Holtz Communications + Technology

Interesting piece from the Chicago Tribune (appearing here in the Kansas City Star) that spotlights a nefarious use of blogs. Because readers assume blogs are written by everyday folks, they tend not to dig beneath the surface. If they did, they might find an agenda beyond personal beliefs driving their efforts. An anti-Dan Rather blog, for instance, turns out to…

I didn’t even know my friend Pete Shinbach had a blog of his own (called The Bach Door), but I wasn’t surprised to find good information as soon as I visited it. Pete points out that Wikipedia opened a wiki dedicated to Hurricane Ivan. Here, the community contributes information about the hurricane and provides links to additional information and resources. There’s a current status…

Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, is considering eliminating its public relations program, combining it into a single “integrated marketing” discipline. The decision isn’t final, and one PR student is fighting to keep the program alive. Jeremy Pepper has obtained the rights to reprint the O’Dwyer story in his blog, along with an interview with the student who is protesting the move.

As Mike Manuel reports in PR Guerrrilla, Joyce Park—the programmer fired without warning by Friendster for blogging about company information that was already public—has been interviewed by Red Herring.

In the piece, Park notes that she has been deluged by offers since word of her firing spread (beginning on her own blog).

The folks at the Poynter Institute are out with their Eyetrack III study results. For the study, the Institute “observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.” Some of the key findings:

* People look at the upper left-hand corner of the page first (which contradicts results of a UIE study that showed…

Associated Press reports that most bloggers aren’t in it for the money. The article quotes Sreenath Sreenivasan, professor of new media at Columbia University. Sreenivasan, who also reports on technology for WABC-TV, says blogger income hasn’t increased commensurate with their visibility. “There’s a very tiny percentage of people who are making anywhere close to a living from blogs,” he said.