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	Phil's Blogservations Friday, June 24, 2005 Posted by philgomes 9:27 AM Going Into The Weekend... Going Into The Weekend... ...I received this picture from writer Roy Rubenstein, based in Israel. Thought I'd share it. He says it was taken this morning, his time. Wednesday, June 22, 2005 Posted by philgomes 2:00 PM I'm Thinking... I'm Thinking... You might notice that the rest of the site is a bit on the sparse side. I'll explain later. Needless to say, it's been long overdue for an overhaul and I've been wondering whether this personal site properly represents me today, or even who I was a year ago. This blog will stay up through the change, though. Tuesday, June 21, 2005 Posted by philgomes 12:53 PM Oakland Athletics Fan Podcast Oakland Athletics Fan Podcast Just a quick note that my buddy Aaron "Papa Smurf" Grant is starting up a podcast for Oakland Athletics fans. Friday, June 17, 2005 Posted by philgomes 10:30 PM Tech At Home And On The Road Tech At Home And On The Road EDN's Brian Dipert is sharing what technologies make his life on the road and in the home office better. Following his lead, I'll share what I have here. With regard to road gear... First off, we have the Rio Carbon, which I received as a gift some time ago. Nice little player, though there does seem to be the slight latency problem when the drive has to spin up again to fill the DRAM buffer. Definitely not for the impatient music-lover. It's filled about halfway now with music and various podcasts, most notably from IT Conversations. Great sound. Sleek design. I actually had the pleasure of meeting the Carbon's designer in a bar in San Francisco. My compliments to the chef! My Palm Tungsten C has been wonderful. I've had it maybe a little less than a year. WiFi performance is sometimes spotty because, while an access point's signal may be strong enough to get to me, the little bugger sometimes doesn't have the RF oooomph to send a signal back. For expansion memory, I have a 64MB MMC, a 128MB SD, and a few write-once memory cards from Dryden Marketing Group client, Matrix Semiconductor. These have been great for impromptu demos and for entertaining my friends' kids. I also have one card that has Matrix's current press kit in Palm-friendly PDF format, just in case. For a while there, I was using a Handspring Visor and a Targus keyboard. This actually allowed me to postpone a laptop purchase for a couple of years. In fact, as I write this, I am tempted to see if there are any folding keyboards for my current Palm. USB keys rule. I have two: a 64MB that I bought on impulse at Fry's and a 256MB that I got for speaking at a Forbes conference almost two years ago. When I'm on-site at a client's offices, these have been indispensible. After all, almost no one uses a floppy drive and a lot of the newer thin-and-light notebooks don't even have a CDROM drive! My laptop — and, functionally, my desktop back at the home office — is a trusty ChemBook 6300C. It's been quite sturdy, having suffered a number of drops. It has a 15" screen that I run at 1400x1050 resolution. This is the laptop that will be used in my Debian "Sarge" experiment. The laptop is known in some circles for its..."personality." The backside of the screen has decals showing the members of Type O Negative (one of my favorite bands), the Decepticon insignia from The Transformers, the head of a classic "grey" alien, and (my current favorite) a sticker with the visage of actor Terence Stamp and the words "Kneel Before Zod!" There might be one more decal coming. I've been joking with Tim about developing a Linux distro for rednecks called "Rednix." ("If yoooooou think a 'hard drive' is something you did with a Ford F250 in the swamp... you might be using Rednix.") We thought it'd be great to put the infamous mudflap girl on there. However, being a single man, such a move would likely conspire to keep me that way for a very long time. "Look on the bright side," one reporter told me. "If the mudflap girl doesn't work out for you, you've always got Yosemite Sam!" I have an 802.11b card from AmbiCom and an 802.11g card from pre-Cisco Linksys. The former appears Linux-friendly, since it uses the Orinoco chipset. The latter just isn't giving up da love to da Penguin, though. (Broadcom?) For those less-than-wireless moments, I have the best tradeshow tchotchky in the universe: a coiled, spring-loaded telephone cord. I got it when I was doing PR for Cohera, now a part of PeopleSoft Oracle. This proved very helpful during my last trip to LA, where I