Thursday, December 23, 2010

PR blogosphere

I miss the sense of ocmmunity we used to have in PR blogosphere. When I first started blogging there were only a handful of PR blogs and it was possible to read all of them. As our numbers swelled, Constantin Bastura created a Blogdigger Group of all the PR blogs that he knew of. It was great, the most recent entries floated to the top, so you had a sense of the PR zeigeist. You could so a search on a topic so you could see what your fellow PR bloggers were saying about it.

There was also a PubSub listing of top PR blogs, which created a lot of competition in both good and bad ways.

Now there is the Advertising Age list of Marketing Communications blogs. It is useful for research purposes, but does not build community the way the old Bloggdigger list did. The closest thing we have to community nowadays is the For Immediate Release FriendFeed Room. Pleasant, informative, but not the same.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Well done Microsoft

Deirdre Blake reports that Microsoft's IE9 will offer a Do Not Track feature. (More from IE blog). There is some talk that this is a response to the FTC's recent report on consumer privacy.

There is an interesting discussion at Slashdot, with a sly comment as to why we may not see a similar move by Firefox.

It is great to see a company innovating in response to customer need rather than game the system to see if they can simply find another way to add on a fee for the same product.

Well done Microsoft. I have always said there was a fortune to be made by the compnay who enables us to use the Internet in a way that preserves our privacy.

Monday, December 06, 2010

Vigilante virtual riot

Hackers Target WikiLeaks Foes

"The reason is amazingly simple," said Anonymous member Gregg Housh. "We all believe information should be free, and the Internet should be free," said Housh, in an interview with The New York Times published Monday.


You are attacking sites in the name of an open Internet? Isn't that a little like destroying the village to save it?

Edit -
It seems the anonymous group has decided on much smarter tactics.

The future of communications is mobile

Federal Computer Week has an article on the mobile revolution, pointing out that, "Annual shipments of smart phones matched desktop PCs two years ago and are on their way to doubling to about 250 million units by the end of this year, according to market researcher IDC."

Communicators are going to have to adopt our messages to the small screen and speed up our response times.

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Politics on Twitter

Twitter is a wonderful tool for political campaings. But one thing that greatly troubled me during the last campaign was the way that some candidates for office encouraged their supporters in destructive online behavior. It is so obvious when something is coming from a campaign, when you see the exact same phrase over and over again. I had to ask myself, would the candidate in question hire anyone who posted such sentiments online? Why would you egg your supporters on in conduct that you yourself would never tolerate in your own employees? And if you do prevail in the election, are you going to use your power to uphold online free speech? I just don't care for the spectacle of candidates manipulating their supporters into doing things that might have bad consequences for the individual supporter's life to say nothing of poisoning our national discourse.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Today in Fedsphere

Temin likes Droid, but he needs a phone that works with a Mac.

Information Week gives us the to 20 government cloud service providers.

Mark Amtower informs us that Deltek bought Input.

ComputerWorld gives us a round up of IT compliance news.

All from Fedsphere, courtesy of Netspective.