Holtz Communications + Technology

I live in Concord, California, in the San Francisco East Bay. I’m close to Walnut Creek, not too far from Pleasanton (home of Peoplesoft) and San Ramon. Our local newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, does a decent job of covering technology, given that part of its readership is in the Silicon Valley area and that the San Jose Mercury News is a…

BL Ochman’s What’s Next? includes a post about a cyberalert.com study that suggest most PR people “are not altering their media monitoring methods to adapt to recent changes in media channels and the new realities of digital news dissemination.”

According to the executive summary of The 2004 Worldwide Market Survey on Media Monitoring, “Despite recent advances in news monitoring services, traditional services like paper-based clipping…

If anyone has any lingering doubts about the rise of RSS, you can put them to rest. IDG World Expo has set May 17-18 for a New York conference dedicated to content syndication. The conference is being billed as an “executive-level” gathering targeting content owners and producers, media execs, corporate marketers, advertisers and public relations professionals. Two tracks will highlight the…

A week or so ago, I spent several hours painstakingly removing hundreds of comment spams from this blog. Every one of them featured links to poker sites on the Web. Consequently, I had to modify my blog settings to require member registration to post comments—which has resulted in a drop in comments. I’m in the process of configuring a new blog app from…

Why should marketers turn to blogging as a key tool? According to networking marketing writer Linda J. Bruton, there are six reasons, the most important of which have to do with search engine rankings. Bruton provides details for each of her arguments. Here’s the short list:

1. Fast search engine spidering and indexing of your site
2. Blogs can build your backlinks quickly
3. A frequently updated blog…

I’m a regular listener to the Geek News Central podcast. Todd Cochrane, the host (and author of the related blog) has recently solicited advertisers. Once a week, he’ll play a two-minute audio clip of a sponsor, usually somebody who wants to draw attention to his own blog (but it’s not limited to that). The money he makes is designed to offset the cost of…