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	Phil's Blogservations Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Posted by philgomes 7:33 PM SimplyHeadlines SimplyHeadlines Yes, I know it does nothing but enable my tendency toward information junkiness, but this tip from Dan Gillmor got me on SimplyHeadlines. More interestingly, though, Dan also allows us to see some light under the door in terms of online media inertia at Knight-Ridder, his previous employer: About two years ago I gave a talk to some senior people people at Knight Ridder, before it was sold to McClatchy. I begged them to use [the headlines.com domain, which K-R owned], or sell it to me so I could do something with it. I believe they thought I was joking about the latter idea. I wasn’t. Any random person off the street could have made something of Headlines.com. I'll add "...either as a useful service or, frankly, even as a crafty domainer." Technorati Tags: simplyheadlines, dan gillmor, knight-ridder Sunday, December 17, 2006 Posted by philgomes 12:10 PM "I Have But One Simple Request..." "I Have But One Simple Request..." "...and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!" Found these floating around the Millions Of Us island on Second Life. I await the "ill-tempered sea bass." Technorati Tags: second life, austin powers, dr. evil, sharks with frickin laser beams attached to their heads Wednesday, December 06, 2006 Posted by philgomes 8:43 PM More Discussion... More Discussion... What started out as a comment on Mike Manuel's blog eventually turned into something a lot bigger as I was writing, so here goes. Mike writes: If, however, we're not all working toward this same goal, and instead get caught up with using proprietary formats and tools to posture and advance competitive agendas, then, sadly, the Social Media Press Release will die, die, die, quickly. Good point. (I find Mike is full of those.) And he also turned me on to a very thoughtful post by Brian Oberkirch. Upon inspecting the StoryCrafter announcement, Brian wants more work at the metadata level, which is a fine point to make. And and important one. Nevertheless, at this early stage, I feel we're working within the presentation-level standards that are being developed or, at the very least, the criteria that reasonable folks have set forward for what a social media release should have. Fine for now, and things will improve as they must, especially with regard to common machine-readable formats. (And I will say "being" developed, since no one metadata standard has yet decisively emerged, though there's a lot of discussion about the needs for standards.) But let's step back a little bit and discuss... How do "standards" work in business? Listen... Coming from the tech industry, I know how important standards are. Like with any standard, companies differentiate and make money by innovating in and around the ways those standards are supported. In other words, standards are free, though the means by which either standards-compliant products are produced, or additional value-add is applied, is often something that companies charge and market with. For example, any two SecureDigital memory cards for a digital camera could each have very different memory chips inside of them, but the electrical and physical interfaces are necessarily the same. That said, many memory card vendors innovate and market on writing speed, owing to some magic they might have baked into their silicon. Look at the average Lexar card, for example. (They choose to market on write speed, even if "133x" comes off as arbitrary.) Thus... Everybody wins: Interoperability is achieved and room for necessary differentiation is provided. I'm pretty amazed how many folks — the ones screaming, somewhat incredibly, that they're not getting something for free from Edelman — just aren't seeing this. And it's not like I've been invited to participate in helping to develop these standards, though people have known about Edelman's interest in this area for some time. I take that back... I think I was invited to chat about it in some kind of dial-in podcast thing months ago. Couldn't make it. Nothing since. Oh... I went to a Social Media Club meeting in LA. Had a nice discussion. Met great people. You get the idea. Give me, Edelman, anyone a workable, reasonable standard and I'll do my darnedest to make sure they play within it if it's reasonable and well-iterated. Better yet, give me an opportunity to help shape that standard, and I might even be happy about it. *8-) Just don't try to set firm on fire when the tools it creates to produce standards-compliant releases (or whatever) aren't handed over. There's opportunity for everyone here. Don't screw it up. So, yes, I'm loudly agreeing with Brian, but there are places where I might disagree with him. Like: If we had a critical mass of releases marked up with hRelease, then you could incent Technorati and other search engines to create tools to make releases more visible and easier to track, parse, remix. Okay... Technorati tracks blog conversations. Not even shudder big-agency Edelman (a "Super-Duper Intergalactic" agency to some) has considered that press releases should even be made a part of what Technorati indexes and references. (Put another way... If Edelman even breathed this suggestion, the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth would be deafening.) In other words, if there's a better way to make SMNRs less acceptable and less relevant to the communities it most seeks to communicate with, I honestly can't think of one. Again... Everyone... This goes back to a point I keep on making: The current SMNR discussion is 80% about attention and 20% about conversation. Reverse it, or you'll have bigger problems than a metadata standards quibble. Can I go home now? Technorati Tags: edelman, pr, public relations, social media news release, newmediarelease Tuesday, December 05, 2006 Posted by philgomes 6:35 PM Pt. II: Yes, I've Been Working On The Social Media News Release, Too Pt. II: Yes, I've Been