Open The Dialogue

Tom and I are both well into the day here at BlogOrlando, the fantastic conference that's been organized by Josh Hallett. So far this morning we've gotten Josh's introduction and a keynote from Shel Israel before breaking off into the different tracks. Tom led the first session in the PR/Comm track talking about his love of shellfish. (wait. he's tapping me on the shoulder. it was about blog relations and community building. hmmm. what did I listen to?)

Both of us are taking pictures and taking notes, most of which will probably be up soon, likely both here and on our personal blogs in some way shape or form.

Not only is this a great conference so far (and we're only a couple hours in to the formal thing) but it's also been tremendously fun and a great opportunity to meet up with some of the smartest people on the interwebs.

More to come.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Following up on Tom's post with advice to Netflix from a few days ago, Ron at Grok says Netflix has implemented some of the changes to its website that he originally advocated. Despite the fact that Ron says no one from Netflix actually contacted him it seems that someone was at least listening.
• Joe Jaffe wonders where the blogger outreach by the big players covering Advertising Week gone and disappeared to.
• Armani is opening a location in Second Life. Did they not get the memo that brands we had moved from "rush into" to "abandon" mode when it comes to SL?
• The Onion, as usual, kills me. "Google Launches 'The Google' for Older Adults."

Posted by Chris Thilk at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Danny Sullivan at AdAge makes a point that I don't think gets enough mentioning, which is that search-engine-optimization is primarily a public relations tool. The idea behind SEO is similar to that of PR, which is to have a brand name of some sort appear as a non-paid listing or mention. Sullivan also wisely points out that paid search and SEO need to live together and that, like other marketing efforts, the ideal solution may be a mix of the two. (CT)
• Web entities of all shapes and sizes are adding features that resemble those found on social networks to try and connect their members/visitors. These features encourage deeper user interaction, but it's also leading some sites that never used to to sell ads, sales of which are helped by these longer visit numbers. (CT)
• AOL has trimmed the portfolio of sites it inherited from Weblogs Inc a bit more, shutting down a number of the life sciences blogs WIN was running. That takes the number down to 26, not including the various translations of Engadget and Autoblog. (CT)
• I'm trying to figure out what the thinking is behind so many people praising services that consolidate your RSS reading to just what the service thinks is important or relevant. Isn't one of the points of reading RSS feeds to be exposed to alternate viewpoints and a variety of voices? Or is that just me? (CT)
• Everyone sees the funny behind Rocketboom deciding to turn ad sales over to Blip.tv, right? I know that they're still going to be able to sell ads on their own site, but doesn't this largely mean the RB team decided it couldn't keep up with the emerging world of video ads and decided to ditch "original and clever" in favor of "simply a variation on the overlays everyone else is testing out."? (CT)
• Someone at Metafilter revisits the "You're the Man Now, Dog" fad. Always a good way to kill 15 minutes while your boss if off celebrating his birthday. (CT)
• I still used CD-Rs for data back-up I haven't carried a floppy disk of any sort in years, opting instead for my handy flash drive. Apparently I'm not alone. (CT)
• Seems MySpace News links, which just show a framed version of someone's story, are being indexed as original sources by Google News. So you have a service that frames (read: brands) a publisher's content getting traffic directed its way instead of the story itself. No, that's not a problem at all, why do you ask? (CT)

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Seth Godin Is looking for some help with a simple solution for reunion organizing. (TB)
• Over at Diva Marketing, Toby's got a great post about thinking on your toes when prepping for a presentation and then ending up providing a slightly different version (read: more detailed, but less detailed could be relevant as well) than originally planned after finding out more about your audience. (TB)
• According to at least this article from Lisa Scherzer, spamming about microcap / pink sheet stocks is actually just as profitable as you might think it is. (TB)
• Go help Dave Winer figure out how to sponsor an open source project. (TB)
• Some Channel 9 forum posters are expressing concerns about how Wikipedia is "changing" to meet its "needs." (TB)

Posted by Tom Biro at 12:51 AM | Permalink

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Posted by Tom Biro at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Lifehacker gives us a heavy hitter with a fantastic potential lifesaver from the world of Google Maps mashups, RottenNeighbor. Wow. (TB)
• Valleywag isn't broken, is it? I got worried after seeing this item about the "new" Digg. (TB)
• Two of my fave services - Newsgator and Socialtext - are doing a free Webinar late next week. (TB)
• Dude, it's like scheduling with a collaborative vibe and stuff. (TB)

Posted by Tom Biro at 01:24 AM | Permalink

• Bloglines is now bringing in feeds using the stylesheets originally intended. (TB)
• A billion dollars per year is the cost of fraudulent clicks on Google's ad network. (TB)
• For those of you who think you can get away with anything when it comes to bloggers, think again. (TB)
• The WaPo's Zachary Goldfarb and Sam Diaz have some skinny on AOL's move to New York City and what's really behind it all. (TB)

