Holtz Communications + Technology

Sony was one of the most paranoid of the music companies when it came to protecting copyright in the digital era. I bought an early Sony digital music player, but it only played its own proprietary format, making all the MP3 files I’d acquired useless. To protect the music it sold on CD, Sony built in restrictions that allowed an owner to…

PRSA’s annual conference is titlted “Architects of Change, Advocates of understanding: Advancing the Public Relations Profession—The most important gathering of public relations professions in 2004.” There’s not one session on blogging. Read more at Business Blog Consulting.

Communicators are constantly lamenting that their profession just isn’t taken seriously. Some people insist that it isn’t even a profession since there’s no certification involved (certification being notably different from accreditation). You have to wonder about the validity of that claim sometimes, particularly when you read newspaper articles like the one I just finished from the Vancouver Sun about the Hell’s Angels’ public…

Given that Google has gobbled the search world (remember HotBot?), how can an upstart get any attention at all for its innovative approach to search? That’s the challenge facing Vivisimo Inc., which just released a beta of a new search engine called Clusty.

Hmm. Well, maybe if a few blogs mention it…

My favorite search engine used to be Northern Light, which nobody…

Neville Hobson’s blog, Nevon reports on findings of a study conducted by Edelman Public Relations, New Frontiers in Employee Communications: Current Practices and Future Trends. The report indicates that internal communications efforts haven’t caught up to new technologies ranging from blogs and wikis to instant messaging.

A PDF of the study is available for download. (Corrected URL…thanks, Jonathan.)

If you’ve ever applied for relief from FEMA, you know how long it takes to get a check. I know—I got a relief check after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when just about everything I owned that could break broke. The check took weeks to arrive.

Not so in the Southeast. Victims of hurricanes got checks in a matter of two or three days,…