NevOn

The Hobson and Holtz Report - Podcast #81: October 31, 2005

Content summary: Listeners’ comments discussion; launch interview with Jen McClure of Society for New Communciations Research; Forbes magazine attacks blogs; minding the conversation gap; Lee Hopkins report.

Show notes for October 31, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, an 86-minute conversation recorded live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Concord, California, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 35MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free iPodder, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

[Show notes OPML file to come]: Get the show notes on your own PC, Mac, PDA or other device. To use this file, we suggest trying Dave Winer's OPML Editor (for Windows).

In this Edition:

• Detailed show notes to come

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are now posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 984 0931. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday November 3...

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)

Smart advice for PRs engaging with bloggers

In an article published online today, PR Week gives some sound advice to PR professionals on how to engage and work with bloggers.

The article includes some excellent quotes from some in the PR profession. Two examples:

Sarah Bresee, account executive, OutCast Communications: "I think that a lot of people are afraid of blogs in probably the same way that they were afraid of the internet. You can't ignore it and hope that they're going away. You have to interact with them. You have to work with them. That transparency can be scary, but it can really work out well for your clients."

Lynann Bradbury, SVP, Waggener Edstrom: "It's critical to read relevant blogs daily - and, whenever possible, on an hourly basis - to understand their slant, tone, and point of view and learn whether there's anything unique that you might be able to add to the discussion. It's not that much different than how you would engage the mainstream media in terms of the homework that you need to do up-front. Being well educated about that blog and what that blogger cares about is critical and is a necessary foundation to lay down before you have a conversation with them."

The only criticism I have of the PR Week article is its headline: "Working with the top echelon of bloggers." This is not about an 'echelon' or an elite grouping, it's about working with an effective channel. It's about influence (read the Technorati/Edelman Trust "MEdia" report for more on that).

In any event, if you're in the PR profession and want to gain some insight into what some of your peers believe about blogs and PR, you should read this article. It concludes with some smart advice:

- Do include bloggers in your media strategy
- Do remember that blogs are open forums
- Do treat bloggers with the same respect as journalists

- Don't try to mislead or manipulate with a posting
- Don't pitch or send press releases
- Don't forget to explain the terms of an embargo

Grab this article while you can, though - if you're not a PR Week subscriber, free access to their websites expires at midnight tonight. I imagine that's US Eastern time, so those of you in Europe will still be able to get in some night-time reading.

(Via Media Guerrilla)

TypePad and the art of patience

Probably similar to every TypePad customer, I received an email over the weekend from Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz with more commentary on what Six Apart is doing to sort out the service issues arising from TypePad's growing pains.

It's good communication to customers and does give you a better sense of the scale of the problems for a company where customer demand has outstripped the company's ability to meet that demand (and I can think of numerous companies who wish they had that kind of problem!).

TypePad's growth has been extraordinary, Berkowitz said in the email, with TypePad serving ten times the traffic they were a year ago. It looks like TypePad's problems became much worse only a few weeks ago due to "even more rapid growth than expected in the use of TypePad," the email said.

I'm trying to put this into perspective with my experience on Sunday when I spent nearly five hours trying to create and set up a new multi-author TypePad blog (for a conference - news about that soon) where the time I spent should have been about 45 minutes, an hour at most. I guess I was unlucky in that what I was doing - things like creating and editing a theme, creating typelists, writing and editing sample posts, etc - required constant interaction with the TypePad servers. I think I've now memorized the error codes from the 'gateway timeout' and 'internal server error' messages I received with literally every server interaction. I did eventually manage to get the new blog finished, but the air in my office by that time was a bit blue.

So what to make of the email where it says "over the last two days we have made significant progress in relieving the stress on the servers in the old data center and completing the move"? It hasn't relieved my stress! I certainly saw no difference on Sunday to the treacly performance that I've experienced in recent weeks which, to my perception as a user, has steadily been getting worse.