Working On The Social Media News Release, Too First... For those of you out there with your Blogosphere Response-Time Stopwatches (free with SASE and three cereal box tops, I'm told) this is going up a little more than *click* eight hours after I saw the first related post. From the eagle-eyed folks over at Topaz Partners, who caught what I thought was a somewhat innocuous post on the New Media Release Google Group yesterday: The new app will likely compete against PRX Builder, an earlier attempt to put a user-friendly face on the social media press release, as well as other attempts to socialize more traditional formats/mechanisms. Well... Two different approaches, in any case. We've used PRWeb's service, which includes many of the options that were initially specified in Todd Defren's suggested format, and I've been reasonably pleased with the performance, although it's not quite 100% social media, it's a step in the right direction. Agreed. And it's about time folks started re-examining the news release. Glad lots of folks are doing so. My primary concern about how the social media news release is currently conceived is that it's really less "social media" than "news release." The focus is all about "attention" and not about "sustainability" or even "conversation." All are important but, if one values conversation as a first-order variable, that's where the focus oughta be. Edelman StoryCrafter is built primarily as a hosted system. If someone wants to take the releases it generates and transmit, fine. With more and more wire services becoming increasingly sophisticated with XHTML support, the transmission variable doesn't worry me, though I do believe the community should develop standard "glue logic" between wizards and wire distribution services (naive as that sounds). I see no reason why a transmission element can't be integrated later on, but we find there is less interest in that part of the equation. Edelman's move will be a unilateral (or probably more accurately a bilateral one, as I'm sure they've brought in a partners or two). No partners on this one, though we did seek the assistance of a development house. ("Unilateral?" "Bilateral?" Someone's been watching too much C-SPAN. *8-) ) How flexible their format is... Very. We have no interest in building a rigid system that isn't future-proofed. ...and how well it will play with the social media release standard being developed by a consortium of practitioners. The intent is to support and contribute to any credible and useful standard. The Social Media Club has a good start. But I welcome any attempt to make social media more approachable. As do I. Many thanks. Now... Over to Todd Defren. First off, and notably, Edelman seemed to use the SHIFT template for their announcement --- which is pretty cool. Made no sense to completely reinvent something for the sake of doing so, though we do think that the hosted approach and the comments element (not included in the spec) adds a lot. They also used my favorite Technorati tag (social media news release) to point to the industry-wide discussion. Thanks, gang! One could go the other extreme, perhaps, and tag every variation known to man, but that'd be useless and wasteful. If people stuck with "social media news release" and "newmediarelease" then I think we'd be happy. So, go ahead! Pat yourself on the back! Wait... Too late... *8-) But I am not clear on what is being announced, exactly. The release calls the new service, "StoryCrafter -- a Web-based software tool for helping companies produce and deploy social media news releases." The tool is hosted. Companies can choose to install it in their firewall or (far more likely) unlock a tertiary domain (e.g., socialnews.company.com) and park it separately. Whatever version they choose to push toward transmission is up to them. Again... The hosted approach appeared more conducive to a more conversational focus. We'll see how things develop. But it's not being presented as a drop-by-and-kick-the-tires kind of thing. But there are no links to a StoryCrafter site? It's not a "site," nor a service for people to just sort of log into and push "publish." It's a client offering. A Google search doesn't yield any results. Edelman rarely transmits its agency announcements over wires, social-media or otherwise. (Sidenote: And consider, hypothetically, that if an Edelman announcement (or that of a client) could end up in Google News without use of a wire service, the folks who don't know me and think I do more of this than this would likely freak out.) It can't be a service just for Edelman clients, based on Rick Murray's quote: "StoryCrafter lets people create social media news releases quickly, easily, and affordably." Why are the two mutually exclusive? Clients deserve quick, easy, and affordable, too. The screen capture looks interesting --- but functionally it appears to be derivative of the PRX Builder service announced in September...? "Derivative?" I wouldn't go that far. That said, there are only so many ways one can skin a fill-in-the-blank social-news-release cat. So it doesn't surprise me that someone would see similarities to another product in any one screen. Either way I'd like to take it for a test-drive. We'll probably set up some semi-public sandbox for it, so long as the management of it remains reasonable. For all I know, the Edelman software may be superior, but my first question is going to be about distribution. Will Edelman facilitate links to major newswires, as PRX Builder did with PRNewswire? If they have no plans along those lines, it's not a deal-breaker but it would seem to be a major benefit for companies looking for a seamless solution for Social Media News Release creation & distribution. I could see why that would some appeal, but keep in mind that, philosophically, we're more interested in exploring the "social media" part than the "news release" part. I believe the news release part, as I'll explain in another post tomorrow, is only a metaphor for what we (and, believe it or not, all of you) are all