Podcasting goes mainstream Is there any doubt that podcasting has hit the big time? :-)  ¶ 10:56 AM 0 Comments

  Notes from around the Net 2/28/06 Steve Rubel comments on his first day on the job at Edelman PR. Sounds like it was a sleepless affair. His story will be interesting to watch: How a successful blogger adjusts to a major shift in work life and still keeps blogging. He says he's going to do it.

Nike has launched a new blog to promote its basketball shoes. But there's no commenting allowed. I wonder why?

Technorati's got a new feature (at least, I think it's new) that ranks blogs by the number of members who have voted them their favorites. It's a great idea and should work over time as the number of votes grows. Of course, it's also open to manipulation...

There's a lot of buzz about a new product from Microsoft code-name Origami. It's supposed to be some kind of mobile device. People are expecting big things. Tell me: when was the last time Microsoft surprised anyone with breakthrough technology?

Here's a challenge in opacity. Robert Scoble, Microsoft's #1 blogger, writes about the danger of concealing product plans from your internal blogforce. And he cites several third-party accounts that speculate about what Origami is. Now Scoble presumably knows what this mystery product is, yet he's writing about what people are speculating about it and not confirming or denying anything. Meanwhile, Microsoft's developers have the freedom to write about what they know as long as they're not covered by NDA, from what I understand of MS's blogging policy. It's an interesting exercise to keep a secret when you're openly encouraging blogging at the same time. I give credit to MS for even trying.  ¶ 8:03 AM 0 Comments

  Warm Your Heart As the parent of a learning disabled son, I almost cried watching this video about an autistic kid who got a chance to play in his high school team's final basketball game. If this doesn't boost your faith in the human spirit, I don't know what will.  ¶ 1:54 PM 0 Comments

  Wal-Mart Talks Back Wal-Mart has created a website to counter criticism that its employee benefits are below par. It's nicely done. There's a blog, too, but that's evidently an after-the-fact idea, since the most recent post is Nov. 23. That's a cardinal sin in blogging. You don't let your site lie fallow. It makes it look like you don't care, have nothing to say or aren't really committed to the topic you blog about.  ¶ 1:50 PM 2 Comments

  Talk Radio I had the pleasure of doing a radio show this past weekend with the guys over at Pundit Review. They have a weekly right-leaning radio program but with a very novel twist: most of their guests are prominent bloggers. They buy in to the concept that social media is influencing public opinion in some very profound ways and they make it a point to spotlight the people who are doing the influencing.

I was pleased to share much of the program with Glenn Reynolds', whose Instapundit site needs no introduction. It's the top political site on the Internet and Reynolds is an incredibly active blogger, posting 15 to 20 times some days and recently adding podcasts into the mix. He also just wrote a book about social media called An Army of Davids and somehow finds time for his day job as a law professor.

You can download a podcast of the program.  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 Comments

  Glaxo deputizes employees for massive PR push GlaxoSmithKline has turned its entire sales force into a public relations machine. The company has deputized its 8,000 sales people to go forth and spread the word about all the good things the pharmaceutical industry does. People are supposed to start with family members and expand the message through community gatherings and speeches. The story doesn't mention blogs, but that would make sense, wouldn't it?

What do you make of this idea. Do you trust your employees enough with your company message and positioning to send them out as PR ambassadors? Or does this idea give you the willies?  ¶ 12:13 PM 0 Comments

  Google's Ajax-based website editor Google just launched a test of an Ajax-based website editor. Supposedly, this will let you create websites with a look-and-feel that mimics a native desktop application. Do you wonder why Microsoft is scared of these guys? Are you going to pay $90 for FrontPage if you can get comparable functionality for free?

Clayton Christensen has pointed out that high-end market leaders are always edged out by low-end competitors whose products are "good enough" but which make products available to large new audiences. Examples include off-the-rack clothing, transistor radios, Toyotas, Dell PCs, VOIP phone services, etc. Google is getting to be very good at "good enough."  ¶ 9:30 AM 1 Comments

  Tribune: 27,000 podcasts The Chicago Tribune has a story that says there are 27,000 podcasts on the Internet, which is double the number that was quoted to me by the people at Podshow last month. This story talks about the passion of the podcasters, but there's still that tricky issue of how to make money. Outside of Mommycast and perhaps a few others, no one's figured out how to crack that code yet.  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 Comments

  Another reason to skip class? The University of Arizona is podcasting some lectures. If they had had this stuff when I was in school, there's no way I ever woulda made one of those 8 a.m. classes :-).  ¶ 6:53 AM 2 Comments

  Podcast innovators No posts for a week. Shame on me! But I've been rebuilding my website, you see, and writing a newsletter.

