July 30, 2005
The new name for...
Less than a month in, and I've decided to change the name of this blog. When I picked the URL, I was in a hurry and so just went for a bit of word association. I then had to pick a name and decided I'd try something else out. Now, I've decided "For More Information..." was way too bland and some people seem to like the URL more. So, it's time for something a little more...phlegmy. Now, I'm wondering why the MarsEdit spell checker hasn't flagged that one up.
Posted by Chris at 09:07 PM | Comments (1)
July 28, 2005
How to completely misuse a report
One of the more unseemly sides of the Windows versus Linux war is the use of research to bolster the position of each side. We get releases describing how report X shows up the weaknesses of Windows and report Y that shows how expensive Linux to run even though its core code is ostensibly free to use. Some of the claims even match up to what the original report said. Not the latest claim from Red Hat.
Red Hat claimed yesterday the SANS Institute had published a report that said only two of the top 20 defects listed by the researchers affected its operating system. Because of that, the company claimed: "Linux network security [is] higher than other platforms". I had to check with Red Hat which report the company was using to back up its claims, because I couldn't find anything out of SANS that came close to the claim made in the press release. Even after finding out, making the connection wasn't much easier.
The release apparently referred to the Q2 update of SANS' Top 20 Internet security vulnerabilities. This is where Red Hat's claims begin to fall down. It turns out that, according to the SANS criteria for the Top 20, Linux bugs could not account for more than 50 per cent of vulnerabilities in the report in the first place. This is not because the SANS Institute is fall of Microsoft-hating zealots but because the Top 20 was never meant to be used as a way of counting up who has the most bad bugs in their code. It is just meant to provide advice to sysadmins who want to know which holes they should plug first.
As SANS points out: "This SANS Top-20 2004 is actually two Top Ten lists: the ten most commonly exploited vulnerable services in Windows and the ten most commonly exploited elements in UNIX and Linux environments. Although there are thousands of security incidents each year affecting these operating systems, the overwhelming majority of successful attacks target one or more of these twenty vulnerable services."
Now, you can argue that Windows gets special treatment because it has more bugs than bin full of three-week-old raw meat. But this is not the report to use to make that point. You will just look either a bit stupid or just be treated as trying to make out everybody else is stupid. To a large degree, the Top 20 does not name and shame unpatched flaws but the things that tend to exhibit problems and which tend to get attacked. The Q1 and the Q2 updates issued this year did cite specific faults, but they don't add up to 20 and they also have the Windows and Other Platforms split. The Q2 document contained six named flaws in the former category and eight in the latter. Some of those affect Linux. So, you might get to the "two bugs that have been patched" claim from Red Hat.
The company might as well have claimed Linux is more secure "because my dad said so". I look forward to the next installment when someone uses the prophecies of Nostradamus to show that Windows has fewer bugs per thousand lines of code than Linux.
Posted by Chris at 08:40 PM
July 27, 2005
A strange Vista
When Microsoft announced that it would give the name 'Vista' to its forthcoming version of Windows that had, up to then, been referred to under its codename of Longhorn, it did not take long for people to spot that a nearby company was using the same name.
The Seattle Times reported the comments of Vista's founder John Wall. "We're going to consider our options and talk to them," said Wall.
Wall is better known as the founder of PC-to-mainframe comms company Wall Data. He resigned from the company in 1999, shortly before it was sold to NetManage after Wall Data started to rack up heavy losses. Wall founded Community IQ, which would do business as Vista.com, in 1999. Vista has kept a low profile since then and the name would not have meant much to a lot of people. But its role in a curious set of dealings with SCO meant that the name Vista rang more than a few bells when I saw the Seattle Times story. SCO is not famed for its generosity but seemed to make an exception in the case of John Wall and Vista during 2002 and 2003.
Back in the days when SCO was called Caldera, August 2002, the company that would become the Linux community's bete noire decided to buy a licence to "web services solutions" from Vista. An exclusive licence no less. However, rather than off-the-shelf software, Vista's main business was, and still is, turnkey web hosting for small businesses rather than software. The company had a deal with Yellow Pages company YP.net to provide web hosting for some 250 of YP's customers and Vista's own site lists a smattering of small businesses that have their sites built and operated by Vista.
The deal between SCO and Vista would see the creation of the SCObiz unit, designed to give SCO's resellers a way of providing their small-business customers a quick way of building and running websites. SCObiz was not a runaway success.
