A good roundup of blogging tips

Just came across this post by Maryam Scoble: Ten Ways To Write A Killer Blog. It’s an exceptionally good (and concise) compilation of tips for effective blogging. Recommended reading.

My new blog chronicles the decline of newspapers

I’ve started a new blog, Newspaper Death Watch, to monitor and comment upon the disintegration of the American metropolitan daily newspaper industry. If you keep an eye on this blog, you know that I have strong opinions about this topic. I believe that the collapse of this American institution will be stunningly swift and broad, with perhaps no more than a dozen major metros surviving until 2030. There’s more detail in this essay.

I take no pleasure in this turn of events. On the contrary, I love newspapers. But I find this process to be a fascinating convergence of subjects that fascinate me: publishing, technology and transformational change.

If you have any suggestions for topics or news items I should be aware of, please don’t hesitate to send them along.

Facebook is rising, but social network users are fickle

Rich Skrenta comments on the surging popularity of Facebook at the expense of LinkedIn and MySpace and asks Are network effects getting weaker? He has a great point about the fleeting success of early social networks.

A year ago, everyone was talking about MySpace. Now its star seems to be fading, perhaps as a consequence of its early success. My MySpace mailbox is full of come-ons from dating services and very little else. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends and business associates have joined Facebook in recent months and there’s a surge or activity there driven by the service’s expanding audience and new openness.

But who’s to say that will last? As Skrenta notes, the cost of switching services is pretty low and people are inclined to run toward whichever network has shiniest new toy, at least for now. If Facebook doesn’t continually out-innovate new competitors, its success could be short-lived.

Google has been remarkable in that respect, for the cost of switching search engines is zero. Yet Google got 65% of US searchs in May.

I’m currently a big fan of Facebook, but I’m not convinced it’s the winner in professional social networks. It’s way too early.

Tech PR War Stories 14: Are CMP layoffs the death knell for IT print media?

This week in the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David and I reflect on upheaval at CMP, which laid off 20% of its workforce last week and shuttered some print publications. I suggest that this is the beginning of the end of print publishing in the IT media market and note that the economics of online publishing in that area are now weighted toward using freelance and blogger contributors instead of full-time staff.

David points out that technology companies are becoming more aggressive about launching their own online and even print publications, and that some of the senior editors who have lost their jobs in IT media will move over to work for vendors. We agree that these custom publishing operations are legitimate targets for PR people to place their clients. Now that everyone can publish easily to the Web, the definition of a “media company” is becoming fuzzier.

In Cheers & Jeers, I praise Oovoo, a new videoconferencing service that sent customized video messages to journalists and bloggers as part of its launch campaign. My jeer goes to Dell Computer, which sent a cease-and-desist notice to Consumerist.com, an action that ultimately backfired on Dell. But at least Dell was contrite in blogging about the mistake and even linking to underground photos of unannounced Dell products. My, how times have changed!

Listen to the podcast here (right click to download): 15:05

Dell attack-dog tactics backfire in the blogosphere

A story has been playing out at Dell Computer this week that illustrates vividly the clash of cultures that must be going on in many companies over blogging.

Last Thursday, Consumerist.com posted a list of tips submitted by a former Dell sales manager that told, among other things, how to get the best deals and even get a free laptop replacement at the end of a warranty cycle. This kind of stuff is Consumerist’s bread and butter – and Dell one of its favorite targets – so the site gleefully ran the secrets, along with commentary from a current Dell rep.

Dell must have been ripped, but it then threw gasoline on the fire. On Friday, Dell sent a corporate lawyer after Consumerist with a cease-and-desist notice. What a boneheaded maneuver that was. Naturally, Consumerist posted the lawyer’s threat along with a response. The exchange made the Dell lawyer looked clueless, particularly since she never disputed the accuracy of the Consumerist information.

