Here are five blogs that you might want to start following this Friday. With four consecutive posts I can safely claim this as a regular feature. The idea is borrowed from the twitter concept of Follow Friday with a faint whiff of Ian Dale’s Daley Dozen but with a lower blog count.
Here are the latest five that you might want to dip into or add to your RSS reader …on a Friday. As ever it is a spectrum that covers PR, a bit of politics, some media and other stuff to. Here’s the smorgasbord for this Friday…
1. Alastair Campbell.org Love him or loathe him, and for me it’s neither, you can not deny his iconic status. He’s a journalist, he know’s a great deal and this blog is a great read. He’s a spin doctor who has reinvented himself as a social web aficionado. Log on and have a look.
2. Stephen Newton’s diary of sorts… One of the first ever Manchester bloggers and the voice or reason. Stephen tackles big subjects and always has a great angle. I liked the Cadburys eyebrow ad…he didn’t. One of my top picks since way back when.
3. MAD or Media Arts and Disruption. (Disclosure: it’s from TBWA\ and I work for the group but I’m not involved with the blog) If you work in advertising or marketing, MAD is a must add to your RSS. Great work.
4. PR nowandthen The work of Katie Moffatt or Katie Rocket as she is known in some social media circles. She is self effacing but really gets it all, far more than most. How many people do you know from the North of England that are currently at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin Texas?
5. Sarah Hartley – The Hartley 2.0 blog, not as essential as H2O the personal blog of journalist Sarah Hartley who is the head digital honcho at the Manchester Evening News. She blogs for them and also on food hence her social media moniker ‘Foodie Sarah’.
Enjoy. It’s all good.
Derek Draper has recently returned to the Labour fold to champion their social media offensive after many years of absence. He is a spin doctor of the old school who seems incapable of ditching the smoke and mirrors. He has been building a following on twitter but his account was suspended yesterday as a result of unusual activity, which usually means you have been breaking twitter rules in terms of the number of people that you are trying to follow. In effect spamming.
A fierce debate is playing out as to what skills are best suited to the conditions created by a digital world to which everybody has access. The era of single message mass marketing is coming to an end. In a presentation to 250 marketing and advertising executives in New York in late 2007, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “for the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation and they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”
It has become a fad on twitter to suggest people to follow on a Friday. Twitter users suggest names and then make the suggestions searchable using the hashtag #followfriday. 
A famous posting by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, in his blog the Long Tail, offers advice and a warning to PR people who approach bloggers with the old fashioned blanket press release approach. The posting ‘Sorry PR People You’re Blocked’ appeared in October 2007. In it Chris refers to the 300 emails a day he receives from PR people. 
It can be hard to find the bits of the web that will be of interest to us and avoid the myriad of backwaters and blind alleys. Too often it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. 
