Day: November 13, 2006

Neville and Shel are bringing For Immediate Release back to once a week (every Monday) with additional ad hoc Podcasts, so you’re running out of weeks to enjoy their Thursday installment.

Speaking of nice and hefty, Morgan McLintic (yet another Second Lifer) points to Technorati’s Dave Sifry’s latest blog stats which show 57,000,000 blogs now being tracked by the search engine.

Now while I’m well aware of spam blogs, dead blogs etc. it’s still an impressive number.

Speaking of dead blogs – and something I will pick up on at a later date – with modern day Search Engines, the long-tail benefit of archived or dead blog posts may be more than we previously believed.

Well the “Delivering the New PR” series came to an end in London last week.  It was our fifth event and the last in the present series.  The good news is that we do plan to prepare for our difficult “second series” 🙂 .

I’ve really enjoyed the events.  It’s a testament to Philip Young and the University of Sunderland that he was able to pull together five strangers who had only met via their blogs and deliver a seminar series that hit the mark in terms of bringing all these new technologies to PR people across the UK – according to the feedback forms we got anyway!

It’s been a treat to spend time and share ideas with Chris, Elizabeth, Neville, Philip and Stuart and a pleasure to enjoy the organizational capabilities of Nicky and Andy at Don’t Panic. [Unfortunately Elizabeth couldn’t attend on Friday – but for a great reason!]

London’s event was both enjoyable and interesting.  There was a lot of great discussion and debate across a diverse crowd of 120 attendees ranging from people with little or no knowledge of blogs and RSS to others already pitching “new media” – urrggghhh 🙂

The questions were, as usual, excellent and I was delighted to hear a nice level of scepticism which is no harm when you’re dealing with a subject that can get a little out of hand in the online world.

Second Life* continues to plague me.  There was a lot of engagement around Second Life and what it can do.  It ranged from people who thought it was ridiculous to those already converted to their virtual life (and I’m not just talking about Neville).  Second Life has the knack to creating debate – which is no bad thing.

I still have an open mind on it, but I’m not completely convinced.  For me it’s still the new new thing. But I’m delighted that people like Georg, Kami and Neville are keeping an eye on it for me, and if it does become mainstream you just know I’ll be writing a post about how I spotted it’s potential before anyone else 🙂

So farewell to “Delivering the New PR” Mark 1, hopefully Mark 2 will enjoy similar success, drive similar debate and be equally enjoyable.

There are loads of commentary from Friday’s event, here’s a selection:

• Neville Hobson
• Richard Millington
• Rob Skinner
• Sarah Hayman
• Simon Wakeman
• Stuart Bruce

*Bloody Second Life: OK, I signed up.  What’s with the stupid surname? What can’t I be myself? Urrrgghhh…

As any of you who read this blog from time to time already know, I sometimes like to take the contrarian view on certain PR issues, particularly around “Web 2.0” – the greatest attempt at re-creating the Internet bubble known to man.

Sometimes I take these views just to be annoying and sometimes because a reality check is no bad thing.

In this spirit Gary Goldhammer’s post made me laugh.

PS:

For what it’s worth (or should I say FWIW) I think the Web 2.0 hypers are going to succeed and we’re going to see at the very least a mini-bubble around Web 2.0.  There’s a lot of itchy money out there and loads of people willing to take it…. I’m not making a value judgement, just a prediction.

tags: Web 2.0, Press Release, PR, Public Relations