happened to get booked into the only hotel near LAX without any broadband! For the home office? Jane gave me a webcam for Christmas, which has gone a long way towards combating the work-at-home heebiejeebies. I have the webcam and Yahoo! IM on all day. It's amazing how much more work I'm able to get done that way, particularly when I'm batting ideas back and forth with my colleague, John Sun. IM is also great for presence detection — colleagues and even a fair number of journalists know when they can catch me at my desk. I bought an external drive enclosure from TigerDirect. After hammering an otherwise unused 40GB drive into it, I have a nice little 1394 backup drive. I use Karen's Replicator to do the incremental backups, which has been a lifesaver. I used to back up to CD-R every month. Now I back up nightly. Big difference. I figured out some months back that my setup here wasn't allowing my laptop to dissipate heat very well. As such, it would shut down during games periods of very high utilization. This did the trick. I have a wireless router here, but my laptop is wired into it while I'm at my desk. Ever since new next-door neighbors moved in, wireless connectivity has been spotty during working hours. Not sure if it's a '70s microwave they've got running all day or maybe a cordless phone that they're lending to SETI, but running back to CAT5 was the only way to go. In any case, I spend too much time behind a computer as it is, so it's probably a good thing that my laptop more-or-less stays at the desk while I'm here. Like with Brian, music figures a lot into the work-at-home situation here. The backup drive holds its share of MP3s — rock, classical, goth, metal, experimental, and jazz, mostly. I also frequently go to DI.FM for their Goa-Psy and Classical channels. Every so often, there are brain-numbing tasks for which much distraction is required — paperwork, administrivia, and that sort of thing. Well... The 1400x1050 resolution means that I can pop a DVD in and have the movie play in one corner while the tasks are accomplished in another. Since I'm only half-watching the movie anyway, I'll often turn the commentary track on if there is one. Last time I did this, I ended up learning a lot more about Equilibrium and got the busywork done in record time. In any case, that's how I roll both inside and outside my little PR Pod. We'll see if I get to maintain the same amount of productivity and fun when I move to Linux. Watch this space for the running log. Posted by philgomes 8:56 PM Marketing Communications Panel At DAC Marketing Communications Panel At DAC Jeff H. of McBru writes in to point to a communications-related DAC panel that he blogged. Jeff says that, "Journalist Peggy Aycinena moderated a panel including Jim Hogan of Telos Venture Partners, Jacques Benkoski of US Venture Partners, Mike Sottak of Wired Island PR and Buno Pati of Xoomsys." Some pretty entertaining reading, actually. I agree with Jeff that the panel perhaps should have focused less on the nitty-gritty. Nevertheless, there's plenty of stuff for your humble host to react to. For example, one of my big issues with news releases is the notion that they must have an executive quote. Moderator Question: Where do you draw the line between hype and reality in quotes within press releases? Sottak: What do you think, Peggy? Peggy, the moderator: Why bother if [journalists] don't believe them? Sottak: The reality is that we'll keep writing them if you print them. Benkoski: Part of [securing a quote] is a bargaining chip with customers. This is an industry where you can't b.s. We lived in a bubble of hype in the late 90s. If you don't have it, don't hype. Pati: Customers aren't going to approve hyped quotes. Many journalists have told me that their eyes almost literally stop at the first quotation mark. Not sure why executive quotes persist — and are sometimes inexplicably the biggest bone of contention during the drafting process — but they've nevertheless become part of the art. I've long since stopped fighting it, out of a need to pick my battles. The quote issue aside, I must say that I agree with Dan Gillmor, who said at last week's BusinessWire panel that press releases read like a conversation between a Turing machine and a lawyer. I'm glad Mr. Benkoski mentioned the BS factor. For years, my email signature has proudly cribbed the famous Feynman quote "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." Now, as to our favorite topic: Moderator Question: Are Web logs of value? Benkoski: I'll pass. Hogan: Sharing information is of