It would be easy to continue to make critical comments on TypePad's service issues. But I'm not going to do that. As I mentioned in my earlier post, this is still benefit-of-the-doubt time as far as I'm concerned, at least for a little while longer.

So, Mr Berkowitz, I will trust you when you say:

[...] By the end of next week, we hope to have all this behind us and to be back to providing you the superior service you have come to expect from TypePad. We ask for a little bit more patience until that time. We all can’t wait to get back to the situation where our customers are delighted with our service and happy to recommend it to their friends. Until that time please accept our sincere apologies and thanks for your patience.

Ok, patience it is even if mixed in with blue air at times.

Whatever else you do, though, please keep that communication flowing.

Podcast interview with Forbes

An interesting follow-up to the Forbes shallow journalism story (my unrepentant description) yesterday which described how the magazine portrayed blogs and bloggers as the source of all evil.

In a comment yesterday to Steve Rubel's critical post, podcaster John Furrier says he's interviewing Forbes' proprietor Steve Forbes about the benefits of social media:

On Monday I will be posting a podcast on PodTech.net with Forbes president Steve Forbes where Steve talks about the benefits of social media (blogging and podcasting). It will be interesting to see how the writer response when his boss basically says the opposite of his story. Look for the podcast on Monday morning.

Interesting indeed. I'm sure this story will continue to build.

[Update 31-Oct] John's 25-minute podcast interview is up. You'll be disappointed, though, if you expect to hear any specific commentary or discussion about the Forbes article for there is none. The interview is primarily related to topics in Steve Forbes' book "The Flat Tax Revolution." You can also read a complete transcript of the interview.

The blogger two heartbeats from the US President

I saw the news the other day that Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, started blogging. Interesting, I thought, even though the blog doesn't have an RSS feed nor a way to leave comments. So I blogrolled it for a look now and again and moved on.

Until I saw this comment just now in my RSS feeds in a post by Jeff Jarvis:

[...] So the man two heartbeats away from the Presidency is blogging.

Now that makes it a far more interesting proposition than seeing it as just another politican who's started a blog as a one-way communication channel.

The power of illustrative speaking!

Understanding Web 2.0

This afternoon, I was in a Skype discussion with an old friend in the UK and part of our conversation strayed into a discussion about Web 2.0.

My friend thinks it's just meaningless marketing hype and similar to all the talk that we heard in the late 90s dot-com era (or Web 1.0, as I pointed out to him) and early 00s on how everyone would make a fortune and change the world with things like web services, e-commerce, and sticky websites.

You could even go back a bit further into the mid 90s when we heard about the Information Highway (remember that?), ubiquitous video on demand and the networked computer. If you were around in those days, you may remember Larry Ellison of Oracle proclaiming that this was the age of the networked computer and the end of the PC as we knew it. A great concept but quite some years ahead of its time.

In trying to explain to my cynical friend why I don't agree with him, I was actually a little stumped at one point in recalling some simple ways to illustrate why Web 2.0 is different to Web 1.0.

Yes, we have blogging and other social media. And I've seen lots of posts and other online content talking about Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Meme Map. This type of illustrative description isn't really helpful to cynics like my friend who say they've seen it all before (and who said, incidentally, that the image helped confirm his negative opinion about Web 2.0). I don't like it much either, as it is very similar to such diagrams in the 90s - they weren't called "meme maps" in those days - that hyped how e-commerce (for instance) was what you just had to be in.

So is Web 2.0 just a load of old cobblers as my friend would say?

That meme map was part of "What Is Web 2.0," a lengthy article in September by Tim O'Reilly in which he goes into some length to explain how he sees Web 2.0. I think it's a very good article which should be a starting point for gaining a better understanding of how the technologies and tools we're using today (which I'd call Web 1.5, perhaps even 1.7) are evolving into what, I believe, will be Web 2.0.

Yet stuff like this can seem a pretty dense read when what you want to see more easily is the wood amongst all those trees. Tim O'Reilly's article actually does contain a way to do that which was probably over-shadowed by the snazzy meme map.

