2004-11-01
Posted on November 1, 2004 10:28 am by Shel Holtz
| Technology
Most RSS feeds give you headlines for every new entry on a blog. Of course, the use of RSS outside the world of blogs is somewhat more sophisticated. The New York Times and Washington Post feeds don’t deliver every headline. You subscribe for feeds from various sections. Now Engadget has applied the same sense to its blog, allowing users to subscribe to the various categories instead of the whole blog.
For those of us using software that doesn’t provide that capability, we can only wait for the coders to jump on the bandwagon and add it to their programs. In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see how the trend evolves.… Read More »
2004-11-01
Posted on November 1, 2004 8:21 am by Shel Holtz
| Politics
One of the plusses about working in public relations is that our job is predicated on the notion of building relationships with audiences. Some advertisers, it seems, are bent on doing as much damage as possible to those relationships, if they existed in the first place. The latest bonehead move from the advertising world (not surprisingly, a political ad) is a pop-up video that appears in the America Online instant messaging (AIM) application. The Washington Post reports that an anti-Kerry ad appeared in the AOL app over a period of several days. The video image of Kerry appeared above the buddy list while an audio track proclaimed,… Read More »
2004-11-01
Posted on November 1, 2004 7:09 am by Shel Holtz
| Internal
Most of what works on the Net eventually finds its way onto intranets. The application of RSS to intranets is inevitable. I’ve even heard of one company where one business unit is employing feeds for its employees.
If you’re wondering how feeds might work on an intranet, Amy Gahran (of Contentious, has produced a guide for CMS Watch. Among the uses she envisions:
- General in-house feeds
- Content from external feeds used to generate news for employees
- In-house content syndicated across departments
- Custom feeds specified by individuals
The article also talks about how to get employees to start using this new technology with which they’re… Read More »
2004-10-29
Posted on October 29, 2004 4:29 pm by Shel Holtz
| External
Autoblog reports that General Motors has opened a blog that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Chevy small block engine. There apparently are no other blogs at gmblogs.com—just a logo with no links. But the Smallblock Engine Blog is generating comments on all its posts, including corrections from the dedicated base of small block engine fans. The initial post, for example, offers a timeline of small block engine milestones. The one comment on the post: “The 350CID debuts in the 1967 SS Camaro, not the ‘68.”
Categories include “Historical Facts,” “GM Brass,” “Performance,” and “Photo Album.” Clearly a GM-sponsored site, it’s… Read More »
2004-10-29
Posted on October 29, 2004 6:38 am by Shel Holtz
| General
Allan Jenkins, Denmark-based PR practitioner, comments on the ongoing discussion about the nature of blogs and whether they should be about anything at all or focused on a topic. Among other thoughtful points, Allan writes:
Look at the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison wrote editorials, deftly woven to build on and refer to one another’s posts, to argue for ratification of the US Constitution. A conversation in public to provoke a wider conversation. It worked. While only the editorials of Madison, Jay, and Hamilton are today collected as The Federalist Papers, those editorials sparked dozens of opposing editorials,…
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2004-10-29
Posted on October 29, 2004 6:14 am by Shel Holtz
| Business
I complained last week about Stata Labs, makers of the soon-to-be-extinct Bloomba e-mail client, for abandoning their customers in the wake of their acquisition by Yahoo. Having used Bloomba for quite some time, and knowing from Stata’s announcement that the software was not part of Yahoo’s plans for the company, I (and most other Bloomba users) had reached the conclusion that we had to move back to Outlook. But while importing Outlook e-mail into Bloomba was a snap, getting Bloomba e-mail back into Outlook is a laborious process. If Stata cared about all the customers it was abandoning, I reasoned, they would create a utility to handle… Read More »
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