Day: March 9, 2004

Jayson Blair‘s new book may be the PR/Media meme of the moment but I won’t be contributing to his comfortable retirement.

I have to say, I am becoming sick and tired of people, who through dishonesty, laziness and an innate belief that they shouldn’t have to work hard like the rest of us, get rich promoting their dishonestly. (That was a long sentence but it has released some of the pressure from my chest so that’s a good thing!).

Don’t buy his miserable book, you’ll learn nothing and will help reward someone who clearly thinks they are better that you and me. No thanks bud.

Richard Laermer, in the latest issue of RLM’s newsletter, gives some first hand examples of how this leech operated. What more do you need to know? I wouldn’t read this book if it was handed to me. 

Now whilst one of the benefits of RSS has been its ability to circumvent e-mail overload, many people actually like RSS updates delivered by e-mail.

A former colleague of mine, Andy Grove (not that Andy Grove) has been toying around with RSS and is offering a free service “My RSS Alerts” which delivers the latest RSS feeds from your favorite sources directly to your inbox.

The service is still in its early stages but it’s really simple to subscribe, try it out.

The past three years haven’t exactly been a walk in the park.  The Internet bust hit business and the PR industry very hard. The latest issue of Ketchum’s Perspectives newsletter takes a look at the lessons we’ve learnt from the past three years.

It includes the thoughts of executives from Home Depot and Fedex, the eternal debate on measurement and what’s hot and not for 2004.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of the failures of “raw” RSS is that it’s difficult to track usage over time.  How can you discover who is using your RSS feed, how often they are reading it etc.

Cliff Allen from Coravue has been in touch to inform me that they are launching a trackable RSS service in the Content Management component of their CRM software.

According to Cliff, “Being personalized, the feed contains only the headlines and links related to a person’s interests in their profile.  And, since the feed is trackable, a marketer can tell who retrieved headlines and which Web pages they read.”

Now I haven’t tried it myself but this sounds more like a solution to tracking RSS. Cliff offers personalized RSS off his personal website and Coravue also offer a similar service. 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to drop me a line on the survey, I’ll incorporate the feedback into the next survey.

Thanks.