Day: May 5, 2006

Well after listening to Neville Hobson evangelizing the wonders of WordPress I decided I had better give it a try.

My daytime blog uses MoveableType on my own web server, but to be honest I am afraid to touch it in case it falls over.  I’m proud to say I installed it myself but every time I try and change something it all falls over.  I don’t have time to go diving back into the morass of templates and configurations. 

Instead I’m trying out the free hosted service from WordPress.com which has the drawback of offering limited configuration but the benefit of not requiring me to waste a lot of time.

Of course there’s a strong chance that it will die of neglect or suffer sporadic posting but then that’s probably no different to the majority of blogs 🙂

We’ll see how it works over time!

Update:

The site is now running WordPress on a dedicated server!

I’m in full time parenting mode this weekend, so with my heir in bed, I’ve been doing a lot of blog catch up and it’s very very busy out there.

I’m looking forward to next week and the third and last planned event in the University of Sunderland’s “New PR” series. It’s taking place in London on May 12th and it’ll be great to catch up with Elizabeth, Stuart, Neville, Philip, Chris and of course Nicky and her team. You can find out more about the event here.

Another thing that’s been on my mind: the PubSub PR list.

It’s a little confusing, I don’t understand how the ranking works. [Now given that there is as much ego as altruism involved in this blogging lark, I imagine a lot of people take a sneaky peak from time to time]. Sometimes when I haven’t blogged in ages I move up, sometimes when I do blog I move down. I always knew I moved in mysterious ways but with the PubSub list….. I thought it would be interesting to look at the latest stories from the PubSub Top Ten on May 5th:

#1 – Kami Huyse: Discussion on PubSub’s Rankings!

#2 – Alan Weinkrantz: Discussion on PubSub Rankings!

#3 – San Antonio Byline Blog: The Rewards and Risks of Blogging [Collaborative Blog: Gregory Frieden, Christie Goodman, Kami Watson Huyse, Paige Ramsey-Palmer]

#4 – Steve Rubel: Blogger Spared from Lawsuit

#5 – Brian Oberkirch: BrainJams New Orleans

#6 – Richard Bailey: The rise of PR and Sponsorship

#7 – Andy Lark: Bloggers not rushing to blogs

#8 – New PR Wiki

#9 – Eric Eggertson: Damn Spammer Only Has to Pay $4 Million

#10 – B.L. Ochman: Benny Goes To Broadway and Beyond [Don’t ask :)]

So what does this detailed scientific analysis tell us? Absolutely nothing, but I’m sure we’ll keep peaking at it.

Technorati : PR, blogs, pubsub

Some reading and listening for the weekend…

• As always For Immediate Release continues to be an informative and enjoyable PR podcast. The boys (Neville and Shel) are now on #134 (or is that 133? 🙂
• The latest Edeleman Earshot has been released (#5)
• Brian Oberkirch has released a podcast from a roundtable on PR 2.0 with Mike Manuel, Josh Hallett and David Parmet.
• The Economist has published a really interesting story on New Media.
• For the UK readers out there, Simon Collister has just completed a round-up of three UK PR magazines: PR Week (UK Edition obviously), PR Business and CorpComms.
• As you may have seen elsewhere the BBC and Reuters have published a report on Trust in the Media (PDF) [Thanks to Neville Hobson]
• Jeff Treem has a summary of the recent Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey – Fortune 1000 companies aren’t inside the tent [Thanks to Niall Cook]
• Trevor Cook has a link to three interesting college articles on Ethics in PR from three students in DePaul University
• Yes, yes, yes… I’ve caved in on the tag rubbish… for the moment anyhow 🙂

Technorati : PR, podcast, surveys

I realize I’m coming to this quite late, but a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of HackOff earlier this week. [I notice BL Ochman had a post on it back in September last year.]

HackOff is a fictional novel about the apparent suicide of the CEO of a start-up that goes public during the bubble. It’s available in blog format, you can also download it in PDF format or buy it from Amazon.

Now I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but for anyone who was intimately involved in the tech business pre-, during and post- the Internet bubble, this is a fantastic read. It does a great job of recreating the mood and atmosphere of the time.

It’s worth the click…

Technorati : Dotcom, PR, hackoff