Just a really short post to say today’s event in Newcastle was extremely enjoyable. Good to catch up with the gang and excellent participation from the audience.
Now if only there were flights at a reasonable hour from Newcastle to Dublin…
Travelling for the next few days, but I’ll post some more thoughts after some much needed rest…
PS:
And lots of opportunities to vent about Twitter… fantastic!
A significant personal blogging milestone has just passed. I am now officially blogging for five years.
If I had known then, that I’d still be at it five years on, I think I would have tried to make my first post a little more insightful, humorous and clever. Good lesson for life there.
It’s interesting to look back over the intervening five years from a personal, PR and online perspective.
A lot has changed and a lot hasn’t.
I note that between the ages of five and six a child should be able:
To learn to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
I think that’s a fine developmental goal for a PR blogger also.
I invested a massive amount of personal time in blogging for the first few years, then due to growing work and family commitments throttled back. I think I’ve now found a happy medium. I post enough to keep my hand in, but not enough to become a D-list blogger.
It’s a nice place. I haven’t even checked my visitor number in a year. Now that’s maturity (or laziness).
Some observations:
Here’s to another five years….
With relatively little fanfare and no spam we now have fifteen members of the http://onlinepr.ning.com/ social network.
We are a unique social network:
1) We have no idea why we’ve joined (or even started it)
2) We have done no networking other than the (very) odd post and signing up
3) We have no idea what to do with it.
If you’re interested in experiencing such an idyllic online social network, with the added bonus of no pressure to perform like a seal or show you are cool in the real or online world, come and join.
We had a great evening last night in the Shelbourne Hotel at the event: “Blogging: New Media, Business and the Law” hosted by the Irish Internet Association and Fleishman-Hillard.
The room was packed (with everyone aware of blogging and an incredibly high level of awareness of Second Life…).
Along with myself, Sarah Carey was her inimitable self, Richard Delevan from the Sunday Tribune gave an incredibly interesting talk on the new generation online, while TJ McIntyre managed to frighten the pants off any listening bloggers with the potential legal issues of rabbiting online.
It was very enjoyable and even through we ran very late we had a full house to the end, which is probably the best measure!
The IIA will be publishing a podcast of the event online in the coming days.
Update:
I added Twitter to this blog about eight weeks ago.
I thought it was a useful little applet to provide visitors to this site with an idea of whether I was around, on vacation, travelling etc. That’s about it.
Now it seems it’s the hottest thing on the Interweb.
For the love of jebus.
This behavior of making everything that appears online as “the new new thing” just isn’t terribly helpful in my opinion.
How long will the passion and commitment last?
Surely if you really want to know is someone online you can use IM or E-mail or perish the thought – how very analog of me – use a phone.
I think Twitter is interesting, useful even, but it’s NOT the answer to the world’s ills. I see there’s even a new search engine that’s been released for it.
One question.
Why?
Maybe (and not for the first time) I’m missing something. Enlighten me.
Postscript:
Kevin… Thank you, I am not alone…
Postscript 1:
OK I’ll admit that Twittervision is a cool little application but will you sit and watch it twice?
Euroblog 2007 Findings
Philip has published some results from this year’s Euroblog survey of over 400 professional communicators across 30 countries.
Very interesting stuff, though I imagine it’s weighted towards to more technically savvy practitioner.
You can see the findings here.
Connectivity not creativity
John Wagner makes a very interesting point wondering is all this Web 2.0 stuff about generating content or being able to find and share content. It’s probably a mix, but user-generated content gets the headlines. Meanwhile many of us are happy with the accessibility.
Guide to Corporate Blogging
Mark van der Wolf at Lewis PR has released a guide to Corporate Blogging – via Morgan McLintic.
Editor’s Note:
I think you’ll appreciate that the headline of this post won’t be filed under “most creative blog headline of the month”. My only excuse is I’m just back from holidays and I’m doing my best! 🙂
First things first, I’m off on a much need holiday for the next week so posting will be non-existent, as well be e-mail, RSS etc. Hurrah!
We now have seven members of our social networking experiment.
If you’d like to join, please do, and we’ll look at it a little more closely upon my return.
Don’t work too hard now 🙂
Almost a year ago today I wrote a post about how it felt as though I was back in my childhood, had been grounded and I could hear all the other kids having a ball, playing outside.
I’m getting the same feeling again as this year’s New Comm Forum kicks off.
Photos from the event.
Mental note to self: Do something about it!
Aside:
Sometimes we forget about inventing a better mousetrap. I was having dinner* last night and on a visit to the bathroom came face-to-face with the Dyson Airblade. Most people will be familiar with the Dyson range of vacuum cleaners. The Airblade takes the same approach to hand drying and it’s a stunning innovation, dry hands in seconds. I know its a mundane piece of everyday hardware but it just shows how some clever thinking, engineering and design can radically change something that doesn’t work (traditional hand dryers) but we put up with anyway. It was the talk of the table 🙂
*For Dublin readers it was in Tiger Becs on Dawson Street. I’d never seen one before but maybe that’s because I live a sheltered life.
I’ve always thought that while the Internet does a great job of removing the barriers of geography – and that’s a good thing – ultimately people care most about their locality. After all, if you want movie listings or services you want them locally. If you’re looking for career advice you’ll probably want to talk to a peer. That’s the theme behind social networking.
So where are social networks going? Are they transient (as someone once wrote “training wheels for the Internet”) or are they here to stay?
Talking with some students last week they thought that in their current guise (Myspace, Bebo etc.) they were transient. They open and shut sites regularly – and the only “organizations” successfully reaching them on MySpace or Bebo were bars and clubs 🙂
So social networks may stay, change or disappear – or they may even become MORE niche. That’s the idea behing Ning the latest venture from Netscape wunderkind Marc Andreeson.
At Ning you can set up your own social network…
For a test I’ve set up http://onlinepr.ning.com
[publicrelations was already taken]
Have a look.
Murphy's Law 