value. Awwww, man... Mr. Benkoski... You had me at "This is an industry where you can't BS!" Mr. Hogan and I seem to agree here. Generally, people seem to forget that blogging is a tool. For good or bad, as I've indicated before, people treat it as a cause celebre. At the core, though, it's about sharing information effectively. (And responsibly.) Thanks again to Jeff for capturing this. Wednesday, June 15, 2005 Posted by philgomes 12:16 AM PR, Advertising, Personalized Media, And Credibility PR, Advertising, Personalized Media, And Credibility From MediaPost by way of Steve Rubel. The public relations industry, not advertising agencies, appears to be taking the lead on the burgeoning marketplace of so-called "personalized media." There's a good reason for this: Properly executed, PR and personalized media hold one thing above all else: credibility. Advertising, arguably, is not so much concerned with credibility as it is raw awareness. I'm not saying this in the pejorative sense. Before you advertising types get your hackles up, let me explain... Remember the "People Do" ad campaign from Chevron? They had these TV ads where you'd see this endangered condor or spotted owl flying towards a power line. Just when you think the bird is going to get fried for sure, it alights on a perch built on the tower supporting the wire — a perch thoughtfully put there by Chevron, of course. Then, the narrator would say something like "Do people really care about preserving rare birds? People do." The picture fades to black and the slogan "People Do" appears under the Chevron logo, centered on your TV screen. Did anyone really buy this? Seriously. Now, imagine if you read the following in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal: Chevron, on the other hand, has been making great strides in improving its record in terms of the company's sensitivity to environmental issues. According to the Association For Responsible Petroleum, an independent nonprofit research concern based in Pahrump, Nev., Chevron is 89% more likely than its nearest three competitors to alter its exploration and drilling plans based on the presence of endangered flora or fauna. If you tell your friend that you admire Chevron's environmental record because of what you heard in their ads, you will be quite rightly laughed out of the room. However, if you say the same thing and quote a reliable journalistic enterprise or, as is increasingly so, a respected blogger, it's a whole different story. Now, please know that I'm certainly not one of those terribly arrogant PR types who takes the view that every bit of journalistic content we consume required or even involved the hand of PR. My point is this, however: PR, solely insofar as the tangible result is concerned, seeks to place the client in the parts of the media content that supply the reasons for which consumers access that content. Credibility is therefore the discipline's stock-in-trade. Achieving this in a truly effective and programmatic fashion requires careful planning backed by experience, research, and creativity. "PR folks are often lawyers in the court of public opinion," as I'm fond of saying. Advertising, as currently conceived and deployed, relies on interruption — those three minutes in between TV show segments, the necessary bandwidth for those banner ads, the pages you must flip before you get to the article you want, etc. Increased credibility isn't likely to result but, in those few seconds before you hit the "mute" button, an impression leading to some measure of awareness might be made. Though it certainly hasn't been immune to slow, awkward, and public fits-and-starts in this regard, PR is the formal communications discipline that is most commensurate with contemporary online media trends. And the reason is clear: They share the same vital currency of credibility. Tuesday, June 14, 2005 Posted by philgomes 2:10 PM Free PR Advice: Tom Cruise, Please Stop Free PR Advice: Tom Cruise, Please Stop Tom... It's a shame that Scientology is so stringently anti-drug, because I simply can't think of anyone else who is in more desperate need of a really good sedative right now. My typical gauge of someone's PR profile — good or bad — is this: Do I hear about that person's comings and goings whether or not I actively follow the circles wherein said person participates? I don't watch the talk shows or read the tabloids, but I've heard a lot about you lately, haven't I? There's the new relationship with Katie Holmes (who, I must say, Dawson or not, easily has one of the best smiles in all of Hollywood), your (two) couch-abusing antics on TV, your public feud with Brooke Shields, your on-set promotion of Scientology during the making of War Of The Worlds, and now this example of counterfactual craziness. Supporting Scientology claims that psychiatry is "a Nazi science", Cruise stated, "Jung (Carl Jung, the father of modern psychiatry) was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War Two," which the magazine's researchers discovered is untrue, according to the New York Center For Jungian Studies. The movie star continued, "Look at the experimentation the Nazis did with electric shock and drugging. Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler." The magazine also questions Cruise on this point, explaining, "According to the Dictionary Of Drugs And Medications... this is an urban legend." Dude... You were Maverick in Top Gun! You were Joel Goodsen in Risky Business! You were Jerry Maguire in... Oh, waitaminnit... Anyway... The second your on-screen characters got in that F-14 Tomcat's cockpit — or, perhaps more adventurously, got with Rebecca DeMornay — a whole generation of popcorn-popping male suburbanite teenagers (now in their 30s) wanted to be you! I'm not writing because I'm somehow jealous of your recent happiness. I'm writing this because, to the mature and reasonable media consumer of today, you just look nuts. Please, man... Rotate the media knob counter-clockwise a bit... For your own sake, before these antics overshadow your career and the movies millions pay to see. Sunday, June 12, 2005 Posted by philgomes 4:46 PM Entry-Level PR Blogs Entry-Level PR Blogs Now this is interesting. It just last week occurred to me that most of the blogs out there written by PR pros seem to be coming from quite senior-level folks. Entry- or junior-level representation seems a little harder to come by. I met AAE Blake Barbera after yesterday's BusinessWire talk. He's the host of the Wet Feet PR blog — "An Ongoing Look Into Public Relations From An Entry Level Standpoint." I was in high tech PR for about a good five or six years before I started Phil's Blogservations. Necessarily, my blog was informed by my pre-blog experiences, biases, and general "baggage" just as much as the daily goings-on in my life and profession. Thus, someone who is quite a bit newer to PR, blogging, and the working world at-large offers a particularly interesting perspective. There can be arguments for and against someone putting their professional development out in the wild for everyone to see, but I tend to see it as a net gain for everyone. In his note to me the day after the talk: I know there are a lot of entry level PR people scanning blogs for coverage, trends, etc. I created my blog so that they could turn to me to ask questions they might otherwise be embarrassed to ask, share experiences, and so that I could provide the PR industry with an entry level perspective. So far, it's been great! Blake also points me to some other blogs that, at least today, provide some additional early-career perspectives or otherwise relevant content. Stephen Davies This is a public relations and PR related technology blog from Stephen Davies. North East England PR student and University of Sunderland CIPR student representative. Stephen lives in Durham, UK and is currently moving into the third and final year of his degree. Kelly Papinchak: Beginning A Career In Public Relations This Blog was created to serve as a resource for students and new professionals beginning their career in public relations. Behind The Spin Behind the Spin was first produced by students from the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, but was quickly opened to students, practitioners and academics across the UK. The print magazine is published three times a year, the blog will updated every Monday. So, if you haven't already, I encourage PR pros at all levels to add these feeds to their aggregators. Personally, I'd like to see more early-stage PR pros blogging and I'd like to see their employers encouraging them, especially agency-side. Thursday, June 09, 2005 Posted by philgomes 8:06 PM Thanks Everyone BusinessWire Breakfast: Thanks, Everyone Wanted to take this opportunity to thank the organizers, participants, and attendees for today's BusinessWire panel on blogs, which I had the privilege of moderating this morning. Our panelists were Dan Gillmor, Catherine Kitcho, Mike Masnick, Chris Nolan, and Kara Swisher. Technical presentation was provided by David Aune. I'd have blogged the talk myself if I wasn't, well, up there. (And I find myself here in