April 2008
53 posts
Watch WiFi Detector : Digital-Lifestyles (alpha remix) →
digital-lifestyles.info
This watch is totally not as sweet as the T-shirt version! But, props nonetheless;)
UPDATE: Props to Lauren Warthan for sending this to me!
Kyle's Brain Dump: America's Funniest Found Videos →
kylemonson.com
From Kyle Monson — I totally want to see this!
Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker: Marketing as a science, but science is a creative endeavor →
chiefmartec.com
Scott Brinker is super smart — if you don’t read him, you should.
How Best to Submit Our (Or Any) Stories to Digg - ReadWriteWeb →
readwriteweb.com
A great set of best practices from Marshall based on how RWW’s articles have performed historically.
GapingVoid: More thoughts on social objects →
gapingvoid.com
I was just re-reading Hugh’s “social objects” post which I think is more and more relevant every day. Figured it was worth posting it again. Enjoy!
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody →
herecomeseverybody.org
This struck a chord because we don’t have a TV. And people are always asking me how much I sleep per night, given all the extracurriculars. The answer is: 7-8 hours, depending. 10 on weekends, 6 when shizz is going down. There really is a cognitive surplus in the world, we just don’t think about it in the terms that Shirky does here. Caveats: we do watch TV on occasion on Hulu, and we watch a lot of movies. But these acts are very intentional. Also, there is some DAMN good TV out there, no question about it.
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? -- TechCrunch →
techcrunch.com
Our man Nova first posted on this topic on March of 2007 — just want to point out that he is about a year ahead of the curve in terms of his thinking about the web — amazing, Nova, you continue to impress;)
Wal-Mart-owned Sam's Club limits rice purchases - Yahoo! News →
news.yahoo.com
WalMart is rationing rice. Maybe the end really IS near.
Ahem,: This World Should Be Taken Out Back, Like In A Shed Or Something, Blown Up, Repackaged Into Shrapnel Cakes And Sold To Martians For Three Cents Apiece →
wonkette.com
Hehehe — W. is on Deal or No Deal tonight;)
Infinia, a solar power startup, attracts attention from iPod and iPhone manufacturer » VentureBeat →
venturebeat.com
This piece by Chris Morrison is the best articulation yet of Infinia’s manufacturing advantage and the potential scale at which its technology can be produced.
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium -- The Reality of Depending on True Fans →
kk.org
A.) Kevin Kelly is one of a very select few people out there approaching old problems from a uniquely helpful perspective. B.) I wholeheartedly agree with Kevin when he says that “I am deeply grateful to Robert for his generous and courageous disclosure of his real-life finances. Very few of us are willing to do that. But the truth about money is powerful.”
Makes me think about a lot of the stuff I’d like to disclose…more on that soon;)
Embargoes: Managing the Embargo Process from Either Side of the Desk | CenterNetworks →
centernetworks.com
As a PR person, the topic of embargoes comes up a lot — just yesterday I got into another long conversation about the practice.
The truth? We know who breaks embargoes and who doesn’t. And we don’t work with people who break embargoes, end of story — it’s unfair to everyone, including the other peeps that we have pre-briefed. Furthermore, honestly, if you have good clients that are doing interesting things, at least from a PR perspective there’s less to worry about — the relationship is symbiotic and, as Rick says, built on trust.
That all being said, I think that the other side of the coin is far more explosive — exclusives. I’ve said it before — I can’t speak for other PR people, but we just don’t give exclusives anymore. It just pisses everyone off, even more than embargoes. It’s not democratic, and it doesn’t help build a community. Now there are still plenty of outlets that angle and/or intimidate in the hopes of getting an exlcusive — I understand how the game is played and the value of exclusive information, but it just ain’t gonna happen.
Two caveats: it makes sense to give an exclusive if: you have no PR budget and/or bandwidth to manage a full-blown campaign; or, you have a minor piece of news (like a second close of B round funding) that most people won’t care about anyway, but that offers an opportunity for upleveling the conversation if that content is exclusive.
W-i-d-e-U-R-L.com →
wideurl.com
Thsi is too awesome for words.
Marshallk: PR ppl: I would like all your clients' news in an OPML feed →
twitter.com
I rest my case!
UPDATE: looks like a post on this topic may be on the way.
My use of technology. . .
Corvida just asked me to describe how I use technology, and I thought a repsonse was worth a little navel-gazing —
As a PR person, a lot of my life revolves around so-called “client service.”
As a result, in tech PR (or in my case more specifically, startup tech PR), you use whatever your clients use — they use Jabber, you use Jabber, they use ICQ, you use ICQ, they use FriendFeed, you use FriendFeed, if they use Google Apps, you use Google Apps, if they use Basecamp, you use Basecamp, they use the phone, you use the phone…your workflow has to be supremely flexible and maleable. They use Sharepoint…you start complaining (there are limits, people).
And it’s even more complicated than that. If the people/influencers they care about talking to use Skype, you use Skype. If they use Mag.nolia, you use Mag.nolia.
See where this is going?
As a result, my use of technology isn’t structured for efficiency or usefulness, it’s structured for comprehensiveness and redundancy in the name of client service.
And…half of my clients make the stuff in the first place so I need to use Twine and FriendFeed every day just to stay intelligent on their business, trends, usage patterns, evolving attitudes towards the service, etc. or maybe even it’s just that a given service competes with my client’s own, and I need to understand each completely so as to be able play ball and compare/contrast and talk features, value prop, backend, overall strategy etc. with an analyst or journalist who I want to take a meeting.
I often feel left out of the lifehacking conversation, or for example the conversation going on right now about the Facebook Lifestream — it’s besides the point for me in practice (even if I do have an opinion on the matter). If it exists and has any degree of meaningful traction, I’m going to use it, end of story. This seems similar (but different) when compared to the problem that blogger friends of mine have — they try out most everything in order to review it, even if just in the context of a news-oriented post — but very few of those services actually make their way into their daily lives, even despite intention. Why? Because things move so quickly that it’s hard to sleep 7 hours a night much less give Social.IM another go-round, even if it rocks (and it does).
In that sense — journalists and bloggers are a great use case in figuring out what is most sticky — and PR people are a great use case in figuring out the relationships between various services and applications (and why whomever uses whatever in a given scenario).
Thoughts?
Meme13 Tries and Fails to Solve the Techmeme Echo-Chamber Problem - ReadWriteWeb →
readwriteweb.com
Dude, Marshall, I love it when you get all dirty with the RSS feeds. And rehetorically, it’s so slick when you post a critique and then deliver the solution. Nice!
