Micro Persuasion

Influencers Pen Blog on Tagging

Christian Crumlish, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Don Turnbull, Jon Lebkowsky, Mary Hodder and Timo Hannay have started a new blog on folksonomies/tagging, called "You're It." Subscribed.

Dine with Dave

Dave Winer is coming to Monday night's geek dinner in NYC. (In case you don't know who Dave is, he practically invented blogging and RSS.) Scoble will be there too. Please join us.

Yahoo! Web Search Results Delivered via RSS

Yahoo now delivers Web search results via RSS. All you need to do is change the name of my blog at the end of this URL and you'll have your RSS feed. If you're using Firefox Livemarks you can simply search on Yahoo and the auto discovery feature will detect the presence of a feed.

Tiger RSS Screensaver

Very cool. The new version of Mac OS X, Tiger, was released today and it has an RSS screensaver. (UPDATE 4/30: A video is posted here that drips with coolness.)

NYC Geek Dinner Monday Night

Robert Scoble and I are organizing a geek dinner next week in New York City. If you're going to be in the city, please join us.

Date and Time: Monday, May 2 at 6:00 p.m.

Place: We'll meet up at Dishes in the center of the dining concourse on the Lower Level at Grand Central Terminal (scene of this infamous photo).

Come one, come all. If you've never been to a geek dinner, here's what to expect.

"The Family Guy" Cartoon Blog Stars Real Humans

The FOX cartoon, The Family Guy, has a new blog, according to Randy Charles Morin. Unlike other blogs (ahem), this one is a gem because FOX chose to showcase the people behind the program. "The Family Guy Freakin' Blog" is written by Dan Povenmire, the show's director, and others.

Blogs Are Not Journalism, But They're Changing It

Dana Blankenhorn: "To say a blog is journalism is like saying web pages are journalism."

Where to Find the Next American Idol

If I were a record producer, I would be crawling over The Hype Machine. The site is an experiment that aggregates songs posted on MP3 blogs and presents them in an organized interface.

Blog Businesses Blooming

Greg Lindsay studies the potential for making money in blog publishing with a particular focus on John Battelle's new venture, FMPublishing.

A Blogger Stands Tall

The WSJ has a fun item on Paul Shirley, a player for the NBA's Phoenix Suns. He just happens to be the the league's most-popular blogger.

Blogger Alleges CNN Trying to Lower His Google Rank

CNN has launched a sophisticated Google attack designed to lower the rank of posts critical of the network by introducing spam into the comment stream, one blogger alleges. The blogger, Nick Lewis, also tried to catch CNN in the act, according to The Inquirer web site...

Figuring that CNN was using technorati to monitor its campaign he posted a blog post with the words "CNN" and "Spam" in the title, and sure enough the next morning it got 13 hits from a technorati search. The IP address, from New York, has popped back to have a look several times since. He is convinced that there is some CNN plan to take over the blogs for its own purposes.

Somebody out there needs to do some real reporting on this. So far, there's a conspiracy brewing. It seems a little fishy to me, but you never know.

What Blogs Are and What They Aren't

Doc Searls explores this subject in a keynote he gave this week at the Les Blogs conference in France.

PR Agencies as Blog Amplifiers

Apparently David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, said yesterday that corporate employees should not only be able to blog but that they should be autonomous and not subject to PR agency screening. While I agree with David on screening, I do feel that agencies can and should play a pivotal role in guiding content and then figuring out how to amplify it. For example, as I told Shel Israel recently, Waggener Edstrom should have a daily blog that highlights the 25 most important posts coming out of Microsoft's army of corporate bloggers that also includes an agency POV for the press.

Business Blogging Webcast

If you can't make it to next week's BDI event on business blogging, have no fear. PR Newswire is webcasting it.

A New Way to Search Google

Presenting - XtraGoogle. This is a neat idea. The site facilitates one-click searches for all of Google's services

Wikipedia Statistics

Wikipedia has a superb page of eye candy that charts the number of wikipedians, articles, edits, links etc. per month dating all the way back to its inception.

Wikipedia's Impact on PR (Part I)

So far this year, the mainstream media has cited Wikipedia as an authoritative body of knowledge nearly 100 times. Obviously, this underscores the need for every PR professional to be monitoring the human-powered encyclopedia for client/brand references. However, it also raises a number of interesting ethical questions. Let's start with the obvious: what should someone in PR do if he/she finds inaccurate information?

Using BusinessWeek's 2004 Global Brand Scorecard (PDF) as a starting point, I searched Wikipedia for articles on the 10 top brands on the list. It is not my intention to embarrass the companies listed below. Rather, I am merely using these three corporate examples to initiate a broader dialogue about what they could/should do to counter facts that I bet they wish did not appear in Wikipedia at all…

• Wikipedia on Coca-Cola (#1 on the BW list): “Coca-Cola has recently been denounced in the UK for weaning young children onto junk food. In India, the corporation has provoked a number of boycotts and protests as a result of its perceived low standards of hygiene and adverse impact on the environment. In Colombia, the company is alleged to be responsible for 179 major human rights violations, including nine murders.”
  

• Wikipedia on Microsoft (#3 on the BW list): “Microsoft software is seen by some as more expensive to purchase, use and maintain than competitors' software.”

• Wikipedia on McDonald’s (#7 on the BW list): “As the world's largest fast-food company, McDonald's has been the target of criticism for allegations of exploitation of entry-level workers, ecological damage caused by agricultural production and industrial processing of its products, selling unhealthy food, production of packaging waste, exploitative advertising (especially targeted at children), and contributing to suffering and exploitation of livestock. McDonald's historic tendency towards promoting high calorie foods such as French fries has earned it the nickname 'the starchy arches'.”

As Wikipedia is relied upon as a credible source by the press, will these and other companies begin to edit articles? What guidelines should we follow? I don't have the answers to these questions. It's something I'd like to put out there and see how others react. My initial feeling is, if you can prove the article false, challenge it. If it's true, leave it. You’ll only make matters worse. Besides, inaccurate information on Wikipedia doesn't stay that way for long. What's your take? Trackback this post or leave a comment.

(Coming next week in Part II: what should you do if your client/brand is not listed in Wikipedia? Is it ethical or proper to create an article?)

Page Six May Go Blog

Richard Johnson, editor of the Page Six in the New York Post, was asked by IWantMedia if/when the gossip column might become a blog. Check out his response...

"When would we have time to write a blog? We are too busy gathering info, reporting and writing Page Six. And we find ourselves increasingly busy reading all those blogs out there, some of which actually contain new and accurate stories. Most don't. They are filled with criticism and opinion. I'm sure when there is a market for a Page Six blog, the Post will launch one. It's probably only a matter of time."

Clearly Johnson recognizes that there is good gossip to be had in the blogosphere.

Direct Marketers Dig RSS

RSS has the power to revolutionize the direct marketing industry, DMNews reports. This is true in theory, but will consumers stay subscribed to advertising feeds once they get hooked on RSS? The content has to be high value - like coupons.

Infinity to Debut Citizen-Powered Radio Station

Here's another sign that the citizen media and the mainstream media worlds are already converging. Infinity Broadcasting announced the May 16 launch of launching KYOURADIO. They are calling it "the world's first-ever podcasting radio station." KYOURADIO's content will be created exclusively by its listeners and available in San Francisco at 1550 KYCY-AM and streamed online. Radio is being decimated by iPod usage and podcasting. This is a wise move by Infinity to embrace citizen's media and retain listener eardrums.