initially available as a beta test, Lycos Cinema uses a patent-pending video platform which allows users to view and chat in real-time.

Brits lag in the blog race

Among Europeans Britons are the least switched on to web logs, an Ipsos MORI poll found.

The French are far more savvy.

The survey of 2,200 Europeans that 90 percent of French people surveyed said they were familiar with blogs, nearly twice as many as the number of Britons interviewed (50 percent).

But the rest of Europe is barely logged-on when it comes to online diaries either. The Spanish did only marginally better than Britons in recognising the term blog (51 percent), while in Germany, 55 percent were blog-aware, and in Italy, 58 percent had heard of the term reports Reuters.

Head in the Oven

The NewPR conference on Friday was, as always, great fun. The light bulbs that go on are especial fun and meeting Victoria Newlands (a student from Lincoln University who is really into social media) and having a good gossip with Simon Wakeman, Stuart Bruce, Neville Philip, Rob Skinner and Rob Skinner was an extra bonus.

Nicky and Andrew Wake from Don't Panic have a very friendly way of managing conferences which is a boon. I should say that Sam (from Bournemouth Uni was there too... Hi Sam! can't wait for you to blog about the conference too (and this is what we got up to while you trained it back for the Graduation Ball).

The conference closed with an overview of networking and a short but debate-provoking look at virtual environments but mostly Second Life.

One of the conference goers, said that she would rather out her head in the oven that go into SecondLife.

It struck me that this is where most of us really are.

We have our heads stuck, not in an oven but close to it, a computer screen. In there we play with a pretty clunky virtual environment (word processing, emailing, a bit of IM, cut, copy, save, drag, retype, look up phone number, tasks to do - all that sort of stuff). Its very boring. It is virtual environments with none of the fun. It is the equivalent of a smoky industrial town of the 19th century. It is a pretty smelly oven.

PR's, Journo's, marketers, CEO's all with their heads in the oven.

Perhaps it is time that decent virtual environment should be made available.

Something and somewhere worth inhabiting. A place where work is not clunky, soulless, and populated by documents, pages and emails but populated with people, action and results.

We have had our heads in an oven.... Can we move on now please?

Voices for your podcast

After wading through the usual PR/marketing hype, this news from a press release may be useful.
Voices.com has added three new categories of voices including documentary voice over categories that you can use for you podcasts.

The abomination called a press release takes hundreds of words to say it but if you are really bored, the release was published at Newswire Today.

Google dug up worms

Google has apologised to users of its Google Video Blog, some 50,000 of whom were exposed to an email worm after three postings were infected and sent out to mailing lists. No details of how the incident happened have emerged, and Google claims to be 'taking steps' to prevent such occurrences reports Virus Bulletin.

The blog (here) is used to keep readers informed of the latest and best additions to the YouTube-style Google Video system, and includes an email subscription system for updates. The postings, made on Tuesday night and since removed, were infected with 'W32/Kapser.a@mm', also commonly known as MyWife, Nyxem or Blackmal and referred to in the press as the Kama Sutra worm.

For PR people this sort of news is a problem. Where do you go to for advice, how can you tell if you have a virus and how can you be sure you are not passing one on.

Try the virus checking software people. They have really good information on these things.

THE PR search engine

Contantin has done it again.

Here is his introduction:

If you want to search across all the PR blogs, wikis, and news feeds included in the PR & Communications Blogs List, you can use a custom search powered by Google Co-op:

http://301url.com/prblogsearch

BT slugging it out - again

Increasingly, broadband is allowing people to contribute back to the net rather than just being passive downloaders of content, reports the BBC. But, while uptake has helped the UK to the broadband fast track, lack of speed compared to other countries could still see it derailed.

Experts warn the UK is falling behind its European counterparts when it comes to speed. In the UK the fastest speed currently on offer is 24Mbps (megabits per second) although typically the fastest people will get is about 8Mbps. French surfers are enjoying around 24Mbps as standard. BT does not plan to roll out its next-generation broadband until the middle of 2007.

Broadband is certainly holding our attention - with high-speed surfers spending around six hours more online each week than those still using dial-up.

How to influence nespapers 'social media' experiments

The moves by some publications into 'social medi' was examined last Saturday by Erick Schonfeld. He posted about how people can influence some of the ideas currently being tried by some publishers and how they can be influenced.