Speaking of which, I got around to writing down more detail on the GM Fastlane Podcasts and the Whirlpool American Family podcasts based on my interviews with the people responsible for both. These are innovative uses of the medium and should be an example to others.

You can read the detailed account here.

I've also expanded my list of podcasting resources for marketers. Read it here.  ¶ 6:08 PM 0 Comments

  PR agency legitimizes blogging
Edelman, the giant global PR firm, has gone and hired Steve Rubel, whose Micro Persuasion is considered the number one advertising blog on the Web. This is a big endorsement for word-of-mouth marketing as a legitimate communications channel. This Ad Age piece (registration required) has more about the Rubel hire and also mentions that Weber Shandwick has hired Jeremy Pepper, author of the Pop! PR Jots blog, as group manager in its San Francisco office.  ¶ 11:51 AM 0 Comments

  Skeptics question Wikipedia model The Boston Globe has a very well-reported two-part series on Wikipedia this week and it's none too complimentary about the online reference source.

David Mehegan, who's one of the best reporters at the Globe, documents the abuses that have emerged since Wikipedia achieved cult status last year. He goes beyond the endlessly cited John Siegenthaler case and talks about the real doubts that serious scholars have about the reliability of information in Wikipedia. Those doubts are based on real experience, too. The article raises questions about whether you can believe anything you read there, on the supposition that even a 5% inaccuracy rate is enough to cast doubt about the validity of the entire site.

I'm a huge Wikipedia fan but I also recognize that these kinds of problems are an inevitable consequence of success. No one paid attention when Wikipedia was the 100th most popular website. Now that it's bigger than AOL, the vandals are crawling out of the woodwork.

Wikipedia's reliability problems can be solved but it will probably require some sort of registration/identification system to verify accountability, if not accuracy. The Wikimedia Foundation has an important task ahead trying to figure this out. But they will figure it out. Wikipedia has been perhaps the most prominent example of the power of social media and a lot of smart people will be helping it overcome this obstacle. Articles like the Globe's are important because they force change. Wikipedia will need to change constantly if it is to continue in the leadership role it has carved out for itself.  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 Comments

  Sometimes you shouldn't blog Michael Schrage, who's one of my favorite tech columnists, has a column in CIO Magazine this week called Think Before you Blog. It makes an excellent point: that blogging by itself doesn't necessarily enhance your image and can actually make you look bad. That's why you have to think before you get online and start spouting.

A friend recently told me about an executive she knew who decided to get into blogging. He set up a blog on the company site and began raining invective on competitors and other players in his industry. He'd been told that bloggers were supposed to be controversial, but he apparently didn't distinguish between being controversial and being an jerk. His blog was so obnoxious that it became a joke and an embarrassment inside the company. No one wanted to be around him. Only he thought he was doing the company a favor. The company didn't. He was fired last December.

Blogging is about having something to say, not about insulting people.  ¶ 10:12 PM 0 Comments

  Clueless clients I rarely take PR people to task for their tactics because I have a lot of respect for their profession and I understand the difficulty of generating good PR in this constantly changing media world. But I had an exchange with a PR person today (name withheld for obvious reasons) that provided a case study of what not to do in pitching a client.

I had posted an inquiry on PR Newswire's very useful Profnet service seeking experts in corporate wikis. Of the many responses I received, one stood out as being completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. It was a pitch for a vertical market reseller. I responded to the PR person asking what the relevance of the pitch was to the topic at hand. Her response: "He is a software expert comfortable with addressing any tech topic."

There are a couple of problems with that statement. For one thing, it's an inherent contradiction. Anyone who believes that he or she is an expert in software is, by definition, not an expert in software. The field is far too vast, complex and specialized for anyone to be a general expert. On the contrary, this positioning makes the so-called expert look like an idiot because anyone who really knows software would know that general expertise is impossible to achieve.