Meanwhile, readers were having a field day. Along with more than 300,000 page views, the Consumerist story on was dugg more than 3,600 times, making it one of the most popular technology news items of the last week. In trying to bury the offending item, Dell actually created a magnet of publicity

On Saturday, Dell’s Lionel Menchaca posted a thoughtful and somewhat extraordinary account of the whole incident on the Direct2Dell blog. He admitted that Dell had dropped the ball and should never have asked for the information on Consumerist to be taken down in the first place. He also addressed many of the flaws in Dell’s pricing, promotion and support system highlighted by the original post. What was extraordinary was the links to photos on Engadget of unannounced Dell products. People used to get fired for leaking news like that. Now they link to it on the company blog!

Needless to say, commenters have been all over this story. Consumerist comes out smelling like a rose, and it should because it published accurate, useful stuff. You have to wonder what kind of troglodyte at Dell thought it was a good idea to sic the corporate lawyer on Consumerist. In the professional media world, these kinds of disputes take place in the background and outside of the view of the reader. There is no such discretion in the blogosphere; in fact, many bloggers actually rejoice in tweaking the noses of those whom they offend.

The contrast between the corporate lawyer’s truculence and the corporate blogger’s openness are really a microcosm of what many organizations must be dealing with right now. There’s a command-and-control side of Dell’s business that attempted to apply decade-old containment strategies to a medium that simply laughed in its face. At the same time, you can see in the Direct2Dell experiment that a culture is emerging at the company that values a new form of interaction. You just wonder why the lawyer never asked the blogger for advice before going on the offensive.

Tool Talk: Two programs I wouldn’t want to be without

There are two programs on my desktop that I consider to be absolutely indispensable. They save me time each and every day and the fact that they are available only on Windows is probably the primary reason I haven’t moved to Linux. The hit to my productivity would simply be too great if I lost access to them.

They are Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Siber Systems’ AI Roboform. Anybody who does what I do for a living should consider investing in them.

Dragon has been around for more than 10 years, and they have been eventful ones. In the late 90s, the company that owned the software at the time was a darling of the Internet bubble, reaching valuations in the billions of dollars. Then there was a crash, an accounting scandal and some generally negative publicity about speech recognition software. The product faded from view for several years, but Nuance picked it up and has continued to develop it.

Speech recognition companies have long claimed accuracy rates north of 90%. I’ve never found this to be true, at least in my case. NaturallySpeaking version 8 probably gets about eight out of every 10 words correct out of the box, which isn’t bad. With training, you can indeed get accuracy up to the 90 to 95% range. Here’s a tip: backup your user files, because if you experience a hard disk crash, all of that training will go to waste.

I find that NaturallySpeaking about doubles my word output, which is important when words are a unit of payment. Even though I type 90 wpm, I dictate much faster than that and Dragon reduces eyestrain and the risk of repetitive stress injury. For $60 on eBay, it was is a great investment.

Roboform is a password manager/form filler/password generator and the only shareware I pay for. Most browsers have the ability to save passwords but Roboform does a lot more. It can store a rich set of information about a user’s identity and automatically fill forms with that data. This is enormously useful if you register on a lot of web sites – and who doesn’t these days? With Roboform, registration is a one-click process. The software also retains information about multiple credit cards and bank accounts, making it easy to fill in that information with one click.

The password manager organizes passwords in a master list that is easy to navigate. To go to any password-protected website, you click on the toolbar icon and select the account. Roboform takes you to the login page and signs you in. I am registered on well over 300 web sites, and it would be simply impossible to keep track of them without this program. Another very nice feature is that the Roboform user files can be stored on a server. That means that my current database of passwords is available to me from any computer on my network.

Roboform has some quirks that make it annoying at times. The vendor seems to release .updates about every week, and upgrading is an intrusive process. Also, Roboform has an annoying tendency to try to save login information as a new account, even when the account is already in the database. I dislike the number of dialog boxes it throws at me, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very useful productivity tool.

I just wish they had it on Linux.

