Holtz Communications + Technology

There are scads of approaches we can take to rehabilitate the image of the public relations profession. One of them is self-policing. This can be handled by the associations that represent the profession (should they ever decide to put teeth in their ethics policies) or by individual practitioners. I like the idea of speaking up—I’ve done some of it myself on this blog…

TechCrunch reports that Toshiba has come up with an intriguing marriage of blogs and bar codes. Let’s say you’re wondering thorugh an electronics store and you see a product you’re interested in, but you’d like to know what people are saying about it. Using your cell phone, you snap a picture of the product’s bar code, upload it to a service running Toshiba’s software,…

I scoffed when a representative from Lake Superior State University, appearing on MSNBC’s “Countdown” (my favorite cable news show) issued the university’s 2006 “List of Words and Phrases Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.” Among this year’s choices: “breaking news” and “talking points.”

The university has been presenting the list since 1976, making its selections from nominations submitted by just about anybody. I gave up on the list last year when…

Organizations should be looking for ways to get their content into the hands of bloggers who might want to write about them. Some, like Nokia, already are. I found a tool on the Ziff-Davis site that would make it easy for companies to accommodate bloggers.

Take a look at the item I posted just before this one (below). It was a…

A lot of voices are rising up to proclaim the death of the traditional website. For example, in a list of “10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006,” the Google Blogoscoped blog suggests...

I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace their ???homepages??? with…

News from the world of blogs dominates today’s Pointers.

First up, it seems Senior citizens are taking to blogging. According to a story in Sci-Tech Today, blogging is becoming a leisure-time activity for the elderly (a state to which I am rapidly evolving). “Bloggers say their hobby keeps them up on current events, lets them befriend strangers around the globe and gives them a…