For this licence, SCO forked over $100 000 in advance royalties and another $250 000 as a way of guaranteeing that SCO would be able to buy more than 3 million Vista shares for $500 000. At the same time, Wall provided SCO with a bond worth $1m in exchange for 800 000 SCO shares and $100 000 in cash. Vista was meant to pay back the $1m in mid-August 2003 plus 8 per cent interest. If SCO decided to take shares instead, it would wind up with 20 per cent of Vista.
In January 2003, SCO made good on its promise to buy the 3 million shares and paid over the remainder of the $500 000 . So, by this time, SCO had provided $700 000 in cash and 800 000 SCO shares, with about a 10 per cent stake in a startup to show for it. For his part, Wall had 6.5 per cent of SCO's shares, making him the second largest shareholder in SCO, after VC firm Canopy Group. At the same time, SCO signed a deal that would provide it with 70 per cent of Vista's shares in exchange for 2.5 million SCO shares. If SCO converted the existing $1m bond and fulfilled that deal, it would have wound up as the owner and sole shareholder in Vista.
The same month, Wall signed an IOU in exchange for $100 000 in cash. Again, it bore 8 per cent interest and could be converted into Vista stock: another 5 per cent. So, SCO had managed to sign deals that would give it 105 per cent of Vista, in theory.
Yet, SCO provided more cash and, in the meantime, filed an S3 document with the SEC that announced that Wall would be selling his 800 000 shares. At the time the S3 was filed, the shares were worth $1.28. They would rise to more than $10 after the company announced its lawsuit against IBM.
In April, SCO extended the payment date for the January IOU to the end of that month and provided another $100 000 for a second IOU, with the same terms as the first, also due at the end of April. By this time, SCO had paid $900 000 in folding stuff and had bought rights to 110 per cent of Vista. By the end of July, however, both of those IOUs were still outstanding and were, according to SCO's 10Q filing with the SEC for its third quarter of 2003, "in technical default".
By September 2003, SCO had decided it was time to call it quits. The company "restructured" its deal with Vista. Although Wall had registered to sell all his shares earlier that year, it seems he was able to return 100 000 shares to SCO in exchange for the bond and two IOUs. SCO cancelled the accrued interest that had built up and wrote off the deal to the value of $250 000.
In 2004, the CFO who was in place while these deals were done moved to the position of vice-president of corporate development before retiring later the same year. But he didn't stay retired for long. As well as setting up an investment firm called BayHill Group, Bob Bench got another CFO position...at John Wall's Vista.
Vista remains privately owned although the company signed a deal with an small oil and gas company called Source Energy earlier this year. Under the deal, Source would buy Vista, with the Vista management taking over the running of Source. As Source is a company that trades its shares over the counter, it would give Vista a position as a public rather than a private company without the pain of doing an initial public offering. The deal has, as yet, not been consummated. But I can see Vista's name popping up again in SEC filings sometime soon, and not just because Wall might be having a chat with Microsoft.
Posted by Chris at 11:47 PM
July 20, 2005
Keep their pitches where you can see them
"Outernet marketing conduit" BL Ochman called the proposal "ridiculous". And it's caused a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth from others in PR. Jeremy Zawodny's proposal to create a blacklist of flacks who effectively spam bloggers has certainly raised the temperature beyond Tim Bray's death to PR post from last week.
At the risk of repeating some bits from an earlier post, my advice to Zawodny and other people planning on an email blacklist of PRs (other than possibly reporting them under the CAN-SPAM legislation) is that you can go ahead and block them but the chances are they will simply start ringing to see if you got their pitch. And you really, really don't want that.
Some people are arguing that requests to block press releases and pitches are because PR has a credibility problem. PR does not have a credibility problem, it has an expertise problem. Most of the people from the PR side who are involved in the "conversation" on this and related subjects I think understand the problem at hand. But no amount of blogging by them is going to change what happens with the PR spammers: they don't read blogs, they just manage mailing lists. The guys at MobHappy may be onto something with their colour-coded signs to PRs but it does assume that PRs doing the pitches are actually going to stop by and read.
Because of this activity, Zawodny's post has clearly troubled some of the more blog-aware PRs because a widespread use of PR blacklists would shut off a means of communicating. All that blind pitching activity has poisoned the waterhole. But it's not the place of PRs to say that bloggers should or should not accept their pitches or releases.
Disposing of unwanted emails is surely up to the blogger. OK, if they miss out on something good, then that's just tough on them. That has always been the case. If you don't track things, they pass you by. Hacks are remain hesitant to block the email channel because you never what might turn up. And we know that blocking email will only make the phone ring more, and we need the phone to dial out, if only to leave messages for PRs who don't get back to us. Having said that, there are vast swathes of material that come from the same offenders that will never be useful.