CMP layoffs dramatize bigger industry changes

The news came down today that technology publisher CMP is laying off 20% of its workforce and merging several publications out of existence, including Network Computing and Optimize. I don’t suppose this is a surprise, for the print business in the enterprise technology market has been on the decline for a long time, but the scope of the cutbacks and the extent of the changes to CMP’s portfolio were breathtaking. Most publishers have been bleeding away properties as print business has turned down. CMP’s action was like an execution.

It’s hard not to feel like an old codger at times like these, for I remember the days when Computerworld’s print business was so healthy that the company had to start ancillary publications just to handle the overflow of ads because the printer couldn’t produce issues that were large enough to hold them all. I don’t pine for those days, though. There were times when the editorial staff was slapping almost anything it could find onto a page in order to fill space around the ads. No one was well-served by that. What’s different about online publishing is that the space expands and contracts to fill available content. There is much less of a need to provide some content — any content — to run around advertising. It’s perhaps one of the great under-appreciated benefits of new media.

People sometimes complain that one of the shortcomings of new media is that space is unlimited, meaning that writers can write as much as they want about whatever they want. I suppose that’s a problem in some respects, but isn’t the ultimate arbiter of value the reader? If writers don’t produce interesting copy, then no one will read them, and it won’t matter how many words they write. The Web is liberating in that way. In removing constraints of space and time, it frees the writer to focus on content and the reader to make choices based upon what they want to read rather than what the publisher chooses to give them. I think that, in the long run, we’ll realize that this was a great liberator and a step forward both for the craft of journalism and the service that publications deliver to their readers.

For now, though, I feel badly for the 200 people who lost their jobs today. They were victimized not by any failure on their part, but rather because of a structural shift in the market over which they had no control. I fear that they are simply the first casualties of a much bigger change in consumption habits that will sweep over much of the mainstream media in the coming years. In the end, it will lead to a richer, more vibrant media landscape, but there is bound to be a lot of suffering in the meantime

Survey says IT pros put their trust in social media

ITtoolbox and adverting agency PJA published the results of a survey that they say demonstrates that IT professionals spend more time on social media sites than reading traditional trade publications and trust the information they find there more than any other published source.

The results serve ITToolbox’s interests and the .5% response rate makes them statistically irrelevant; still, the findings about trust are probably valid. IT managers have always said they trust each other more than any other source, probably because the other sources haven’t done a very good job of being all that reliable.
Publish
I question the survey’s findings that executive decision-makers spend 3.5 hours a week on social media sites, but I have no doubt that the people who work further down in the organizations spend at least that much time. After all, Slashdot.org was probably the earliest successful group blog. It was Digg.com before there was a Digg.com.

How to sell to CIOs

Episode 12 of Tech PR War Stories – the podcast for PR people that I co-produce with David Strom – is all about selling to CIOs. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been spending a lot of time with CIOs recently and over the years. I’ve observed that they care a lot less about products and vendors that they do about issues like business alignment, governance and skills retention. I have some observations to share about how they look at vendors.

David actually spent some time working in large IT organizations. We both agree on a few things: CIOs look for trusted partnerships more than products; they rely on their peers and staff for advice on what to buy; and the best route to the CIO’s office is up from the lower levels in the organization. In other words: stop focusing your pitch solely on CIOs because that’s a lousy way to actually reach them!

Click here to read the blog entry and listen to the podcast.

Tech PR War Stories Episode 11: our guest is Sam Whitmore

Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey is one of the most influential publications in the high-tech PR community, and David Strom and I were fortunate to have Sam himself as a guest on Tech PR War Stories this week.

We asked Sam to talk about the up-and-coming influencers in IT media and his response surprised me. He’s evidently looking at media that tap into the real issues that IT pros wrestle with week-to-week more than new publishers and editors. He also had a lot to say about the ethos of the blogosphere and how PR pros should work with this new class of journalist. Bottom line: deal with it. These are the new journalists and their ethics and practices aren’t all that different from the folks you’ve dealt with for years.

Good stuff from a thought leader who pulls no punches.