Alaska Air’s Near Disaster Unfiltered…
I Hope Jeremy has big bandwidth and a big server because his account of the Alaska incident is scarry – and it’s going to attract zillions of eyeballs. Via Jeff Jarvis. Compare his account with news reports– some of which are featuring Jeff’s photos.
“Citizen Journalism” in action. Jeremy P makes a really interesting point that one lesson for any PR practioner facing a crisis is that you are going to need to manage transparency. It seems that Alaska employees are going nasty-comment-happy on Jeremy’s (the Jeremy on the plane) blog. Assuming he would never know I guess, they commented away. Jeremy simply looked at the originating IP addresses, which were from Alaska. And he was gracious enough to suggest that they might have been hackers using Alaska’s IP addresses. Not likely mate!
So, if your communications policy doesn’t cover commenting on blogs as an employee – then you might want to make sure it does.. and then make sure employees know it. And, if your crisis communications plan doesn’t feature monitoring of and communications with the blogosphere – better get on that as well.
Blog Tools | Week 2
A week or so ago I wrote about my journey into the world of Blog tools for Windows. Here is where I am at:
- Uninstalled Newsgator. Just too complex, too slow and too hard to figure out. While none of the blog clients really fulfill the way I live in the blogosphere – or its hyperconnected nature, Newzcrawler is working well for me. I’m also using Firefox more to grab and read the top ten blogs I follow.
- Uninstalled Qumana. I’m loving Zoundry. Nice application and does everything I could want it to and more. Misses on a few fronts – like being able to specify a font size and easily manage cut and paste formatting. And no spellchecker. But it is still good.
Blog Content Theft Answers
Blog content theft was always going to be a big issue. The utility of deploying search advertising only amplifies the problem by enabling plagerists and thieves to remarket content within their own commercial framework. I’m not talking about inserting the odd paragraph or extrapolating content in a different context – I’m talking about making off with a bloggers content in its entirety. So what to do?
I’m not sure but here are some thoughts that need qualifying and more discussion:
- Make all content available under Creative Commons and then work to enforce it.
- Collectively we lobby Google and Yahoo to protect IP by taking action against those who abuse it. Based on Google’s intent to do pretty much the same with books this would appear to be unlikely to work.
- Support the evolution new tools like Copyscape into IP-address blocking tools that enable you to start to protect content by stopping those addresses from coming to your site. I know this won’t really work now, but we need to spur and encourage technology innovation here.
- Collectively harrass the thieves. Lets create a black-list and make people aware of their infringements on our IP.
Part of me also says that the ecosystem depends on sharing – and sharing of content implies a certain amount of recycling of content. But it is wrong when that occurs without any new contextual framing, linking or value add to the orginal content creator. It’s worse than plagerism – it is theft.
What these companies are missing is the opportunity to grow the ecosystem and participate. They are parasites. And that’s the shame of it. If they had engaged guys like Steve and established a working commercial relationship, they’d probably be able to build wildly successful businesses. Instead they add no value and alienate the marketplace. Reflecting that, probably the best thing we could do is ignore them and let them rot.
Blog + Wiki =?
Interesting conversation on what happens when you cross a blog and a wiki. You get a bliki. Martin has an interesting definition of what a bliki is.
Techorati Updates Ping Site…
Technorati has updated their ping site so it will give you a little more info on your blog. Stowe has a pretty picture.
