Podcast

Here is a link to my PR group's podcast. Included is my segment on the previous blog.

Drudge Dread

In a recent New York Times article, "Clinton Finds Way to Play Along With Drudge" the impact of alternative media on the 2008 presidential campaign is evident. The article takes an in depth look at what extremes candidates are wiling to go to in order to get positive articles posted on this extremely popular site. According to Nielsen/NetRatings the Drudge Report has clocked 3 million visitors in the course of one month. The site was founded by conservative Matt Drudge ten years ago and gained popularity during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I believe that national politics today are closer to professional wrestling than democracy. Large news sources such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC are all biased in their own ways. The public has come to realize this and the popularity of alternative sources has begun to rise. The Drudge report was a good example of alternative media, or at least it was before the politicians started getting all buddy buddy with Drudge. This does not overly concern me because the great thing about today's alternative media sources is that for ever one that gets so popular it's creators become corrupted there are alwasy millions of other sources that are ready to step in its place.

Bookmarking Battle

Recently I decided to switch my social bookmarking site from del.icio.us to Stumble Upon. Both sites have their pro's and con's and i decide to compair the two and decide on one in an effort to cut down on redundancy. Delicious is a great bookmarking site and it offers a good keyword search but after signing up for it i found myself rarely bookmaking sites with the toolbar. I found myself stuck in the past; adding bookmarks to my favorites list in my browser. But stumbleupon offers me a reason to use it. Unlike other bookmarking sites the toolbar of StumbleUpon has a button that will take you to a random site that is highly rated by the other 3.5 million users. It also allows you to rate sites you like while at the same time adding them to the favorites page of the site. The big advantage of these 2 bookmarking tools is that they allow you to view your most important or favorite sites away from your home computer.

New Media Vs. Movies

In today's world of new media described in our readings and lectures the impact on such forms of traditional media cannot be overlooked. One of the most important demographics for any marketing project is the notorious 18-34 year old group. This segment of the population is of great importance for any product or service but especially to the entertainment industry. I came across an interesting article today while using stumbleupon. According to David Jenkins, film and television production companies are beginning to blame their slipping ratings on the Internet and video game usage. Mr. Jenkins linked back to the original article in Advertising Age by Claude Brodesser-Akner. The articles state that many industry executives have blamed the poor box office sales of the new Ben Stiller Comedy "The Heart Break Kid" on the release of the Xbox 360 video game Halo 3. According to film industry executives the 18-34 year old demographic is being lured away from the theaters by video games. I envision two possible outcomes of this new marketing reality; more films based on video games will be produced or this completion will force the industry to produce better films. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the latter.

More On The PRX Builder

A few weeks ago we viewed a short sales presentation about an interesting concept, an interactive company PR template called the PRX Builder by Americas best PR firm according to the American Business Awards Shift Communications. Cameron's blog covered the template in detail and he even filed out one and made a template for our class. When PRX first started a year ago it had an exclusive distribution deal with PR Newswire for the distribution of it's press releases, but now that contract is up and PRX can be distributed by other sites. In their newest email they informed their clients that Twitter followers can now link to the PRX builder. Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site that takes an interesting approach to social networking. Twitter uses instant messaging to ask people what they are up to, what sites they are visiting then logs the responses and distributes them all over the world as in the diagram above. Its pretty cool in my opinion because it is almost instantaneous. The site can track interests, keywords, and concepts through IM and SMS and has been doing so for 2 years now. The interesting stuff they find is right at your fingertips on their blog page. The tracking of these keywords and concepts over SMS and IM is brilliant because this is the closest thing to casual conversation that people participate in on the net. PRX's clients can now track the spread of their press releases through the site and it is a great marketing tool.

Web Radio 2.0

One of my favorite web 2.0 concepts has always been the idea of interactive web radio that creates customized stations tailored to your musical tastes. For two years now I have been a member at one such sites called Pandora. The site is great because it is part of something called the Music Genome Project which is a collaboration between artist and programmers to provide a great place for people and music to come together. The site has hundreds of thousands of songs that are listened to by a group of music-analysts and given one of over four hundred descriptive attributes that are used to let the customer search for a song or an artist then it plays song with similar attributes and lets you rate them to make your own radio stations. The site, like many other interactive web radio sites, offers both a free membership with advertisements (visual only) and a $36 annual membership free of advertising. Along with the great music on the site, the interactivity of Web 2.0, is firmly embraced with a behind the scenes look at this site through blogs and a podcasting section. I encourage everyone to try it out and I dare you to enter the name of a song or an artist that Pandora does not have.

Web 2.0 and You

Web 2.0 has probably become one of the biggest buzz words or cliches of this new world of PR on the web. I have heard a lot of things about 2.0 before this class and since learning more about it since the course began. When I first heard the term web 2.0 the information I received now appears to be grossly inaccurate. One of the first interesting things I heard about Web 2.0 was the possibility of web smell-o-vision, given the number of repulsive sites out there the idea sounded both hilarious and disgusting. Yet the device actually exists and is apparently in use by some in japan. Another misconception about web 2.0 I had before this class was that the marketers would be able to watch everything you did and everywhere you went online. In reality web 2.0 is not that much different than the web as we know it, except it encourages a two way conversation instead of the one way distribution of information that characterized the early internet. One of the best sources of information on web 2.0 I have found comes from Tim O'Reilly who helped develop the idea. In reality the concept of web 2.0 is truly a liberating idea that if used properly and left uncensored can give millions of people around the world freedom of speech and the ability to have their experiences and options heard.

Wired Science and the future of televison.

Recently many of the traditional television broadcasters have begun circumventing the standard form of program distribution and have started airing entire episodes on their web sites. Several of the major network's such as NBC, ABC, Discovery, and ESPN now offer entire shows on the web, most with fewer commercials than their traditional counterparts. One of the best places to find free, high quality and commercial free TV on the web is PBS and a good show for everyone in this class to watch that is both entertaining and informative is wired science. This form of broadband media is more inline it the original vision of the internet, but does not have the feedback mechanisms necessary to classify it as web 2.0. This is good for the internet in general though because it is only natural that all forms of media begin to move to the fastest and largest data distribution network in the world: the internet. I myself have been without cable for two months now, I cut my bill in half by just paying for my internet connection and now I can still watch most of the programming I would have paid for before. Of course these sites have commercials and ad-space needed to make such streaming video feasible. Studies suggest that TV might one day be surpassed in viewers by the internet and this seems to be moving at an exponential rate.

Facebook For Sale

Last week news broke of Microsoft's interest in acquiring the social network Facebook. In the word of social networking sites Facebook is smaller than Myspace with about half the monthly traffic, but it is never the less very successful and popular. Facebook is not totally at a disadvantage when compared to Myspace because it has a higher growth rate and it's market is less saturated. Microsoft has made a early bid at about 10 billion dollars, two years ago News Corporation bought the site for 580 million dollars, not too bad of an investment. Facebook's Current CEO and co-creator 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg is constantly introducing new features and applications to use on the site they even have a company blog which they often use for PR purposes.
Facebook was the first social networking site that I joined back in 2004. When i first joined the site there were no photo albums, no applications, and you had be be enrolled in a high school or college to be a member. Since those prehistoric times Facebook has expanded and improved, now people do not have to be students to become members and the different forms of media and applications people can interact with are impressive.