Secondly, the response from the PR person made no attempt to relate the client's expertise - whatever it is - to the topic I was writing about. In fact, it was clear to me that the PR person knew little, if anything, about wikis to begin with. In a situation like that, the PR rep should either research the topic or remain silent.

It's very possible the client told his PR rep to position him as a general-purpose software expert. In that case, shame on the PR person. Her job was to help the client refine and focus his message, not spray it out to a general audience.  ¶ 11:28 AM 0 Comments

  How to get links Performancing.com has a useful article on how to create links back to your blog or site by posting information that informs, intrigues or offends. It's at The Art of Linkbaiting. Opinion columnists will recognize a lot of these tactics as being standard operating procedure for generating readership. There are a few quirks in the blogosphere, though. For example, when you post a link, click on it so the author of that page will know the link exists!  ¶ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

  The best of Demo - my picks Two days, 25 hours (including evening events) and one full notebook. Demo is like drinking from the proverbial technology fire hose. I didn't get a chance to meet with all 68 exhibitors but I saw my share of cool stuff. If any conference does a better job of cluing you in to where innovation and venture capital is going in the tech industry, I don't know of it. Hats off to Network World for keeping this venerable event fresh and relevant.

Here are my picks for the best demos I saw at Demo. Keep in mind that most of these products are unreleased and I haven't played with any of them. They're organized by category. We'll start with personal productivity and I'll add others as I get my notes together.

Personal Productivity
Accomplice Software's Accomplice - This is a time organizer on steroids. It bolts onto Microsoft Outlook and PDA organizers and allows you to organize your tasks flexibly but powerfully. You can quickly move tasks around, re-categorize them, change priorities and integrate all kinds of files and clips through a drag-and-drop interface. You can also share and organize your tasks with other people.

Iotum - It's not a personal product - in fact, you have to connect it to a PBX or VOIP switch - but its benefits are very personal. Iotum does intelligent call routing, making sure the calls you get are only from the people you want to talk to. You're not bothered by anything else. If the call's from someone you want to speak to, Iotum will find you at any phone number of IM address it has. If not, it's off to voice mail land. It also learns from your past behavior and gets smarter as time goes on.

Publishing
There was lots of interesting action in this field as the personal publishing trend gathers momentum.

Blurb BookSmart - My choice for best-of-show. Drag and drop photos into a template, add text and ship off to a service that returns a hard-cover coffee table book. Think of the possibilities. Your contract is up for renewal so you put together a custom volume showing the great work you've done for the client for the last year and present it as a gift before the renewal meeting. Or create family yearbooks for the holidays. I just love this idea.

Grass Roots Software's Freepath - This adds a bunch of new tools to your PowerPoint arsenal, enabling you to seamlessly mix in multiple data types and jump quickly around a presentation.

Riya - Pattern matching and face recognition software has huge potential but the technology available to the public has never been very good. Riya can spot patterns in photos - be they faces, words, objects or something else - and then sort through databases of photos looking for the same patterns. People will initially use it to tag their photo collections and publish them for private and commercial use but the potential applications of this technology are endless.

Simplefeed - RSS is the best tool to organize the vast and growing river of data that surges over the Internet. But there are few tools that organizations can use to understand who's reading their RSS feeds or how they're acting on that information. Simplefeed has some very cool technology that make RSS a more effective and trackable medium than e-mail or even Web pages for anyone who publishes information.

More to come...  ¶ 9:12 AM 0 Comments

  Best of Demo - the SMB picks Given all the lip service being given to the small/medium business market, I was surprised there weren't more products targeting those users. Nevertheless, there were three that caught my eye.

Digislide Holdings, Pty Ltd.'s Digismart - You couldn't beat this technology for sheer ''Wow!'' factor. It's a tiny projector, about the size of a keychain fob, that plugs into a cell phone or PDA and projects an 11'' X 17'' image on a wall or screen. It runs off the power supply of the handheld device and basically lets you take your presentations on the road with you without the hassle of lugging a portable projector. This is still very early-stage technology; the Australian company hopes to ship it this year and doesn't even have a projected price. It also isn't yet effective beyond the 11'' X 17'' size. But if Digislide can make this technology work, everyone's going to want it.

