Follow Friday Five #11

15 05 2009

Here are five more blogs for you to take five to look at during your busy Friday.  There are some small blogs that cover really big issues and voices of authority from PR Week and the Guardian. You might be anywhere but I’m right here in Manchester UK so I’ve added some local flavour. 

Enough hot air from me; there should be something for everyone here so click away.  

1. Planning Corner Small but perfectly formed.  Insights into the world of advertising and marketing.  Apparently Germans feel more guilty about not brushing their teeth than they do for having an affair, now where else could you find out something like that?

2.How Do  Not really a blog but a media and marketing news site that follows many of the conventions of a blog – posting comments and now updating throughout the day.  Essential reading if you work in the creative, media or marketing industries in the North West of England.

3. Ask Jack Blog The Guardian’s Jack Schofield is the godfather of tech. I have been reading his stuff in the newspaper for many years. This is the place where he answers all of those niggling technical questions.  Got a problem? Email Jack.

4. PR Week Blogs  All new look PR Week online blog community.  It’s been revamped and it is pulling in gurus from the PR sphere.  New, hot, looks good.

5. Chris Reed – Ginger and Proud  A digital PR trail blazer, blogging since 2007. Thoughtful, and opinions worth listening to about the world on online PR.


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Follow Friday Five #10

8 05 2009

If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know by now that every Friday I pull together a quick list of five blogs that I like and I think that you might too.   They are all clickable so you can go straight to them and have a look.

This week the list is a little more eclectic than usual but no worse for that. Here is my five penneth worth for this Friday.

 

1. On-line Journalism Blog  Comment and analysis on citizen journalism, blogging and on-line news from Paul Bradshaw et al. Paul is senior lecturer in Online Journalism, Magazines and New Media at Birmingham City University

2. Toby Young  You either love Toby Young or you feel a bit alienated by him. Either way he is funny and insightful in equal measure. 

3. Push-on If you want to get technical Simon Wharton and the team have it all here for you to lap up. Expect this blog to be well optimised.

4.Simon Alexander  Another Simon and another digital marketing person – albeit one of a slightly different hue.  Communications, marketing and lots of good stuff on games.

5. Jon Ronson  I have followed the journals of Jon Ronson in their many forms since I first encountered him as a cub on Manchester’s City Life.  He wrote a scathing piece on one of my clients but he was very funny.  He still is.


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Follow Friday Five #9

1 05 2009

Another Friday and another five blogs that you might want to take a look at and even add to your reader, or your web favourites, if readers aren’t your thing.    They are all worth a visit and I’ll put my shirt on that.

The sketch is the same as always some big blogs, some not so big. Some PR, some politics, some other stuff.

1. Micropersuasion This week’s blogging behemoth is Steve Rubel’s micropersuasion.  In his latest post Steve tells us what’s next after twitter and facebook. Resist if you can.

2. Neville Hobson Another big beast of the social web. This time with of a British hue. It includes the twice-weekly “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” a business podcast for communicators.

3. Salam Pax  The original Baghdad Blogger who became a cause celebre at the start of the Iraq war with his Dear Raed blog. Sill fascinating, still blogging from Baghdad.

4. PR Voice Blog  The words of the president of the CIPR, Kevin Taylor.  With over 9,000 members the CIPR aims to be the ‘eyes, ears and voice’ of the PR industry in the UK.   

5. Artisan The blog for Rob Baker’s Artisan Marketing Communications. Resolutely Mancunian but with a global view. Great insight and a PR blogging trail blazer that has just celebrated its blogging third birthday.


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Follow Friday Five #1

20 02 2009

 

19mmtransparent5diceIt 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. 

In the same spirit this blog will suggest five blogs to follow…on a Friday.

  

 1. Wadds Tech Blog    The personal blog of Stephen Waddington, head honcho at Rainier PR.  This week with an interesting take on a twitter spam pub game.

2. A PR Guy’s Musings  Stuart Bruce is a trailblazer in online PR. Always good to see what he has to say. This week he wades into the PR/SEO debate.

3. Ian Dale’s Diary  The one stop shop for gossip, humour and commentary on British politics. This MP’s blog has a phenomenal following.

4. PR Media Blog  Full honest and upfront disclosure, this is the ‘powered by Staniforth’ blog, Staniforth being the PR agency I work for.  Lots of my colleagues writing lots of good stuff.

5. NHS Choices – Behind the Headlines A great piece this week debunking the Facebook gives you cancer story in the Daily Mail.


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Is Blogging Right for Business?

27 01 2009

Businesses are often nervous about the naked conversations that take place in and around blogs.  They are right to be concerned,  careless comments can hit a corporate share price.  

The more common danger is that a corporate blog will be boring.  Many argue that corporate blogs should only be written by the Chief Executive because anyone else in the company will avoid any controversy and the end result will be anodyne.  Vetting, reliance on press releases and caution result in blogs that interest noone.  Blogs must really allow comments, but businesses tend to block any challenging comments or any that generate real debate.    

 “A lot of companies are making the mistake that blogging is publishing,” says Bob Pearson Vice President of corporate group communications at Dell. “Blogging is two-way and, crucially, it’s the audience that decides what’s read, what gets linked to and so what is deemed successful. So it makes sense to listen to the conversations your target consumers are having and then shape your blog around them.”

Should corporates blog?  The answer to this is a qualified yes but there is a real challenge.   We have to ask the question is the blog going to be interesting and is it going to be relevant to its target audience.  Once you’ve started the blog you will quickly discover whether the answer to these questions is yes.   If it’s no, stop the blog.


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A Short History of Blogging

15 12 2008

The word Blog is a contraction of ‘web log’.  It’s hard to be exact about when blogging started. The peripheral  ‘blogger’ Jorn Barger editor of the blog Robot Wisdom, effectively invented the term ‘weblog’ but the term “blog” was not used for another two and a half years.   It was first employed by Peter Merholz and intended as a joke. He broke the word weblog into two words we blog in his own peterme.com blog.  In doing so he essentially created the verb “to blog,” meaning to create a weblog as well as initiating the contraction of the noun into its now popular form.

The first bloggers were the effectively online diarists, who would keep a running account of their lives.  These blogs began well before the term was coined and the authors referred to themselves usually as diarists or online journalists.  Perhaps the first of these and therefore the original blogger was Justin Hall, who began blogging in 1994 and posted his first regular blog ‘Justin’s links to the underground’ whilst a still a student.    Blogging took off when the publishing platform Blogger was launched in August 1999.  It quickly became the most popular and simple to use blogging tool and it allowed mainstream internet users with little or no technical knowledge to start blogs.  Blogger was bought by Google in 2003.


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