Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Great post on competitive analytics. Never fails to amaze me how many PR Pros aren’t aware of all the great free services out there that can give them insight into how both their site and keywords are doing.

As much as we focus on messages as communicators, we also need to focus on keywords and their overall performance. Keywords are much more than search teams… they are the language the people are using to talk about your products. Moreover, this is where the communications and web strategy has to dovetail.

Missed this one in the NYTimes… interesting read on online trolls:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Wow, perfect description for all those bloggers on ZDNet…

For us Kiwis, Janet Frame is an icon – same for most of the literary world. I finally made my way through a stack of New Yorkers this week only to discover a newly discovered story of hers. The last paragraph left me breathless – it is a remarkable piece of writing:

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets—dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion. The shutters were closed across the wooden moon. Outside, in the hospital grounds, where the gardens were, a fake wind shook the cardboard trees in a riot of collapsing mirth. Then the day’s thin scenery toppled over, revealing the true dark. A real wind came blowing clearly, without pretense or laughter, from the cold actual sea, and spread its layers of knives across the empty stage. Unless it was protected by some miracle of faith, tomorrow would bleed, walking here.

From the NYTimes Magazine this weekend.

“What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading. I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.” — Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode.” — Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale

For those of you that missed that Steve Jobs chatted with the NYTimes, off the record, you can read more here. That this constitutes selective disclosure of material information seems to have been missed by most. Dan Lyons (ironically, once the fake Steve Jobs), says it well:

“Imagine, seriously, the response if Microsoft pulled (crap) like this. Or any company. … Here’s the thing. If you want to appear in public looking like (crap), and you insist on offering no explanation for the way you look, because you believe your privacy is more important than your company’s stock price, then fine. That’s a reasonable position. So do that. Stick to your principles, shut … up, and let the stock do what it’s going to do. But don’t try to have it both ways. Don’t pull this crap with leaks and off-the-record conversations. Either answer the question, out loud, in public, or don’t.”

I’m all for CEOs maintaining their privacy. But you can’t have it both ways – selectively revealing your health status to some while keeping it from others. Those that have the information now possess a unique advantage others don’t. Opacity, Apple’s hallmark, is one thing. Selective disclosure is an entirely different matter.