You could see the pain in the comment from "TechJournalist" on Zawodny's post who named and shamed a shortlist of tech PR companies. If you do a straw poll on tech hacks from either side of the post, you would probably find the same names popping up time and again. I for one had a good laugh when I saw the list: a PR from one of those companies threatened to stop sending me stuff when I refused to help them with research for a proposal to a prospective client. It was quite a surreal moment. I should suggest it to refusenik bloggers as a possible way to filter their email.
Posted by Chris at 09:29 PM
July 19, 2005
Address harvesting meets word association football
When I first set up this blog, I decided to pick a new URL for it and rather than sit down and try to come up with a phrase that would fit the blog, just played a bit of word association football: journalist, hack, hacking, cough. Simple. And all over in seconds. Just days later, I've got spam. Nothing to be surprised about even though I've not used the domain for any email addresses. It's simply a consequence of yet another directory harvest attack (DHA) I would imagine. However, it seems that some spammers have got past mailing "info" and "webmaster" and various combinations of first and last names to target domains and started playing word association football themselves.
It seems oddly fitting that the to-address of a couple of pieces of spam that I fished out of the webmail turned out to have been spawned using the very same process. But that is the only explanation for two messages that turned up addressed to "spittle". It took me a few seconds to work out why anyone should choose that word as an address until I looked again at my chosen URL.
I shall wait and see if "furball" and "splutter" turn up any time soon. And I will continue to wonder as to who the spammers were planning on getting through to, unless the purpose of DHAs now is simply to find any address that can get through the defences and possible reach a real person who will then simply hit the delete key. Or maybe its the sysadmins who clean out the flotsam that clogs up email servers who buy the most penis enlargement cream and who are most likely to see the weird names.
In the meantime, spittle at hackingcough.com will be forwarded to Mr BitBucket at DevNull Terrace.
Posted by Chris at 09:32 PM
July 17, 2005
The sound of the crowd
Corporations are being told to blog to counter bad publicity. It can't hurt too much as long as it's done right but I can't see corporate blogging on its own defusing situations where the public have got it in for them. It's taken a while to get around to reading through the white paper "Search is brand" published by Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser. A number of people picked up on the advice in the white paper for corporations to get blogging. But I think the advice should come with a health warning.
The white paper largely concentrates on grocery brands with Google searches used as a way of determining how badly a brand is being hit with 'negative' comments. The argument by the authors is that brands are in danger of losing control of their reputations because the first page Google brings up may contain as many as seven entries that refer to knocking copy. I actually had some difficulty replicating the results quoted by the report's authors as I initially fed the searches to google.com. I later tried google.co.uk and requested only UK pages: the results were then much closer to what the authors claimed. The UK-specific searches generally brought up more links pointing to pages containing criticism. I particularly enjoyed the one that said Dairylea is rhyming slang for wee; I didn't know that one. The searches were performed by the authors on the 6th June and I did mine today.
I need to point out that many of the brands cited by the authors are UK-centric - Bernard Matthews and Tetley, for example - and were mixed in with global examples such as Coca-Cola. Having done my searches more than a month after the authors, I cannot be sure that I saw what they saw - Google's first page for almost any search is a fluid environment. But I have the nagging feeling the authors included anything that could be regarded as negative by the company, as I found an April announcement from the Food Standards Agency about the recall of some types of Dairylea Lunchables among the other supposedly negative page references. The report claimed Bird's Eye chicken and Dairylea did particularly badly on the survey (five negatives out of ten for each search).
Weboptimiser is a search-engine optimisation company, so it should comes as no surprise that the report recommends doing things that make the company come top of search lists, particularly Google. Blogs feature prominently in the report for two reasons. First, bloggers are unhappy and on a mission. The report's authors quoted research by Delahaye, by way of PR Week I believe, that found that only 13 per cent of news coverage on the Net was negative. Who said newspapers only ever run bad news? For blogs, 23 per cent of comments (and presumably posts) were negative. Message boards were the cheeriest of the lot at just 11 per cent. That may because most message board content consists of "WTF! ROFL, LMAO, JPMS !!! ?!?!?! etc", minus the useful punctuation.
