Holtz Communications + Technology

I should have noted yesterday that I’m on the road, back to Chicago yet again. On a personal note, this is a trip with a double purpose. In addition to doing the keynote at a healthcare company’s communications conference, I met my son here. Ben has been in the US Army—the 101st Airborne—for the last three years (including a year in Iraq). He…

Skype has announced some new fee-based services, one of which has been long overdue. With SkypeOut, Skype users have been able to dial the phones of people without Skype, but Skype-less people couldn’t call you. SkypeIn changes that, providing phone numbers in eight countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Norway, Sweden, the U.K, and the U.S.). A three-month subscription is $13.

The…

Any crisis communication plan that hasn’t been updated in at least the last 18 months if fundamentally useless. If you haven’t dusted off your plan lately, now’s the time.

The rapid evolution of citizen journalism and the collaborative Web has changed the way companies need to watch for looming crises, assess the reaction to crises, and respond. Citizen journalism, of course, is nothing…

Steve Phenix of the Phenix Rising blog wrote yesterday that he wants PR bloggers to “cowboy up.” Taking a cue from Richard Edelman’s blog, Phenix says,

So tomorrow I’m proposing that all of us in the PR blogging community circle the wagons and devote a post—or two—to why we are necessary, how we make an impact or to simply what we respect and love about this…

When I heard that Accenture was releasing an RSS screen saver, I had to give it a try. After all, Accenture is a company that understands the Web better than a lot of other companies, and as a technology consulting firm, I figured they’d release something interesting.

They didn’t. In fact, the disappointments about the screen saver aside, it struck as as very…

Creative Commons allows individuals to establish rights for their intellectual property. Music, images, written words…they all can be assigned various levels of protection. The service is based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and copyright attorney. If you’re not familiar with it, scroll down and look on the lower right-hand side of this page; you’ll see my Creative Commons…