trying to accomplish. That said, we're certainly not averse to integrating with some kind of distribution mechanism. That'd be silly. If that happens, though, I'd want it to be an industry-standard layer of glue logic between Edelman StoryCrafter and wire services. (And we would hope other SMNR wizards would do the same.) And... Over to Chris Heuer posting on the Social Media Release blog... We will have a more in depth review of the tool itself in the coming days as well as an interview with Phil Gomes from Edelman's Me2Revolution Group. *gulp* Did I miss the meeting-maker? (Scrambles to check Outlook.) Sure... Any time... Anyway... More later. Update: Misspelling a tag ("hreff") caused a well-deserved link to Todd Defren to drop. Fixed. Yes... I'm a nerd who prefers to hard-code it. Technorati Tags: edelman, pr, public relations, social media news release, newmediarelease Posted by philgomes 12:15 PM Yes, I've Been Working On The Social Media News Release, Too Yes, I've Been Working On The Social Media News Release, Too I had mentioned before that one of the projects I was working on with some other folks at Edelman was a take on the social media news release concept. By way of review... Tom Foremski was the one who originally threw the SMNR rubber ducky into the online bathtub. Since then, folks like Todd Defren, Chris Heuer, and Brian Solis have been actively evangelizing improvements in the news release, that old chestnut of the PR trade. I've been popping my thoughts in there now and again. Heck... There's even a Google Group and a podcast about the concept. Anyway... We've just one-dot-oh'd a web-based "wizard" for generating social media news releases, which we call StoryCrafter around here. Edelman will be using it in its newsroom from here on out, generating "social media" versions of announcements in parallel with the "traditional" ones for now. (An approach somewhat inspired by Neville Hobson's work with SpiralFrog. Presumably, Neville feels, as I do, that a wholesale changeover to a new format might take time.) And, of course, Edelman is baking this wizard it into client offerings as well. Auburn University's Robert French beta-tested the StoryCrafter tool with his students. I was very happy with how deep-and-wide they went with their test, which was exceedingly important during the debug process. Essentially, we wanted to make the generation of social media news releases as easy as, say, getting a Yahoo! email account... Fill-in-the-blanks. I can continue this with all kinds of details, but this post is long enough as it is. Here's the social media version of the release and the traditional one. Look for some screenshots and an interview I did with Robert French (MP3). The hosted approach we take also means that you can comment on the release as well. Looking forward to seeing where this takes us. I'm actively thinking about what I want to put into the next version and will be looking to the outside community for thoughts on same. More thoughts later today or tomorrow. Technorati Tags: social media news release, newmediarelease, smnr, edelman, pr, public relations Sunday, December 03, 2006 Posted by philgomes 10:41 AM Seagate's CEO On Seagate Seagate's CEO About Seagate Josh Morgan made my morning by pointing me to this interview with Seagate's CEO: SAN FRANCISCO (Fortune) -- Sitting at the arm of a tech CEO during a corporate dinner is rarely as interesting as you might imagine. Usually, the CEO stays on message throughout the meal as a PR flak hovers, smiles, nods and prods the conversation along. Just keep the drinks coming, guys. Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." These days, during talks and in the day-to-day course of doing business, I'm reminded more and more of the movie Crazy People. Technorati Tags: seagate, ceo, bill watkins, fortune, pr0n Saturday, December 02, 2006 Posted by philgomes 8:33 PM Signing Your Emails Signing Your Emails Oh, dear... Ever read an article in a high-profile publication that implies you've been doing something totally wrong for, like, fifteen years? NotMartha and Jason Kottke point to an article about how people read into email signoffs. You know... "Warmly, [name]" or "Yours Truly, [name]". Well... In pretty much my whole professional life, I've signed my emails: Best, /pmg According to The Old Gray Lady, though, I've been unwittingly involved in some minor "E-mail-y Post" netiquette faux-pas. Mr. [Chad] Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes "Best," then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from "Warmest regards" to "All the best" to a curt "Sincerely." Of course, some disagree: "Best" does have its fans, especially in the workplace, where it can be an all-purpose step up in warmth from messages that end with no sign-off at all, just the sender coolly appending his or her name. "I use 'Best' for all of my professional e-mails," said Kelly Brady, a perky publicist in New York. "It's friendly, quick and to the point." I used to work with someone who would sign her emails all kinds of ways. When she signed her emails "Respectfully," though, she usually meant the opposite. "Respectfully" was almost a hex-like acronym for "Really, Expect Severe Pelvic Effluvia Coming To Fruition Until Loss of Life, Yutz." Here's what I recommend... Find an email sign-off and stick with it. That way, people won't tie themselves into knots reading into what you really mean when you sign an email "Warmly" one day and "Cordially" the next. So, it looks like I'm sticking with "Best." Technorati Tags: netiquette, nyt Posted by philgomes 7:47 PM Google: Use Atom... Or Else! Google: Use Atom... Or Else! Apparently, if you move to Google's Blogger Beta after being a Blogger user for some time, and have been just-fine-thank-you with choosing RSS over Atom for syndication, tough luck. Your feed will turn into Atom whether you like it or not. Of course, Feedburner users won't have a problem. Technorati Tags: blogger, google, blogger beta, feedburner 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.