Here's how to get a sense of Web 2.0:

This is perfect for a right brain individual like me. This I can explain. How about you?

And by the way, here's a neat quiz that will help you determine whether you're left brain or right brain (although if you're left brain, you probably already know that).

BBC innovation to annotate audio content

The BBC is involved in some major innovation for audio-visual content management that looks far beyond the needs of only a mainstream broadcaster.

Tom Coates writes a detailed post describing the BBC's Annotatable Audio Project, an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow you to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. He says: "I consider it one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so."

It's not hard to see where this research is coming from. There is so much audio (and video) content out there now that finding what you specifically want, never mind being able to describe and tag that content, is rapidly becoming one of the major difficulties for anyone who listens to audio, whether that's mainstream media broadcast recordings or podcasts. As for adding and sharing your own annotations to your favourite content, that's not yet a practical reality:

[...] How on earth are people expected to navigate all of this content? How are they supposed to find the specific bit of audio or video that they're looking for? And how are they supposed to discover new programmes or podcasts? And it gets more complicated than that - what if what you're not looking for is a complete coherent half-hour programme, but a selection of pertinent clips - features on breaking news stories, elements in magazine programmes, particular performances from music shows?

In the end, the first stage in making any of these processes possible is based on the availability of information about the audio or video asset in question - metadata - at as granular a level as possible. And not only about that asset, but also about its relationship to other assets and services and other information streams that give individuals the ability to explore and investigate and assess the media they've uncovered.

What I find extremely interesting about this BBC project is that, while it's mostly focused on annotatable audio for BBC programming, it looks beyond that and into user-created annotation and metadata that would let you add your own tags and descriptions to content that you and others can use, and you would also be able to edit and add tags and descriptions to content other people have created.

Indeed, just like the Wikipedia concept.

Read Tom's post for clear and understandable explanations of the project and the real potential for what the project would enable. Includes some great screenshots. And take a look at two screencasts he's done that show the embryonic ideas in action, in how you would edit content information and playing content.

Innovation to pay close attention to.

(Via Geek News Central.)

From Tom's post, it's very clear indeed that he has been a major asset to the BBC with a project like this. The BBC has now lost that asset - Tom has left for a new role at Yahoo.

A new call for ethics in PR

PR Week reports on a call to action by the newly-appointed president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization, Fleishman-Hillard executive V-P John Saunders:

Following on from an impassioned speech at last week's Prague global summit, where his presidency was announced, he told PRWeek: 'This is no longer the golden age of PR. We will need to change to get to where we want to be in the future.' [...] He said PR should be about more than just business: 'We need to devote more energy to ethics. If we are to advise on reputation management, we must be above reproach.'

Current codes of conduct – such as ICCO's Stockholm charter and the PRCA-devised Consultancy Management Standard – were not enough, he added. He compared PR with industries such as accountancy, which are answerable for the information they relay: 'We need to impose more rigorous standards on ourselves, before they are imposed on us by others.'

Well said.

I've posted it before and I'll post it again - IABC's code of ethics which I believe is a model for the whole profession:

IABC Code of Ethics

Preface

Because hundreds of thousands of business communicators worldwide engage in activities that affect the lives of millions of people, and because this power carries with it significant social responsibilities, the International Association of Business Communicators developed the Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators.

The Code is based on three different yet interrelated principles of professional communication that apply throughout the world.

These principles assume that just societies are governed by a profound respect for human rights and the rule of law; that ethics, the criteria for determining what is right and wrong, can be agreed upon by members of an organization; and, that understanding matters of taste requires sensitivity to cultural norms.

These principles are essential:

- Professional communication is legal.
- Professional communication is ethical.
- Professional communication is in good taste.

Recognizing these principles, members of IABC will:

• engage in communication that is not only legal but also ethical and sensitive to cultural values and beliefs;
• engage in truthful, accurate and fair communication that facilitates respect and mutual understanding; and,
• adhere to the following articles of the IABC Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators.

