Micro Persuasion

If Mt. St. Helens Erupts How Will the Bloggers Cover It?

AP reports that Mt. St. Helens may soon erupt. How will citizen journalists cover it? Microsoft - home to 1000+ employee bloggers - is a mere 100 or so miles away. Perhaps a bit too close for one blogger. If I ran the Seattle PI, Seattle Times or Portland Oregonian, I would be organizing blogger meetups and loaning out laptops and PDAs. Are any Northwest bloggers organizing? Is anyone out there gearing up to lava moblog? What ideas can we contribute? I have six free Gmail account invites for the best ideas.

Business 2.0 Says Biz Blogs are Now the Norm

The venerable biz pub looks at CEO blogging, blog marketing and blog monitoring, writing:

But in time, and as this latest Web phenomenon becomes more established, blogs will likely become just another standard marketing channel for most companies.

Marketing Lessons from Channel 9

iMedia Connection: Microsoft's Channel 9 developers' blog sheds light on how marketers can use these forums.

Clusty Performs Blog Meta-Searches

The New York Times reports that Vivisimo today is launching Clusty, a search engine that clusters results into categories to make them easier to sort through. The Clusty site also scours blogs as well by meta-searching several different blog search engines, as this image shows.

Being in Two Places at the Same Time

While I continue blogging away here, I have also been invited along with fellow PR blogger BL Ochman to also occasionally contribute over at Rick Bruner's Business Blog Consulting site. Rick, an Internet marketing vet, recently joined DoubleClick and has graciously invited BL and I to guest blog on his site - a tremendous resource for anyone interested in business blogs.

Rick goes into this in greater detail. He will continue to post occasionally and will soon add a couple of other folks from outside PR. As part of this new "assignment" I promise you I will...

* Stick to the topic: business blogs

* Mostly cover examples of business blogs, as well as articles on that topic

* Avoid any blatant self-promotion

* Avoid other off-topic posts so that the blog keeps its mission as a resource on the topic

Newzie, a New Predictive RSS News Aggregator

Another software-based RSS news aggregator has hit the scene. This one is called Newzie. One of its key differentiators is that, like iTunes and other smart apps, it claims it can predict what news items you might be interested in reading based on priority levels you assign other posts and a rank-based dynamic assessment of your reading habits.

CNET, FeedBurner in Talks with Carriers to Distribute Mobile RSS Reader

FeedBurner and CNET have teamed to launch a mobile RSS reader based on the BREW platform. More details are posted here. What's perhaps most interesting is that FeedBurner is working to sign up wireless carriers, such as Verizon, U.S. Cellular, and Alltel to offer the reader on select mobile handsets.

Although it's early, "moreading" (mobile RSS reading) - just like moblogging - will one day be huge. Over the past few days I have been trying out several mobile news aggregators on my Web-enabled LG VX7000 Verizon Wireless phone. These include Bloglines Mobile, Bloggo and Newsgator Online Services. I plan to review them all in the near future. Hopefully I will get to take the FeedBurner reader for a spin as well in time for my review.

The Blogger White Pages

Two new directories have opened up that aiming to index the blogosphere. One, called BlogsbyCity.com , opened it's virtual doors this week. It aggregates vocal local yokels by city. Another (via Scoble), called Blog Catalog, lists blogs by category.

Don’t Worry, Microsoft Will Wake Up and Smell the RSS

Over at Microsoft Monitor, Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox outlines why he feels Microsoft will forgo integrating RSS features into either Outlook Express or Internet Explorer anytime in the near future, even with Bill Gates touting the merits of blogging. However, Wilcox does say he believes the software giant will eventually build such capabilities into MSN.

Now Wilcox is a long-time revered Microsoft watcher. And you may say: well, who is little ol' Steve Rubel to disagree. But I do think that Joe is missing the bigger picture here. Microsoft will wake up and smell the RSS soon and it will move in a way that will significantly impact the blogosphere, the RSS-o-sphere, and eventually ripple into the "PR-o-sphere." Microsoft recognizes that its RSS opportunity lies not in creating new tools to read feeds (Yahoo cracked that code yesterday), but in simplifying how we publish information in feeds.

In typical Microsoft fashion, the software giant will again crash a hot, happening technology party fashionably late and then dominate it, just as it did in the Web browser and email/groupware markets. As I pen this post, I bet Microsoft is probably now cooking up all kinds of new software/ASP-based tools that will make it a snap for information workers and consumers to save and publish any information that needs to be continually updated in RSS format. This might include everything from recipes to press releases to calendars, contact info (watch out Plaxo!) and even family photos.

The race is quietly on to build the "killer app" for RSS publishing. You can bet that Microsoft, Yahoo!, Adobe, Macromedia and maybe even Google and Apple are all looking into this. Whichever company nails it will be in the catbird seat. In the next few years everyone and their grandmas will want to publish information in RSS.

So what does this mean for PR pros? More clutter. In the next few years as Microsoft and others race to establish the de-facto RSS publishing tool used by millions, the RSS-o-sphere – and thus by association the PR-o-sphere – will become a lot more noisy. Just read what Scoble wrote yesterday about the number of feeds he is reading and his concerns about how he will manage this load in the future.

The upshot is this: Microsoft is thinking about RSS, but it's thinking bigger than where the market is now. It's worried about simplifying publishing, not readers. Eventually, Microsoft and others will enter the RSS creation market. The good news is that it will become easier to publish feeds. The bad news is that may get harder for companies to stand out and be heard.