The second reason why the report cites blogs as being a brand's worst enemy is their reliance on crosslinking. You ain't nobody on the blogosphere unless you have a lot of people who put links in their blogs that point at yours. Not only does this get you top billing on Technorati and other blog search engines, it plays extremely well with Google's page-rank system. Just how powerful blogs can be for high prominence in Google was shown by the way Anil Dash's blog soared to the top of the listings for the nonsense phrase 'nigritude ultramarine' in a search-engine optimisation contest where no holds were barred, beating an unofficial FAQ page and plenty of 'black hat' search-engine optimisers.
The FAQ claimed: "Anil's site is a blog and appears to have won with the help of old fasioned blog-based Google bombing, showing that despite Google's efforts at protecting against Google bombing bloggers, the bloggers still have a significant amount of power to manipulate search engine results."
A year on, Anil's still there.
Some people have seized on the report as being a prime example of why companies should have blogs. Among them, Steve Rubel claimed the careful engineering of a blog's entries by Common Craft gave the company top billing on Google for its chosen search terms. OK, that's number one sorted out. Now deal with the other nine entries.
Or, put it another way, is blogging is the defence against blogging? Would that have helped Kryptonite or Land Rover? Let's look at Kryptonite and the New York bicycle lock. I don't dispute that blogging's accessibility through Google got the story picked up worldwide by both news media and other bloggers - which backs up the report's position on why blogs need to be considered by any company. However, I feel that it was the video of lock-picking trick in action that appeared on a blog rather than blogging per se that truly did for the lock. It turns out that this type of lock - and not just Kryptonite's - has had problems for more than ten years. Stories about cylindrical locks surfaced in the specialist press and sometimes on TV several years before the New York lock ran into trouble. It was when the videos surfaced that people realised their mountain bikes might not be tied to lamp-post outside anymore.
But, how would a Kryptonite blog help? The product design was broken. It didn't do what it was meant to: keep bicycles safe from thieves. No amount of denial via blog was going to change the situation for the company. All it could do was withdraw the product and either replace it or refund everybody. That's good old-fashioned customer relations.
The Land Rover Discovery 3 case raised by Adrian Melrose at his Smartapps and HaveYourSay blogs is a fine example of how Land Rover's PR team could have handled the problem through traditional means (like replying to emails, phone calls, letters and stuff) and headed off any news coverage before it got too bad. OK, Land Rover could have posted entries on a blog that talked about what it was doing with complaints about the Disco 3. But would that have helped in this case? Who would have linked to those entries when we know bloggers like a public fight? HaveYourSay.com does not feature as a prominent site under the plain search term "land rover", at least not yet. But it does get high billing when you add words like 'problems'. And, let's face it, if you are buying a high-value item, you want to know about any problems and, perhaps more importantly, what the company does about problems.
One thing to note is that Melrose noted that Land Rover and the company's PR knew about his blog pretty early on but chose not to respond. The company sells about 200 000 cars a year for quite a lot of money not the millions of mass-market vehicles. And its people can't reply to emails? And Melrose remained pretty positive towards the company as a whole through much of this. He wasn't sticking his head out of the window and screaming: "I've had enough and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
It will be interesting to see how these short-term campaigns affect the Google page rankings. The Land Rover campaign started only a couple of months ago, so probably has not reached its highest point in Google. A search for 'kryptonite bicycle locks' reveals that Kryptonite's own site is having difficulty holding up against pages uploaded almost a year ago.
A look at the position of Nike and the other big global brands indicates to me that the brands that have caught the attention of pressure groups and anti-globalisation campaigners have yet to suffer the full onslaught of blog-powered Google bombing. That is probably only a matter of time. And the cure proposed by search-engine optimisers may be worse than what these companies perceive as the disease. To combat Google bombing, you pretty much have to do it yourself. And there are potentially thousands of campaigners out there with access to free blogs who can outlink you. Your company could try to nick a leaf out of the link farm book and do it automatically or start trying to recruit shill bloggers. (<Dr Evil>I shall call them shiggers.</Dr Evil>) But, that is likely to make the company look even worse when found out - even if they use sponsorship to get some high-profile blogging going on - and won't combat the source of the problem.
Now, the company might determine that search position per se may not be that important to the brand, especially as you can cover maybe one or two key terms but not all of the ones that may be used commonly by consumers. It is when sales suffer that companies react. That is often too late, but it is generally the case. And if they are bothered about aspects of their image, then they really need to engage directly with the problem, not worry about search engine optimisation and setting up a bunch of corporate bloggers.
On the Internet as much as anywhere else, people are going to call you names: meatballhead, neo-Calvinist, whatever. The issue is how companies react to bad news and the methods for that have not changed radically, although the average speed of response may start going up.
