Open The Dialogue

Happy Friday everyone!  There are only 15 days until Halloween or more importantly only 68 shopping days until Christmas.  Until then, enjoy these links of the day.

• The Internet Advertising Bureau has come out against the recent FTC guidelines. The IAB argues that new rules unfairly regulate the online media more than offline.

• In other FTC guideline news, one service called CMP.ly is attempting to establish a standard format for all disclosures by using their 6 different disclosure links.  For more on CMP.ly make sure to check out PRNewser’s recent interview with the co-founder, Tom Chernaik.
• The Official Google blog shares tips on Managing Your Reputation through Search Results. The first idea? Make sure you want your personal info online.
• Finally, as the fervor around the Balloon Boy continues to swell as the “it” viral discussion of the moment, make sure to take the time to check out such gem’s as the T-shirt, the Fresh Prince Rap and of course this stunning re-enactment (See below).

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Washington Post Cracks Down on Dissident Journalists

Reports have come in that the authorities at Washington Post have launched a severe crackdown on journalists’ use of social media after news broke that one of its editors, Raju Narisetti, used the popular microblogging website, Twitter, to send personal opinionated comments to the public.  The crackdown includes never before seen levels of censorship by shutting down Narisetti’s independent Twitter profile and new edicts outlawing similar uses by all WaPo writers.  These actions have been severely criticized by other member websites such as TechCrunch with limited discussion on the subject coming from within.  Narisetti’s conditions and whereabouts within the WaPo HQ are as yet unknown.

Brand Websites Under Attack by Google Sidewiki

Correspondent Steve Woodruff reports that brand websites are facing a critical threat to its image by the emergence of Google’s new tool called Sidewiki.  The wiki allows rogue agents to leave unflattering comments in direct contradiction to the careful messaging on the branded websites for all others to see.  Woodruff highlights the effects it is having on pharmaceutical blogs and websites.

Google Wave or a Google Tsunami?

Reports indicate that there are high levels of chatter surrounding Google Wave to be unleashed today.  Some are predicting it to be a Google Tsunami in its “potential to redefine the web and how we interact digitally.” Experts are still waiting to see what effect it will have for brands and social media strategy.

Via The Disney Blog comes what is the first instance I’ve seen of an actual back-and-forth (at least as much as is possible) relating to a story that’s happening using the new comment feature on Google News.

Last week a study came out from The University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Science relating to language development in toddlers and how it might be impacted by videos such as Disney’s Baby Einstein series. This resulted in a number of headlines in the mainstream press as well as the online world. But now the two parties, the study’s authors and the Disney company. Disney wants the study retracted since it didn’t actually include any looks at the Baby Einstein videos and so it feels its being wrongly labeled as contributing to toddlers who can’t make with the usage that is good of the words.

I’m going to make this point again: Why is this something Google had to think of? Why isn’t the news media either 1) Getting their facts straight in the first place (I know – but I had to say it) or 2) Doing this kind of thing on their own site? “Here’s the story as we’ve reported it. Click here for participant reaction.” Barring that sort of media buy-in, this is very much the sort of thing that could be covered on a corporate blog, where executives could weigh in with a company point of view on a story related to them.

Seeing this comment function in action also makes it seem to me like a very clunky tool. The reactions seem to be tied, in some cases, to a particular version of the story. One of the comments from Disney is labeled as being a response to the Time Magazine story. Good idea, but why so specific? And what does this accomplish that, if the party in question has a blog of their own, wouldn’t be achieved by adding some sort of trackback functionality?

As John Frost at The Disney Blog says, this is now another outlet for corporations and their agencies to monitor, but with the no-spiders rule and other problems with automated tracking it’s not exactly easy to do.

Google News has announced it will begin including comments on the stories it links to. These won’t be comments from readers or trackbacks in the way we’ve come to define them in the blog world, but limited to the subjects of the story in question. This allows those people to add their additional perspective on a story that might not have been possible through the couple of quotes selected by the writer.

A major move? Absolutely, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

Google in the past has positioned News as something that’s just an aggregator. Every time Google has responded to jittery news organizations who say they’re stealing content and subsequent ad revenue Google says “No, we’re actually pointing more people to your site” by just showing a headline and an abstract. And they’ve been right.

But this neatly lifts out the news organization from the user experience. This is something that brings the reader right back to Google or prompts them to never leave in the first place.

It seems to me that this wouldn’t even be an issue if news sites did a little more innovating – and I don’t include adding video as innovation. I mean what if a news site put up a story just like before but then allowed room for participants to add comments right there? Or put up the whole text of an interview online for readers to peruse on their own? Seems like both of those would add to the value of the site and to the engagement (read: time of visit, the all-important ad metric) on that site.

Someone asked what kind of impact this is going to have on us as public relations professionals. I don’t actually think it’s that much of a new thing for PR folks, at least not in and of itself. If we’ve worked with our clients to develop a sensible online strategy, including how to respond to blog postings, problematic Wikipedia entries and such than this is just an extension of that. It’s something else to keep in the back of your mind. Same best practice guidelines exist, at least to my mind.

LATER UPDATE: Seems Google has disallowed spiders from crawling the comments content, setting off a firestorm of charges of hypocrisy. Those are somewhat warranted, especially since Google News is kind of, you know, built on a foundation of spiders. The fact that Google’s first foray into content creation is inaccessible to search engines should not be overlooked by anyone who covers the media space.

I’ve been using Writely, the online word processing program, for a while now. I love having all – or at least most of the functionality of a word processing program online. Earlier this year Writely was bought by Google and then a couple weeks ago they finally integrated with the Google accounts of its users. But that didn’t change much about the look and feel of the system.

Until today. This morning when I went to writely.com it redirected to docs.google.com. All my documents were there, just as they had been, along with the Google Spreadsheets I had in my account. This is just the sort of integrated functionality I’ve been looking for from Google since I can now access my Calendar, Docs and Picasa photos all from the Gmail page I open as soon as I sit down at the computer.

Great move by Google to make sure their features are as easy to use as possible. As more of us spend out entire days online using Web 2.0-ish apps this a handy way to put everything Google offers in one convenient place.