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:54 PM | Permalink

• Read/WriteWeb's Richard McManus informs about the big news that Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined the team at that site, as Lead Writer next Monday. Congrats, Marshall! (TB)
• Dave Winer points out that Valleywag doesn't run ads. Never noticed that myself. Oh, wait - that's because Valleywag does run ads. Or at least they do when I visit. (TB)
• I'm really wondering why people aren't paying attention to the fact that Facebook just signed its first outside PR agency. Seems to me that a move like that does as much to signal the company's next moves as much as ad strategies. (CT)
• As someone who used to spend a fair amount of time scraping gum off the underside of theater seats I find the invention of non-stick chewing gum to be just fascinating. (CT)
• Yes, it might be true that teens learn about new TV shows from promotions on TV itself, but that's only dependent on there being quality programming to draw them in in the first place. Hope everyone realizes that. (CT)
• If this is true and MySpace is adopting a design that lessens my desire to gouge out my own eyes then that MIGHT be enough to get me to use it again. Might. (CT)
• I'm linking to this story about Prince suing to keep his music off YouTube simply because I like to think in his complaint he spelled it U2ube. (CT)

Posted by Tom Biro at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• If any of you are out there fighting for innovative, original thinking in terms of what you can do on teh Interwebz, Steve Safran has a list of things that we were told would never happen online. Print them out and show them to the person shooting you down. (CT)
• GSM mobile technology is, apparently, 20 years old. I'm not sure what to do with this, other than feel old, but there that is. (CT)
• SixApart released an interface that allows people to update their Typepad blogs from their iPhones. There are a couple jokes I could make here:
• Better hope your AdSense revenue is enough to pay the service charges.
• It's too bad people without Typepad blogs couldn't use that $100 in credit to get one
• Technorati got an update to look like a river of news. This will be fun to visit on those occasions T'rati stops indexing posts all together as the river runs dry. (CT)
• On a very serious note, both Tom and I noted on our personal blogs the tragic, untimely death of Adam Finley, someone who we both wrote with over at AdJab and TVSquad. Adam was killed late last week in a bike accident but was not carrying identification, so wasn't identified until Sunday, when police took his iPod to the Apple store, where they were able to track the serial number. Adam was just 30 years old. (CT)

Posted by Chris Thilk at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Jaffe is announcing some changes at crayon, including the exiting of CC Chapman, and the agency's refocusing on being more of a consultancy, pushing for thought leadership and vision definition for its clients. (CT)
• AOL has made official the rumors that have been circulating and is all-but killing Netscape as a social news site, turning the Netscape brand name back into more of a traditional portal. If anyone at AOL has a clear vision about what the company is doing online, I'd like them to raise their hands. (looks around) Didn't think so. (CT)
• Josh Hallett has begun a series examining the upsides and downsides of individuals blogging for corporations. (CT)
• Allison hit me with this link that contains not just the Quote of the Day but the Quote of the Year. (CT)
• Jeremiah looks at the role of the "Career Blog," a site not corporate in nature but more devoted to someone's passion and which becomes an integral part of the personal branding they're engaged in. (CT)

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• The Bivings Report has an interesting update on the status of the top commercial magazines and how they've incorporated things like reporter blogs, RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 treats. Overall the report found mags are behind the adoption rate of newspapers. (CT)
• I find it funny in a "Dear God won't someone please get that tiger off the infant" sort of way that, after coming under criticism for being a "walled garden," Facebook is now being targeted by privacy watchdogs for opening up member profiles to Google and other searches. (CT)
• After snatching up competing stock photo services, Getty Images is now being criticized for its strong-arm manner and habit of slashing photographer royalties, a characterization the company says is false, citing the increased presence of independent digital photography sites it has to compete against. (CT)
• Chris is discussing New Line's use of Facebook to market "Shoot 'Em Up" through Sponsored items (you know you saw it) in that social network's landing page, among other things. (TB)
• Over at one of my favorite "I could read this blog and Read/Write and nothing else for a week" blogs, eHub, Michael Murphy drops dime on Notely and stu.dicio.us. (TB)

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• The WSJ's Riva Richmond is calling the move by, oh, I don't know, *everyone* to create a Facebook app "another online gold rush." (TB)
• Dear Twitter: Please devote more resources to keeping your service stable before you start building cool little toys like Explore Twitter. Regards, Chris. (CT)
• Looks like Google might be maybe getting around to potentially doing something kind of with Jotspot, which they acquired almost a year ago. If they actually integrate it into their current offerings before July 28th, 2009, I lose the pool I'm in. (CT)
• It's been 25 years since the first computer virus was released, a relatively harmless prank by someone who just wanted to annoy his friends. (CT)
• Sites like Daily Candy and Thrillist have survived and thrived despite (or maybe because of) a business model that revolves around e-mail newsletters and not extensions into every interactive space around. A nice testament to not over-thinking an idea. (CT)

Posted by Tom Biro at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Some in the German government want to be able to use trojan horses to "spy" in suspected terrorists in the country. Umm, yeah. Not to defend terrorists or anything, but do we really want to go here? (TB)
• Last week, Matt Mullenweg posted browser stats for wordpress.com-hosted sites, with 30.74% of visitors using Firefox, and about 6.73% using Macintosh OSes. While I think the latter seems lower than I would have presumed (that's just based on the number of Macs I'm seeing in airports these days), the former was enough to get the folks at SpreadFirefox to notice. (TB)
• I'm happy to see that Seth Goding dropped a bomb tonight on Quechup, which is handling things in a pretty shady way, from what my Web pals are saying tonight. (TB)
• The Guardian Unlimited's Robert McCrum writes about how George Orwell may have been a blogger were he doing his thing today, but he would probably be "appalled by the writing." Nuff said. (TB)

Posted by Tom Biro at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)