And, who knows? Google may decide change its page-ranking system once more.
Posted by Chris at 09:09 PM
July 15, 2005
You can't catch anything from a PR pitch
I would say PR pitches on the whole are a good deal more sanitary than toilet seats but generally a whole lot less useful, although they can be entertaining for all the wrong reasons. The continuing backlash from bloggers complaining about having their email inboxes filled with irrelevant pitches is intriguing as it's at least a year since the first posts I can find appeared on the subject. Anil Dash arguably caught the mood of many when he described what really ticks him off as a blogger having PRs trying to get him to write about some tedious product they are paid to plug. The unfortunate truth about all this is that the situation will be the same next year. Hacks have been on the receiving end of them for many, many years. And hacks have been outing egregious examples in diary and back-page sections for about the same amount of time. And still they come.
The advantage that most bloggers have is that pitches come almost all in the form of emails. Hacks have had to put up with phone calls for years. Some of those can be truly irritating. An email pitch is easy to toss. Yes, they might get your name or sex wrong, but who cares. Do you have Nelson from the Simpsons leaning over your shoulder going "ha-ha" whenever you read those emails? Yes, they are probably irrelevant and boring. But, the delete key hasn't moved.
But, you say, surely these people should take notice of our anger? Yes, probably. But they won't. There is quite a lot of breastbeating going on among the PR bloggers over whether they should pitch to other bloggers. Some say yes, but do it right, others say no. The reality is that bloggers are seen as 'influencers' in marketing speak: it is the influencer role that makes bloggers next on the list of pitchees in this latest Internet boom. There are people who I would prefer not to send me pitches and releases, but there is no point telling them, because they won't stop, and here's why.
As a freelance hack, I have to confess I don't get as many pitches as I would as a staffer on a magazine. Some PRs get very confused over the role of freelancers, in the same way that they get confused over what should go into a pitch. Some really get confused over freelancers who are contracted to run a magazine's editorial. That's when the smoke starts to pour from their ears in the manner of a robot that's just been beaten in the logic department by William Shatner. But I still get a whole heap of irrelevant and dull stuff.
The main thing about publishing, whether it is in the form of a magazine or a blog or something else is to know your audience. You should have a good idea which stories will garner attention and which will be ignored. A lot of PRs know this; only very few know how to make use of it. It doesn't matter where it comes from, a good story is a good story. The problem is that the PRs are paid to get attention for stories that aren't any good, but are humdrum announcements. The vast majority of corporate actions have almost no effect on the rest of the world. Only the innovators and the big guns make much of a difference. Even in the hands of a master PR operator, nothing will save many of these middle-market announcements from oblivion and many who spend money on PR seems resigned to that without publicly acknowledging it. But, the PR is paid to get the word out even if the only result is to write in a report that "key messages were shared with key influencers" and that they are "unsure why the blogger/hack failed to pick up on the release". As a hack it took me years to understand why report writing was so important to PRs: the clients want to see some activity logged because clippings are so, well, difficult to find.
They don't, unless they are really good at what they do, go back to the client and say: "This announcement is so dull it put my hyperactive 5-year old, dosed up on tartrazine and hamburgers, to sleep. Haven't you got anything important to talk about?" Now, knowing that the announcement is dull but you are being paid simply to send emails and report on it, would you put much effort into getting some blogger's or some hack's name right?
Posted by Chris at 10:12 PM
July 14, 2005
Whoring for fun and profit
Tim Bray's article on The New Public Relations is interesting in a "do you honestly believe what you're writing or did you start before thinking it through?" way. It's drawn some heavy criticism already from the PR side. Tom Murphy does not see himself running beery love-ins and Stuart Bruce among others in the PR world have commented.
Some parts of Bray's piece make sense: I wholeheartedly agree that the trade press as we know it is going to see some big changes, although my personal feeling is that blogs will only play a bit part in that process and the process has already started. But I'm afraid his thinking on why the trade press is in trouble has a little too much of the philosophy that led to the publishing aberration that was the wikitorial.
Bray makes a sideswipe about whored content from journalists and analysts and how that will become transparently obvious to the avid blog reader; as if it isn't already obvious. Instead of this odious situation, Bray postulates a brave new world where corporate employees will remove the worst journalists and many of the PRs from the information food chain. Employee bloggers will carry the message to an audience hungry for their thoughts on what is going on at MegaGalactic Chips & Stents, Inc.
Bray's brave new world has the senior management telling staff what they are up to and "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly".