Wonkette's Wonks

Ana Marie Cox, editor of the political blog Wonkette.com, scored a gig delivering the luncheon keynote speech at the upcoming Online News Association conference in Hollywood, Calif. on Nov. 12-13, 2004. Full details here. Hopefully she will cover how to write snark in 150 words or less.

Yahoo! Officially Adds RSS Reader

Yahoo! has officially launched their online RSS reader, which has been in beta for several months now. More info here.

Bloglines, FeedDemon to Sync Up

An update to my prior post, Bloglines and FeedDemon have announced they will sync up. Here's the press release and more info from Scoble.

I SMSed the News Today

Poynter reports that when a popular Dutch singer died last week, many heard the news via SMS wireless text messages as citizens spread it themselves.

Newspaper Policy Persuades Editor to Abandon Personal Blog

Doug Harper, a News Desk Editor at the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, last week wrote that he is ending his personal weblog because of new blogging guidelines that came down from the newspaper's management.

According to Harper, the Journal sent around a memo to employees that among other things says:

It is especially important that editorial staffers do not express personal opinions - on their Web sites or in their blogs or chat rooms - on news subjects or issues that they cover. Such publication of personal opinion casts doubt on their impartiality, ultimately calling into question the newspaper's commitment to fairness.

Harper responds:

Well, that's the end of the line for me. Since I often sit at the wire desk and make decisions about which national and international news stories get published in the next day's edition of the ------ ------, the line about "may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover" precludes me from writing about current events in any form.

It's been nice knowing you all.

As blogging becomes more popular I bet we'll see more edicts like these in newsrooms across the country.

Firefox Evangelists Debut Wiki

A group of customer evangelists who support the Firefox have launched a wiki to track the sites that don't support the Mozilla-based browser.

PR Threats and Opportunities in Moblogs

Moblogging – short for "mobile blogging" – will have a bigger impact on the public relations industry than any other technological change in the past five years. Combine low-cost, easy-to-use social media tools like Blogger, TypePad, Audioblog, Flickr and BitTorrent, with an intelligent arsenal of millions of connected mobile devices, and suddenly the PR professional is faced with an entirely new set of challenges and opportunities. Here’s a quick look at two threats and two opportunities …

Moblogging's Threats to PR

Corporate/Intellectual Property Secrets will Leak onto the Internet
Some companies and organizations are already banning camera phones from the workplace. Others, perhaps naively, are still allowing them. In either case, it will increasingly become difficult for corporate America to stop some employees from using their camera phones to mobile blog photos of source code, secret products in development, planned advertising/marketing campaigns, legal documents, pending patent filings and more. Once this information is out on the Internet, it’s an easy picking for any enterprising professional/amateur journalist. Just think what the Enron and Tyco scandals would have been like if moblogging were more widespread back in 2001.

The "Soft Launch" Will Die
"Soft-launches" and "test marketing" are oft-used phrases in corporate marketing. Companies often roll out new products and services in stages to make sure they’re fully baked and ready for primetime. Typically the PR team will wait to begin its full court press until a soft launch has completed. The reason is simple – you don’t want to "hype" a product before it is widely available and functional. With millions consumers moblogging, the soft launch is dead folks. If your company or client is test marketing a product in a limited market – and you are a well-known entity – expect the news to hit the network.

Moblogging’s PR Opportunities

Moblogs Will Become a Valuable Crisis Communications Tool
What’s more convincing? A corporate-speak PR statement from Firestone that says "we’re working on our tire recall issue" or an up-to-the-minute moblog that shows executives and front-line workers in real-time implementing a massive recall to protect consumers. This gives you a taste of how the savvy PR pros might employ moblogs in the future when a crisis breaks. Take a look at what David Sifry wrote today as an example.

Using Moblogs to Bang the PR Drum
Moblogs can also be used to build early hype for a product/service before it’s even out on the market. Let’s say you’re a movie publicist. Why not moblog or "vlog" (video blog) snippets of the "dailies" live from the shoot’s location? Or perhaps you are organizing all PR for a trade show or conference. You could launch a live moblog from the event. Moblogging offers PR pros the opportunity to leverage new tools to generate buzz. Look into them.

AP Dives Into the Wikisphere

AP's Nick Jesdanun has written an overview of Wikis that basically says the tools have the power to change how we live and work, replacing e-mail as a collaboration tool. I can already hear Ross Mayfield's cash register ringing!

If you're interested in the power of Wikis, this article is a good starting point. Some key snips...

Though for now largely the domain of techies, Wikis are poised to become what blogs have turned into - still in the Internet avant garde yet widespread enough to be influential.

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Unlike e-mail and discussion boards, which tend to involve back-and-forth exchanges and lots of attachments, Wikis permit changes directly to the main document.

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Perhaps the biggest hurdle is cultural. Corporations are accustomed to hierarchy and control.

RSS Nirvana

FeedDemon is working on a new feature that will enable users to synchronize posts they read somewhere online with the ones they read in the application, according to a forum post by Nick Bradbury. Looking forward to seeing it.

Technorati Now Tracks Four Million Blogs

Wirearchy notes the Technorati home page ticker hit four million blogs today.

Ana Marie Cox Gets Her Props from NYT Mag

Jason notes this piece is coming to a newsstand near you this weekend. He rightfully calls this "the single biggest blog PR moment to date." I will update this post once the story is online.

UPDATED 9/26: The story is now online.