He writes:

Gannett newspapers are turning to their readers to help research and write stories in a new "crowdsourcing" initiative. The idea is to tap into the knowledge, and even investigative zeal, of readers to help cover stories for the papers. It sounds like USA Today wants to look more like Digg.

But figuring out how to tap into the culture of participation without abandoning journalistic objectivity is going to be tricky. Once people figure out that they can influence what goes on the front pages of Gannett's 90 local papers across the country, they will try to game the system. As Digg is finding out, giving the crowd a voice comes with its own set of issues.

Watch out for some people in the publicity industry using these idea - and comming to grief.

Who is offering homes for your content

By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine has an interesting view about file sharing start-ups.

I list them here but he has some excellent comments.

Sharing Made Simple
Several new services hope to profit from letting people exchange big digital files.
SERVICE	HOW IT WORKS	COST	BUSINESS MODEL
AllPeers	Transfers files to your buddies through a BitTorrent-based add-on to Firefox.	Free	Content delivery fees, peer-produced media sales
Glide	Stores and shares digital media via browser-based "desktop" or smartphone	300MB free; $5/month for 1GB; $10/month for 4GB	Subscription fees, software licensing
MediaMax	Stores digital photos, movies, and other files on the Web	25GB free; $5-$30/month for 100-1,000GB	Subscription fees; software licensing; advertising
Myfabrik	Sends links to shared files stored on the Web or a Maxtor Fusion hard drive	1GB free; 49 cents/month for each additional GB	Subscription fees, software licensing
Pando	E-mail attachments initiates BitTorrent-based P2P transfer backed by server	Free	Content delivery fees, advertising
YouSendIt	Sends links to uploaded files good for 14 days; designed for business use	100MB free; $5-$30/month for more	Subscription fees
Zapr	Turns any file or folder on your PC into a shareable Web link	Free	Advertising

Typepad gets voice message widget

The millions of visitors to blogs now have a new option for leaving their comments. They can record messages in their own voices using a computer microphone. The Evoca Browser Mic. available as a Widget for TypePad, now makes it possible for blog readers to leave voice comments using the Typepad blogging platform.

Freinds or markets

Andrew Lark has been talking about public relations evaluation again..
His latest contribution goes as follows:

My view has been that the degree to which actions intended from any marketing activity - say downloads - occur is proportional to participation in that media by readers/ views/ the community. For this reason I like Scoble's idea on measuring media engagement.

This will require a step-change in thinking by communicators. Rather than looking at the reach of publications, we need to think in terms of participation.

I agree with the last point. Reach is, these days, almost irrelevant.

I have a problem with the first.

There is a degree of truth but the key surely is the extent to which the constituent wants to engage their community with the organisation (introduce them to the organisation/ product etc). This may also be the extent to which they want to change the organisation, service, product, aims etc.

In evaluating relationships we need to look after the friend who seeks to offer their best knowledge, opinion, and contacts.

The 'Marketing Objective' is a small part of what we seek.

Surely what is most helpful is the value (not just money) that attaches to both the organisation and constituency.

Making video clear

For the PR and News industry there is now software to make poor photographs and video crisp and clear. Motion DSP’s new Ikena system cleans up on overcompressed videos and the grainy, blured video you tend to get with mobilephone camaras.

With so much happening in the video space, fired by the combination of broadband and YouTube, video is becomming an important part ofthe communication mix for PR.

The initial Linux-based product (including hardware) costs $30,000, but this type of interpolation-based cleaning will become more affordable before too long. Examples of what is achieved are at at MotionDSP.com.

Software and imaging chips for better video have been a growing business for the past few years. Video -- both from consumers and security cameras -- is exploding, but a lot of it is blurry and finding something on video remains a primitive art. Some of the notable start-ups include NuCore (imaging chips for consumer SLR and video cameras), 3VR Security (a search engine for security camera video) and Pixim, (an imaging chip which captures better images in glare or low light).

BBC goes a step further

In a lift the other day, I was talking to a BBC person who said that she thought the BBC now understood how far it had got behind.

Now some of that thinking is in the public domain.

Pete Clifton told the World Digital Publishing Conference in London today that the plans could include new topical pages to aggregate information from BBC and external sources on a variety of topics; increased personalisation features for the front page of BBC News Online, an expansion of the site's live statistics tracker and possibly wiki style pages that would let users contribute to compilations of information.

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.

This is very interesting. First here is another word for PR people to wrestle with - API. get used to the idea and what it offers you.

The wiki looks interesting for communicators too.