I have never been an employee at Sun Microsystems and I can't say I plan to become one. But I have worked for a few companies, large and small. And I can say with reasonable confidence that, even where a company has its entire strategy worked out - and I can count those on the fingers of my left foot - rarely does the company do a good job of communicating it to its employees, let alone anyone outside the company. I don't believe this is a problem that is isolated to publishers. Often it is down to incompetence. Sometimes, there are good reasons for lack of internal communication. Most companies announce things making sure they tell the outside world the absolute minimum about what it means. They want the element of surprise when they launch a product or service based on what they did earlier. The last thing they want is an employee giving the financial markets and the SEC a scare by blabbing the whole strategy in a blog.
OK, so you don't tell employees everything, which is what happens now. But the thing about employees is that they don't necessarily share all the values and opinions of their employer. Often, they have policies that are rammed down the throats of their workforce. Some will accept the situation; others talk to journalists on the understanding that they will not be attributed in the story that results. They will not share their discontent on a blog unless they like being sacked, sued and having their home computer confiscated in the space of a day. Oops, one down for the "blogs only contain truth" argument.
Let's look at the other side of the situation where employees and their employer do not share a common cause. Let's assume Company S has bought into a moribund market for no apparently good reason, say tape drives. Will employees conspire to parrot the claims of their employer believing that the strategy is inexplicable, wrong or misguided? Or will they find that silence is the best policy? If there is one thing people hate being more than sacked it's the ridicule of their peers. How they will love being called a corporate shill as they look around for their next job. But, let's assume everbody consumes Tim's Kool-Aid and see the massed corporate blogs as revealing the truth about a company. What happens when they go to these blogsites and see on the subject of Company S's acquisition: nothing. What will the markets make of it? "Company S stock plummets on employee foot shuffling over acquisition." That's the story I'd be running...oops, I forgot, trade journalists are an extinct species.
That's why PRs exist: they are not there just for journalists, or bloggers or Auntie Maureen down the road with Company S shares in her pension fund. They exist because the company needs someone to give the best spin on every company move, and use techniques to make that spin the position that is accepted by most of the people out there. Everybody knows they are paid to do that and you don't have to like it. But that is the point: their position to comment on what the company does, no matter what it is, is always clear. Bray should be thankful for the existing corporate blogging rules that, for the most part, ask them to stay off the corporate-publicity turf.
As an aside, Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble's tally-ho rallying call to the blogosphere claiming you aren't part of the picture unless you get in on this particular conversation is a little, erm...misplaced. It's a bit like running outside the pub, where a heated argument over whether the Gooners are going to kick the Blues' arse next season has suddenly involved more than two people, and claiming that the future of football lies within. (I'm aware I may need to provide a translation or better analogy for non-UK readers. I don't even watch that much football myself.)
Posted by Chris at 08:50 PM | Comments (2)
July 06, 2005
Experiments with RSS
One of the reasons for creating this blog was to provide a way of covering changes in the way that the press and the PR industry interact. There are a lot of PR-related blogs talking about the death of the emailed or posted press release now that RSS has arrived on the scene. But not many from the journalist's side of the fence, so this is my two pen'orth on the subject.
I have been experimenting with RSS for a couple of weeks now, so I'm well behind journalists such as Danny Bradbury in that regard, who has been using the syndication system for some time according to his web journal. Bradbury has noted one downside of using RSS: it's apparent one-size-fits-all nature. Most RSS feeds currently come from US-based operations and a common complaint among UK-based hacks is that US releases are well-padded drivel.
Some PRs in the UK like to do a bit of surgery on the releases before they send them out, whether by post, fax or email. Stuart Bruce, apparently, is one of them. Some simply don't bother to relay all of them on the basis that a good many press releases are drivel, no matter where they come from. They only process the important ones, although PR companies differ on what gets classed as important. Often, releases that are useful to me (but are bad news from the client's point of view) often don't get sent out whereas the releases about incremental improvements to obscure products are given the once over and then sent out with covering notes.
This pre-editing process means that it can take several days for a UK version of a release to appear after it has gone out on the wires in the US, although some manage to get them out at roughly the same time. Personally, the way make sure I don't miss things is to simply use the US RSS feeds and stop worrying about the padding.
But, doesn't this make the role of the UK PR for a global company a bit superfluous? I, and others, simply have to pull the relevant feeds into an aggregator and the local PRs are then out of luck.