Interprise Solutions USA, LLC's Interprise Suite - I didn't think the world needed another ERP suite, but Interprise thinks it's got a winner in a fully integrated and internationalized ERP/CRM suite for small business. And it has 1,300 beta sites to prove it. Pricing will be in the $5,000 range for five users.

Sprout Systems, Inc.'s Sproutit Mailroom - The first in a planned suite to SMB productivity tools from this El Cajon, CA-based startup is Sproutit Mailroom, a flexible e-mail management tool that allows users to automatically categorize, route and respond to e-mail messages based on a set of rules. Enterprise products are available with the same functionality but Sprout is focused on SMB organizations that are drowning in e-mail.  ¶ 9:10 AM 1 Comments

  Best of Demo - the cool stuff The following products may not make you more productive or profitable, but I liked them just because they're so cool.

eVoke TV - This service combines community media and TV listings to create an entirely new entertainment experience. Evoke makes it possible to link the TV guide to the vast amounts of factual and fan-generated information on the Web. You'll be so busy navigating you'll miss the show. Oh, right, that's why you got...

Digital Deck - This could be the evolution of TiVo but the price has got to come down. Digital Deck makes it possible for every media device in a home to attach to every other media device. So the TV in the kids' room can play a show recorded from the cable box in the living room. By designating one PC as, essentially, a network server, all the media is cached centrally for delivery to connected devices. However, Digital Deck recommends hard-wired Ethernet connections and will charge $800 for a basic two-room system when the device ships in April. That's just too high.

Kaboodle.com - I always through the epinions.com concept - let users recommend products and services to others by voting for their favorites - was a great idea that no one ever figured out how to deliver. Kaboodle is the Web 2.0 version of that. You research a purchase and share your findings with others. As the community grows, the quality of information gets richer. Is it finally time for this idea to take root?

Polyvision's Thunder Enterprise Collaboration System - We've all been in training sessions where flip chart pages get scribbled on and pasted all over the walls. Polyvision has done that in software. The flip chart in this case is a large, touch-sensitive flat panel screen and up to 12 completed pages can be ''torn off'' and displayed simultaneously on walls via ceiling-mounted projectors. Pages can be easily moved around and edited and the whole thing saved digitally. You can also share the whole experience with remote users. This product is way cool, but I've got to wonder how many customers will be willing to pay $100,000 for a fully installed system. Paper and masking tape always worked pretty well for me.

Vivid Sky LLC's SkyBox - As a baseball nut and statistics freak, I'm always wishing I had more information available to me when I'm at the game. SkyBox is a ruggedized, handheld computer that gives fans access to statistics, replays and even concession menus from their seats. In theory, you could get ESPN, ESPN.com and an interactive stadium guide in a PDA. It's a great idea but the devil is in the details. Vivid Sky foresees sports teams renting the little units to attendees for $10 or $20 a game but hasn't signed any customers yet. And I wonder how the umpires are going to like that instant-replay-on-demand feature? Nevertheless, if this product comes to be, I want one.

Zinkkat, LLC's Chili - Chili is a banana-shaped device that fits on a teenager's belt or baggy pants pocket and delivers audio content from any Bluetooth-attached computer. The user can chat on Skype, play MP3s, listen to Internet radio and access e-mail through a text-to-speech interface. At $150, it'll be affordable and it's cool to look at.

MooBella, LLC - The longest lines at Demo snaked from the MooBella exhibit, where two refrigerator-sized machines churned out made-to-order ice cream every 45 seconds for sugar-craving attendees. The machines are technological marvels; the whole freezing, mixing and deliver process is done in real-time while the customer waits. The target market is food service providers like college cafeterias and hospitals. The fact that this company has raised $36 million in venture capital shows that even mature markets can spark innovation.  ¶ 9:05 AM 0 Comments

  Wikinews innovation - call it IP journalism Wikinews.org debuted a new kind of investigative journalism in a report on the Senate Wikipedia scandal. That story hit the mainstream media last week when several outlets reported that staff members at several senators' offices had apparently edited entries about their senators and rival politicians that deleted or added embarrassing information.

