Category: Other

Being Reasonable has an interview with author Douglas Rushkoff that is well worth reading. Rushkoff talks about today’s media environment and invasive marketing:

“Companies are no longer treating their consumers as anything other than consumers. When buyers and sellers were living in the same community, they were dependent on each other in a way they aren’t anymore. One of my students was just pointing this out in class: If I am your deli man and you are my pharmacist, I have an incentive make you a great sandwich – not just because I want your business again, but because I need you healthy so that you fill my prescription properly! Companies today see their consumers as consumers only. As targets to be manipulated; wallets to be emptied. And people pick up on that, eventually.”

How is your company or brand described in Wikipedia? You don’t know, do you? But it’s just a question of time before communicators learn more about wikis and realize that they are important as a source of information about a brand, service or product. As they do, inevitably someone will misuse it.

Podcasting pioneer and former MTV veejay Adam Curry wanted to improve his role in the development of podcasting by anonymously edit the entry on the early history of podcasting, and giving himself a larger part.

What he didn’t know was that revisions are tracked and the IP addresses are logged, so the Wikipedia editors soon found out that someone from an address controlled by Curry had made four major revisions and axed vital parts of the text.

Now it seems that this story has made it into the Wikipedia entry about – Adam Curry. That’s poetic justice.

Rogers Cadenhead has the story and PR blogger Jeremy Pepper comments.

Media Orchard has tested SiteScore, a tool that rates how well-designed, popular and accessible a website is on a scale of 1 to 10. Media Orhard tested the eight largest PR agencies and how they ranked:

1. Edelman … 8.4
2. Porter Novelli … 8.0
3. Hill and Knowlton … 7.9
4. Ketchum … 7.5
5. Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide … 7.4
6. Weber Shandwick Worldwide … 7.2
7. Burson-Marsteller … 6.9
8. Fleishman-Hillard … 6.8

Naturally, I had to see how this blog rates in comparison and Media Culpa gets 8.0, so only Edelman is doing better.

Why doesn’t the spell checker in Blogger know the word “blog”? Or “blogger” for that matter.

Affärsvärlden’s and Ny Teknik’s new lifestyle monthly magazine Passion distributes its first edition today. I’m interviewed in an article about mobile blogging. Let’s just say that I don’t consider my blog to be a mobile blog, even though I occasionally send photos via MMS to Flickr, which are displayed in the right column of this page.

Oh, and they managed to spell the name of my company wrong (of course). It’s supposed to be an “s” in the end. Other than that, I think the article is ok.

Norwegian daily Verdens Gang (VG) launched a blog initiative on October 10 and in one and a half month, as many as 3,000 blogs were registered. The users have posted 8,000 blog posts which have received a total of about 30,000 comments.

Looking at the tag cloud it seems that VG bloggers are heavily into football (the sort you play with your feet, not your hands), politics and blogs. Music, sex and school are other popular topics.

I have two minor objections. First, why have a megaphone as a symbol for a communications channel that is more of a dialogue than any newspaper? A telephone would have been slightly more relevant. Second, each blog gets a very short (which is good) URL, starting with www.vgb.no and followed by a number. It would have been cooler if users could have chosen a user name that would also be the URL of the blog (like www.vgb.no/kullin). It is easier to remember and would give potential users a hint of who the blog belongs to and/or what the theme of the blog is. The other way is more “host friendly” than user friendly. Remember that with 20, 30, 40 million blogs around, branding your blog becomes increasingly important.

One could also question the reasons why a newspaper should be a blog host (other than increasing traffic to its web page). At least VG seems to have some form of citizen journalism ambitions (which is more than you can of most Swedish papers) as it is experimenting with ways of incorporating the best blog material on the general site.