Yes and no. The problem with RSS is that it was never designed for distributing press releases, although there is nothing in the protocol that stops anybody for using it for that purpose. The RSS model assumes that the audience for written material is larger than the number of sources, at least within a given area of interest. With press releases aimed at the media, it is the other way round. You have a large number of sources trying to aim at a small audience, the journalists working on the various news media. Those outlets will serve a larger set of readers, often providing RSS feeds from their own websites.
Potentially, journalists could end up dealing with hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feeds to be able to cover all of the areas and companies that they need to. This is, of course, assuming that a lot more organisations pull their respective fingers out and actually do something about RSS. The reality is that the wire services such as Businesswire and PRNewswire will act as sources for much of the material that arrives by RSS feed, at least in the short term. That cuts down dramatically on the number of feeds that I need to subscribe to at the moment. The good thing about RSS is the aggregator. I use NetNewsWire and that does a pretty good job of letting me organise the feeds I need to deal with in a useful way. I have a folder that contains all the press release sources that I have identified so far. It basically acts as a super-newswire.
In there today is Businesswire's RSS feed, the one from Sourcewire, and a smattering of large technology companies such as Intel. I haven't added PRNewswire as yet. That is not because PRNewswire doesn't have an RSS feed. It is because the one it offers to hacks today is the entire output of the wire. Businesswire provides a personalised feed based on my preferences. PRNewswire has said it has a personalised system in beta, but until I can gain access to that or the company goes live with the service, the PRNewswire RSS feed is useless to me.
This is what will solve the problem for the local PRs, as long as they are able to embrace the necessary technology quickly enough. Most companies active in this field today are only providing one RSS feed for everything, from financial releases through to the most obscure product releases. Multiply that by a few hundred companies and you have something far worse than the email distribution we rely on today. For RSS to be a genuinely useful tool for journalists, PR companies and their clients will need to offer personalised RSS feeds in the same way Businesswire does now: customised through a web interface.
With personalised feeds, local PRs can continue to do what they are doing now and make use of RSS as an alternative distribution scheme to email. They will also get much better feedback on the material journalists actually want, because they will be able to see which options they select on the web form.
Posted by Chris at 11:52 PM | Comments (3)
July 05, 2005
Which way to the race?
There were a couple of first-time things that kicked off July 2005 for me. The first one took place on Sunday when I ran in my first 10K race around central London. The second thing I did for the first time was to set up a blog. The blog is not meant to have much to do with running but I thought I'd add a journal section to see how often I would post this kind of stuff. So, the first entry in this blog is about the curiously shambolic event that was the British 10K.
The first part of the competition was to find the start. For no good reason, I thought the race was due to start at 9am, not the 9.35am that was the official start time. Even so, I didn’t turn up ridiculously early. Sitting on Victoria Line from Brixton to Green Park, the train gradually filled up with people who were clearly going to the same place. The problem that faced us was working out exactly where the start was to be. Most people knew that it was outside the front of the Hard Rock Café on Piccadilly. A big clue was the big blue sign saying ‘Start’ on it next to a platform made of the customary wood and scaffolding covered with a few bits of tarpaulin. If only it were all that easy.
According to the guide distributed to entrants before the race together with a flimsy T-shirt and a discount voucher for some energy drink, runners were supposed to be honest with themselves and stand by the sign that corresponded to the time they thought it would take for them to get around the course. The only trouble was that there were just two signs visible, both for times well above an hour. Even I do can 10km in an hour. But decided to be more conservative than honest and perched opposite the 1.5 hour sign close to where the Hyde Park Corner underpass joins Piccadilly.
It turned out that nobody told the stewards anything about starting slots. They had been standing for half an hour halfway down Piccadilly collecting runners who had dropped off their kit outside the Institute of Directors at Pall Mall armed with nothing more than a piece of string between them. Those runners who took a short cut through Green Park to get to the start line who found themselves milling around trying to work how the start was going to work. While they wondered, “Colonel Bogey” and a big-band version of “We All Stand Together” – better known as the homicide-inducing “Frog Song” – blared out from the loudspeakers on an apparently endless loop. A day after Live8, a day before the official WW2 commemoration started and three days before the announcement of the 2012 Olympic venue, the race organisers were milking every link for what it was worth. The music was just the beginning.
Then the stewards turned up with 10 000 runners behind them. The starting arrangement suddenly became clear: it was one step away from chaos. The idea of having people organise themselves into neat groups based on how long they expected to take was nothing more than a bit of wishful thinking. It was only after the start that I realised that I had a lucky break as I was well past the Ritz before the crowd waiting to get going ran out. And it took three minutes for me to get started even from what was a comparatively good position.
