An article from Red Herring explains that the Union Tribune will begin experimenting with using Wiki software on a Web site that hosts their indie rock station, AmplifySD.com.  As the failed LA Times Wiki experiment proved, launching an unmoderated Wiki is basically like sending an invitation to the drug and porn industries, in addition to countless jerks, asking them to spam […]

I was preparing a slide for a talk I’m giving today and wanted to show some anecdotal representation of the visibility of blogs in search engines.  I typed in the following query: what to do terrorist attack and lo and behold, two of the top four results (above the fold on my screen) are from […]

Susan Getgood has recently written about the importance of cultivating actual relationships with bloggers.  The post contains a link to some notes she has written up about Do’s and Dont’s with regard to pitching bloggers, which is a great list of best practices that I wish all companies and PR firms would internalize.
It is particularly […]

PRWeb’s new analytics release contains a Google Maps mashup that actually plots the people who read your press release on a Google map.  I just was looking at it today and thinking about how cool it is.  I wanted to post the entire thing up here but I couldn’t get it down to a reasonable […]

Steve Mullen from EndGame Public Relations has posted a really great review of current online press release distribution services out there.  Now, I may be a little biased, but I can’t help but want to drive down to Richmond, VA and drop off a cake at Steven’s house like Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite:
Releases on PRWeb are […]

Enter Social Media
In September 2006, Hitwise, an online marketing research firm, reported that the majority of traffic to online music retailer, HMV.co.uk, was referred from MySpace, a social networking Web site.  This traffic surpassed searches from two of the most popular search engines, MSN UK and Yahoo! UK.  The event was a milestone because it […]

I’ve recently put finished a draft of an article that focuses on an aspect of social media and had been asked to do a complimentary Podcast for the article. 
For some strange reason I started dreaming what I would say in the Podcast this morning at about 4 AM.  That is evidence that I am thinking […]

Last night I was in a taxi, coming home from Dragonfly in the Dupont Circle area and the cabbie asked if I would mind if he picked up some additional fares.  I didn’t really care so he scooped up a group of law students on their way to Foggy Bottom. 
They were a pretty gregarious group, and […]

Some free newspapers have a bulletin board space where people can essentially post personals to people they have met in passing, in the community.  Basically you get things like “I saw you at the coffee shop and I was wearing a blue trucker hat, yada yada yada.”  The thing about these is that they are completely catchy […]

In search, it is a misnomer that a user will run a query and then go through the results in chronological order from first to tenth.  More often than not, a user will run a query, skim the top-line results and see if anything strikes his or her fancy.  If not, then the user will […]