Alameda, hours later, thinking of more directions I'd have steered the panel.) And it was also great to see wonderful folks like Dawn Mortensen and Mike Manuel coming to represent and wave their respective flags. In this panel, I hope we achieved the goal I stated during my opening remarks — that, in the hands of creative, thoughtful, and ethical corporate communicators, blogs are more of an opportunity than a threat. If you were there and have any opinions at all about the panel, feel free to email me and I'll post them. Thanks to Pravin Venketsamy at BusinessWire for arranging the whole thing. Wednesday, June 08, 2005 Posted by philgomes 9:22 AM Media Guerilla And Joe Blog Media Guerilla And Joe Blog An informative, thoughtful, and entertaining read from Mike Manuel. The concept of a "trusted network" isn't on a page in the marketer's playbook right now. When it comes to online programs, I think too many companies are too focused on getting the A-list blogs to write two sentences about an announcement, while ignoring the C-list blogs that are writing two pages about the same thing. Tuesday, June 07, 2005 Posted by philgomes 4:22 PM New Soulfly Album Coming New Soulfly Album Coming For those who don't know, I'm a huge fan of Soulfly. Thus, I was very glad to hear that there will be a new album coming out this year — Dark Ages. Blabbermouth.net has the track listing. My second "Heroes Page" has an entry for their singer/guitarist Max Cavalera. Posted by philgomes 12:16 PM Congrats To Dave Bursky Congrats To Dave Bursky I'm way late getting to this. Those of you who know me well know what I was up to the day this was announced. I wanted to congratulate Electronic Design's Dave Bursky for winning a lifetime achievement award and hall-of-fame induction by the Communications Alumni Group of The City College of New York. Mr. Bursky was provided this very prestigious award in recognition of his 32 years of service to trade journalism and the positive impact that his coverage has provided to the advancement of technology. He is the first Electrical Engineer to be so honored, and joins an elite club of other lifetime journalists such as Bernard Kalb, Stephen B. Shepard, Upton Sinclair, Marvin Kalb, Larry Gralla and many others. Quite a distinguished list, I must say. Monday, June 06, 2005 Posted by philgomes 9:55 PM Debian "Sarge": Watch This Space Debian "Sarge": Watch This Space I'm finally going to be pursuing a full-time Linux migration starting in July. In the next few weeks, I'm going to be actively planning for it and doing my research. In my past, I've had machines based on Slackware, Red Hat, and Mandrake Mandriva. I've also had fun playing with the Knoppix and Kubuntu live CDs. This time around, and at the suggestion of my oft-blogged friend Tim, I'm going to give Debian a try. Version 3.1 (codenamed "Sarge") just came out today. If anyone has a distro recommendation, let me know now before I get too far down this path. Posted by philgomes 10:27 AM There Is No Global Warming, Part II There Is No Global Warming, Part II I've said it before, and I'm saying it again. According to TWICE: Mass merchants posted modest comp gains last month as unusually cold, wet weather dampened sales of seasonal items like room air conditioners. Friday, June 03, 2005 Posted by philgomes 7:39 PM Moderating Panel About Blogs Moderating Panel About Blogs Next week, I'll be moderating this all-star BusinessWire panel about blogs' impact on corporate communications. I must say it's an incredible honor. Of course, I'll be writing plenty about it afterward. Wednesday, June 01, 2005 Posted by philgomes 10:15 AM 49ers' PR Blunder 49ers' PR Blunder Looks like the San Francisco 49ers are in hot water because their up-until-very-recently-employed PR Director decided to make a training video that apparently goes out of its way to insult, well, everyone. Matier and Ross at the Chronicle have the story. It was meant to be funny -- but no one is laughing now in the San Francisco 49ers' front office over an in-house training film that featured off-color racial jokes, lesbian porn, a spoof of gay marriage and a trio of buxom, topless blondes frolicking with team public relations director Kirk Reynolds. I really can't believe what I'm reading. In what twisted parallel universe would such a training film have been a good idea? It's only a matter of time before this video makes its way online. UPDATE: The Chron split it up into eight parts and put it here. People are going to be talking about this for some time. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.