Before I and thousands of others were able to get through the start point, we had the usual speeches, most of them pumping up the London 2012 bid. The Westminster Town Cryer left most in no doubt that ringing a bell at every opportunity and shouting can lead to a separation from reality. As the first runners were away, including former Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, the Town Cryer suddenly blurted out over the tannoy: “Go on Spiderwoman. Er…no. Wonderwoman.” I don’t remember a Lynda Carter lookalike being among the front runners, so I still have no idea who he directed the comment at even after the correction.
Within a few minutes I was off. Unfortunately, exactly how many minutes remains a mystery as I completely forgot to look at the clock by the start line as I ran past it and did not bother taking a watch with me. Or a mobile phone, which seems to be today’s running accessory for those who don’t believe in iPod holsters.
Trafalgar Square, about 2km down the line, had another selection of wartime hits pounding out from the loudspeaker and it was not until the Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue that we got The Clash’s “London Calling”. On the Embankment a lone DJ and four girls from the Loughborough University dance troupe had pitched up to do a spot of disco-style encouragement. It was just after that someone shouted, “It’s Haile Gebrselassie!” And it was, the Ethiopian runner was hurtling down the Embankment in the opposite direction aiming to make a sub-30 minute time. There was a quick round of applause and he was gone. It would take me another half hour just to reach that point from the 2.5km point I was at.
The number of people all trying to run down the same stretch of road meant that they ended up mixing with the few onlookers who had ventured out comparatively early on a Sunday. But that was nothing on the situation that faced the amateur athletes as they got near the finish line. Getting to the finish meant running along past Blackfriars Bridge, doubling back up the Embankment and then taking another detour with a hairpin bend at the end on Westminster Bridge. After a couple of attempts I think I got the strategy right for dealing with the hairpins: take them wide and keep running rather than risk tangled ankles by cutting in tight and colliding with about ten other runners. Even after 8km, the crowd had not thinned out that much.
By 9km we were getting “Chariots of Fire” over speakers placed at the foot of Big Ben. The clock struck the chimes for half-past ten as I neared the north end of Westminster Bridge and turned for the final stretch. People were yelling out “Last few hundred yards” to anyone who was paying attention. Working out how many hundred yards was not all that easy as the organisers had managed to confuse just about everyone taking part in the race by putting in a final hairpin just yards from the finish line. But people knew they were five minutes away from the end as they turned back onto the Embankment for the final stretch past the Ministry of Defence building.
One woman running for a bowel cancer charity was cheerfully ringing up relatives on her mobile in an athletic version of the “I’m on the train!” announcements you can hear at 6pm on the way out of London on any overground rail service. “I’ve just passed the 9km marker!” she yelled. “Where are you waiting?” The phone seemed a bit superfluous.
The one thing I knew about the finish was that it was by the Cenotaph: the organisers were keen to maintain the link with the VE and VJ celebrations as well as the 2012 Olympic announcement, and anything else they could find as a publicity hook. The catch was that it was the other side of the road. Coming round into Whitehall, I realised that, as the end of “Jurasalem” played out from this set of speakers, there was at least one more turn before I could find the finish. So, at the end of Whitehall it was another wide turn to avoid a dozen legs and then a matter of running back towards the Cenotaph. The finish was easy to spot, although not because it had a big sign saying “Finish”.
There were two clues: one being the clock and the other the big crowd of people who decided that, once past the finish line, you can stop dead. So, the end of the race turned into the pedestrian equivalent of a motorway pile-up. Stewards morosely asked people to keep walking but they were meeting friends, family, anybody who wanted to say hello. So, the sprint finish I saved out petered out a bit in favour of avoiding a collision. The clock counted its way round to one hour, three minutes and 23 seconds, which meant I had taken more or less an hour to get round the course.
I found a piece of wall that did not have any people by it to get some stretches in as my left leg started to protest about the pavement pounding I had been doing for the last hour. Then I set off in search of my finisher’s medal, which was with the bag drop at Pall Mall. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the back of the medal carried a picture of St Paul’s Cathedral. You might think the Cenotaph might have been a good choice, or Nelson’s Column. Even the Hard Rock Café might have made an appropriate if tacky and incongruous image: at least it was on the course. But it summed up the organisation of the event: a nice try but not quite on target. And that was my first go in a race like this, just wait until I’ve done some more before I get really scathing about the organisation.
Posted by Chris at 11:06 PM
