Beta Blogger

The new version of Blogger has some nice additions including a faster and reliable republishing process, the ability to label posts, bringing Blogger into the 21st century. Thankfully they haven't thrown the baby out with the bath water, and have had the good sense to keep the same easy-to-use interface so habitual blog monkeys like myself don't go into shock. In common with other properties of Google the company is moving to a Gmail log in as a universal ID across its network of services.

Now the moan. Blogger still doesn't have feature parity across the main browsers and is less than useless in Safari. Get the basics right first, you can worry about the whizzy stuff later. Safari users don't have a WYSIWYG editing environment to blog with, and all the formatting buttons and font selection missing (see above).

The dictionary is snazzily designed but its range still pretty crap.

Broken Glass mark II

I noticed that The New Republic editor Franklin Foer has posted an apology to readers about a lack of transparency in a blog written by Lee Spiegel.

You can find the offending comments here, Spiegel responded under the alias Sprezzatura.

The New Republic seems to have learned from its experience with Stephen Glass and moved on.

What is interesting is how the blogging conversation provided additional avenues for journalist misconduct that wouldn't have been available in the mainstream media.

Whilst blogging has made media much more fluid and dynamic by lowering the barriers to production, there is still a lot that the blogosphere can learn from the checks and balances of the fourth estate. I am sure that the blogosphere will get burnt with its own Stephen Glass-style scandal as part of its growth into a vibrant media industry.

There is already a payola system by Payperpost.com in place with clients such as the William Shatner DVD club.

In addition with most commercial blogs being one-man bands it can be hard to be both salesman and editor.

I suspect things will get interesting soon as blogging, podcasting and other peer-to-peer media formats undergo growing pains, providing even more fodder for discussion on this blog...

Cringely gets company

PBS.org has a new media column joining its work with internet and technology maven Mark Stephens (aka Bob Cringely). Mediashift is penned by Mark Glaser, a well known media industry commentator. Kudos to Frank Barnako's Internet Daily newsletter from MarketWatch.

I don't want a retraction, I want some retribution

Since the beginning of my PR career, when I when I was media relations grunt in my agency days, if the client wasn't keen on what a journalist had written about their announcement, or taken out of an interview they would ask me to get a retraction.

Usually, the best course of action would be to let the waters cover over the story and move on because journalists always had the last word and it damaged relationships in the longer term.

With blogs, this power balance may have changed, and not for the better.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban was unhappy with a piece that ran in the New York Times business section: Is Mark Cuban Missing The Big Picture that questioned the wisdom of investing in a cinema chain.

Cuban came back with some blog postings of his own here and here.

From a PR perspective, this concerns me as it means that executives may shoot off a blog entry first and only worry about the corporate reputation once their ego has been put back in the box. At worst, they could tie themselves up in a debased slagging match.

It will then be PR's job to try and clean up the mess. In a few months after, PRs will then be beat up for not doing their job because said executives aren't getting the volume of coverage they want.

What do you think? (Feel free to post a comment below)

UK PR Blog List

This site has made it on to a list of UK PR blogs. I don't know whether to be happy about the recognition and the improvement it will have on my page ranking in search engines, or whether it is a sign of how untrustworthy or dubious the content is?

I have always thought of this as a blog that happens to be written by a PR person, rather than a blog about PR..... If that's what your expecting you may be disappointed, but feel free to stay and have a poke around, and make yourself at home anyway.

Jargon Watch

Death by blog - According to James Burleigh in The Independent Ad guru blames bloggers for demise (October 22, 2005), this is the phrase that Neil French worldwide creative director of Ogilvy used to describe how outrage at his off-the-cuff remark at an entertainment-orientated speaking event for advertising industry people that all women in the advertising industry were crap came back to haunt him.

Anyone who had read French's op-ed column in Communications Arts, would have known the kind of boisterous personality to expect.

Nancy Vonk another Ogilvy employee is the woman who started off French's death by blog with this posting here on ihaveanidea.org. Whilst French may no longer be employed at Ogilvy, the lessons and values learned from his creative work will continue to inspire creatives to go against the grain.