Diplomacy exposed

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?

Gosh! Diplomats that tell it as it is.

Reuters AlertNet - Darfur: The end of an insider's blog? - www.alertnet.org/...

Don't mess with the soccer barons

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.

See also http://www.copyrightcontrol.com/

Links to YouTube land blog in hot water - www.ihotdesk.com/...

Video conferencing is moving on

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."

I will be interested to see if this really is as smart as they say. There are other products like Skype, that can offer a lot too.

Cisco unveils telepresence push - vnunet.com - www.vnunet.com/...

Why Journos dislike PR's

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...

creativematch: New course aims to help you avoid hacking off journalists - www.creativematch.co.uk/...

Campaigners use a wiki -

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.

This is a reason for PR people to monitor wikis and to be able (within a strategy of course) make contributions and edit content.

University scientists share their dossier on NPfIT concerns - www.bjhc.co.uk/...

Digital Divide hardens

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.

Number of UK web refuseniks rockets - vnunet.com - www.vnunet.com/...

The network has intelligence

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".

The relevance of Anne Gregory's work about Internet Transparency, Porosity and Agency is again seen as insightful. For more information an explaination is here.

newswireless.net .:. Comment .:. That Symbian Magic! - a lamp-shade's ... - www.newswireless.net/...

Evaluating online 'engagement'

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?)"

This is very client oriented. What about the invisible buzz. The comments between, for example, bloggers who do not link to the client?

Note created Oct 25, 2006

Web 2.0 – what are the metrics for successful ‘engagement’? | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-c - www.e-consultancy.com/...

The blogger is the news

Interesting to find that the newspapers' blogger' becomes a news story in the newspaper.

The article starts:

"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.

So blogs are news after all.

And the winners are . . .: Shropshire Star - www.shropshirestar.co.uk/...

Young people pay to read a newspaper!

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.

Worth looking at this because a new editorial paradigm is always worth examining

Press Gazette - UK Journalism News and Journalism Jobs - www.pressgazette.co.uk/...

Blatherings of the old

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"

This might also apply to how Public Relations communicators present their case. Crisp, to the point and not condescending?

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » When will they learn: The young are smart - www.buzzmachine.com/...

Crayon - a new new company

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.

Technorati : Shel Holtz, crayon, edelman, rubel

More on Planning and Management

I have been working on Social Media Planning and Management models. This extends the model I proposed last June against a case study setting.

It occurred to me, after comments in on the Hobson and Holtz Report show 183, that I should make it available here to add to the debate proposed for show 184.

Citizendium goes live

In a press release issued this week, Sanger, who is now on leave of absence from the Digital Universe Foundation announced the progress to a pilot project. "A major new encyclopedia project will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online. Like Wikipedia, the Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), or "the Citizen's Compendium," will be a wiki project open to public collaboration. But, unlike Wikipedia, the community will be guided by expert editors, and contributors will be expected to use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms. This week, the fledgling Citizendium Foundation will launch a six-week pilot project open to potential contributors by invitation (see http://www.citizendium.org/cfa.html)."

In an era when trust and recommendation make or mar content this could be a valuable tool for PR to use when providing background information.

Tayhoo to make money from Flickr or de.lic.io.us?

Via Always on we find Thomas Hawk writes "One of the most interesting things to come out of Yahoo's earnings call with analysts yesterday was a statement by Yahoo's COO, Daniel L. Rosenweig on Yahoo's plans to 'monetize' their various social network properties. Flickr was mentioned five times on the conference call and their de.lic.io.us property was as well, after neither were mentioned in last quarter's call. Rosenweig characterized these services as being largely unmonetized and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base.

Using a wiki for campaigning

The 23 academics who wrote to Parliament outlining their concerns about the progress of the National Programme for IT have set up a wiki to track media reports and act as a resource for NHS IT, reports e-health insider.

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).

This is a interesting application of social media for campaigning PR.

Thumbnail re-sized for your site or blog

e-consultancy has been looking at WebThumb invites you to enter a URL and then spits out thumbnails in four different sizes. Websnapr, by contrast, only provides one (small) size at the time of writing.
WebThumb’s brainchild – and AJAX guru - Joshua Eichorn has made the code available as an open API, allowing you to do something lovely with it.
An alternative is Bluga.net .

30,000 blopg posts

More than 30,000 people across Britain have recorded a diary of their day as part of a project to create an online snapshot of life in the country, reports the BBC.

The National Trust said the entries - which range from the mundane to the extraordinary - have created "Britain's biggest blog".

Broadband customer service sucks

In Point Topic’s latest Broadband Consumer Survey, 91% of broadband customers said they were happy with the quality and reliability of their internet service, and 82% are satisfied with download times says e-consultancy.

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.

I go along with that (BT).

Camcord and upload in seconds

Pure Digital Point & Shoot Camcorder has introduced a new, pocket sized camcorder which will allow videos to be uploaded to sites such as Google Video (but not YouTube, for some reason) within seconds.

The Pure Digital Point & Shoot Camcorder is currently available in the US for $129.99 (around £70) and features 30 minutes of storage capacity, with a 60 minute version also available.

from e-consultancy.