Because conditions in the world are constantly changing, members of IABC will work to improve their individual competence and to increase the body of knowledge in the field with research and education.

The Hobson and Holtz Report - Podcast #80: October 27, 2005

Content summary: Listeners’ comments discussion (creating a reverse thesaurus; what's in a name: 'business continuity planning'; more on hearing about blogs; Libsyn glitches with podcast downloads); Yahoo RSS white paper; faux research from Advertising Age; the use of blogs during labour disputes; TypePad has service problems from rapid growth; OpenOffice 2.0 is out; Waxmail for voice email; Microsoft joins Yahoo and Google with a book project; Dan York's report; Shel’s report on the CPRF panel in New York; upcoming FIR book reviews.

Show notes for October 27, 2005

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, an 86-minute conversation recorded live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Concord, California, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 35MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free iPodder, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

[Show notes OPML file to come]: Get the show notes on your own PC, Mac, PDA or other device. To use this file, we suggest trying Dave Winer's OPML Editor (for Windows).

In this Edition:

Intro:

• 00:36 Neville introduces the show; what the show's about; what's in this edition; show notes

Listeners' comments discussion:

• 02:40 Josh Hallett suggests creating a reverse thesaurus to help figure out buzzwords and jargon
• 03:17 Bryan Person thinks 'business continuity planning' is a silly corporate-speak term
• 04:27 Donna Papacosta isn't surprised at what Shel heard at the IABC Canada conference re blogs, and says we should keep on evangelizing
• 08:07 Clarence Jones reports on difficulties he's had with downloading FIR, and other shows hosted on Libsyn

News:

• 14:00 Yahoo's white paper 'RSS: Crossing Into the Mainstream' (PDF) presents some interesting facts on RSS awareness and usage
• 23:35 Advertising Age astonishes with faux research on time-wasting in US business by employees reading blogs
• 32:28 Hospital workers' strike illustrates the power of blogs as communication channels in labour disputes: "Strikers are using text messaging to communicate on the picket lines and picket-line leaders are coming home at night and describing what it was like that day"
• 37:29 TypePad's growing pains impact service to users - will communicating about the problems with promises to resolve them help retain customer loyalty?

Features:

• 48:48 OpenOffice 2.0 is out - how does the free open source software suite compare to Microsoft Office? Good, we think, but it does eat up your PC's resources according to ZDNet
• 54:41 Voice email with Waxmail - is this the easiest audio email-messaging tool yet?
• 58:42 Microsoft starts a book indexing project - unlike Google's, this is an opt-in system for copyright owners; why don't Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collaborate on book indexing?
• 61:15 Dan York's Report - voice over IP security alliance threat taxonomy wiki, podcast solutions book, K7.Net, DomainDirect, my new experimental TypePad blog
• 69:03 Shel talks about his experience in New York yesterday as a participant in the Council of Public Relations Firms' panel discussion on 'Straddling the Fault in a Shifting Media Landscape: New Roles for PR' with Richard Edelman, Stephen Baker and Ross Mayfield (session recorded as an FIR podcast for download)

Outro:

• 75:38 Shel outros the show; how to give your feedback; upcoming book reviews
• 79:17 The music - Beneath Your Surface by Elizabeth Lohninger Quartet via Podsafe Music Network

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are now posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 984 0931. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We'll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Monday October 31...

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel's and my podcast blog.)

New editor asks for opinions

In taking up his new role next month as editor of The Guardian Technology supplement, freelance journalist Charles Arthur is doing something quite smart - asking readers for their opinions on how he should shape the newspaper under his editorship.

Terrific use of a blog by a journalist as an 'engagement engine' with a newspaper's readership.

(Via DrewB.)

The Guardian is still the only national UK newspaper that has really embraced the blogosphere and the way in which a mainstream medium can connect its online newspapers to its readers with complementary blogs.