Wikinews volunteer reporters took an innovative approach to furthering this story. They dug up IP addresses at individual senators' offices and then analyzed the Wikipedia history pages for the affected senators' biographies to identify which offices manipulated which entries. What was particularly ingenious, I thought, was how the reporters mapped IP addresses to senate offices. They sent e-mail to the senators and then looked at the headers in the replies received from the auto-responders to identify which offices had which addresses. Then they compared those addresses to the ones tracked on the history page. Very innovative and very revealing.  ¶ 12:34 PM 0 Comments

  Extricom triples Wi-fi bandwidth Extricom showed a technology that it claims can triple bandwidth on a wireless network. Actually, the technology doesn't do anything to bandwidth but it does allow a single wireless channel to be spread across multiple, overlapping wireless coverage ageas. That's particularly interesting in an 802.11g environment, where only three channels are available.

Extricom says its technology can virtually eliminate roaming and signal strength problems. Now that many people and organizations are trying to cram video and VOIP over their wireless networks that never anticipated those applications, this could be an appealing way to squeeze a little more life out of equipment.

The technology basically transfers responsibility for channel management from the access points to the switch. The switch "knows" where all the access points are and can adjust channel allocation to minimize RF interference.

This reminds me of all the software that came out in the pre-Windows days to break the 640K barrier. This industry devotes enormous brainpower to fixing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. Eventually, technology advances usually render these workarounds irrelevant.  ¶ 6:22 PM 0 Comments

  Five minutes of Demo fame Demo presenters get no more than five minutes for their pitch and my choice for best use of that time today goes to Persystent Technologies. The software makes sure that PCs on a network have a consistent set of software according to standards set by the IT organization. Where software is corrupt or missing, it fixes the problem.

CEO spent the first minute of his presentation trashing his laptop on the big screen. He deleted a bunch of system files, launched a destructive virus and messed up the registry. Then he rebooted. His PC came up cleanly and flawlessly, with all the files and settings restored.

If seeing is believing, then this demo did the trick. Nice use of five minutes.  ¶ 6:08 PM 0 Comments

  Social tools dominate Demo 2006

The Demo 2006 conference is all about social media this week. Among the interesting products/technologies I’ve seen so far:

Riya – Based on pattern maching software, Riya will search your photos and find people and things based on sample images you provide. It can then tag those photos in bulk. So if you want to search a 1,000-image folder of images for photos of your three-year-old, you submit a few photos of the tot to the recognition engine and it then tries to find every instance of that image that it can. You can then tag those images all at once.

The company sees the service as being useful to photographers who want to have their images discovered on the Web and potentially to be paid for them. It would be great for freelance photographers who want to sell their work but aren’t in all the right search engines. Free client, advertising supported.

Blurb Book Smart – Coolest product I’ve seen today. This service lets you organize photos and text to produce a book through a commercial book-publishing service. I wasn’t aware of how big the self-publishing industry is but there are a lot of service providers who will create bound volumes for you. Blurb’s software lets you drag and drop photos and text into a template and then send that to a publisher. You can publish a single volume for as little as $30 from some providers.

Think of the potential for this technology for small businesses. What if, just before going in to renew a contract, you could create a coffee table book of the work you’ve done for the client in the past year and bring copies to the meeting? This software tries to make that easy.

Zingee – Web site publishing for people who don’t want to create web sites. Specify files to share and create a link on the Zingee website. The file is then available to anyone you want to share it with. It’s like an index of peer-to-peer content.

TagWorld - This company wants to host your blog, photos, videos, MP3 files and bookmarks. They give you a gig of storage and a bunch of templates you can use to create multimedia websites on the fly using these elements. You can also pull in images and sounds from some other sites, like Flickr. It's a consumer app, kind of a MySpace on steroids. The problem is that they want to host all this content and I wonder how much interest people have in maintaining multiple blogs and photo albums. This market is getting crowded. You can create some very neat integrated websites, though.

Gravee – User-powered search. It’s a search engine but users can vote on search results and add them to personal bookmark files. Supposedly, the quality of search results improves over time because real people are constantly improving it. Self-funded company with a very interesting idea.

Kaboodle – This venture tries to do what Epinions failed to do, which is to harness the power of a social network to help people choose products. You can snip items from web sites you’ve visited and organize them into pages that can be commented upon by other users. The time may finally be right for this idea.

More to come...

  ¶ 5:03 PM 3 Comments