Just last night, I made moves to edit an online Wiki piece that profiled me in an unfavourable light, (alert PR person that I am). A PR forum had asked for crisis PR contributions to an online Wiki and I duly supplied. Unfortunately for me in the edit process, a highly prejudicial, unconnected and unflattering phrase accidentally appeared next to my name and email address. So I asked the moderator to review and remedy this accident, and he promotly did. So, does this make me a Wiki-manipulating monster? Hardly. From a PR viewpoint, I’m with the Aussie Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, who believes it is entirely legitimate to correct factual inaccuracies that appear in the online arena. After all, if left unchecked or uncorrected, they can unfairly damage reputation. And gues what? There are reputation assasins out there people!!
For the media to paint all Wiki edits as devious or sly is wrong. Same for Wikiscanner the website that traces the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to entries in Wikipedia. What the media and Wikiscanner have in common is the desire to spotlight the appearance of wrongdoing, without looking into whether the edits were justifiable. In my small case, I believe the changes were entirely for the better.

Todd Andrlik has a goodie on all you ever wanted to know about blogging(but were afraid to ask in case it made you look behind the times)

Constantin Basturea blogs news that a clutch of academics have given the Wal-Mart fake blog thingo a good going over, analysing the case every which way including sidewards.

Lee Hopkins is giving free presentations away by the lorryful (well, two anyway)

Keep up the interesting work guys, thanks.

Now if she were appointed judge of this case, that´d be an episode worth recording, eh?

Two senior level communicators are among five execs named in a lawsuit seeking damages over the fuel surcharge price-fixing for which British Airways was fined $300m (£150) yesterday, Guardian scribes Wearden and Milmo report:.
“The scandal began in August 2004 when BA’s then head of communications, Iain Burns, called his counterparts at Virgin Atlantic. He told them that BA was considering raising its fuel surcharge - the levy it puts on tickets to cover the rising cost of oil. Shortly afterwards, both companies simultaneously increased the charge. The other senior comms practitioner named in the lawsuit, filed by Washington law firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, is Paul Moore, Virgin Atlantic’s former communications director. Willy Boulter, the current commercial director of Virgin Atlantic makes up the flying five.
Moore is rumoured to have resurfaced lately at FirstGroup, the UK’s largest transport firm, as PA and comms director, says the Plane Facts blog.

The ole jargonmeister and journalist Simon Sharwood alerted me to this botched PR job from a company called ásiarelease´. Worse still, this outfit, promising targeted online news distribution, was formerly PRWebAsia, its website claims. Here´s a quote from their site:
“We precisely target the right media for you in the right countries in the right language – and at the right price. Or, we can distribute information to your own lists with delivery reports.” (Or we can spam and irritate Australian journalists). Simon´s gripe is that this company has been distributing press releases to a wide variety of Australian IT media. The releases have almost zero relevance to Australian audiences. So, news dissemination or international spam, we´re left to wonder?

Content is ´economic´king
All you comms Pro´s out there may be interested in looking at the latest Ofcom technology use report looking at trends and developments in the UK’s communications market. As the report states “statistics suggest that in terms of Gross Value Added, telecoms, broadcasting and the content-related components of the creative industries contribute over three times as much as the UK’s electricity, gas and water supply industries combined.” See, we media types do contribute something to society after all! And it tells us heaps about the popularity of and growth in the channels that we use to feed messages and receive feedback from our stakeholders and other audiences.
UK - a nation of social networkers
Analysis of time spent online reveals that Britain is a nation of shoppers and social networkers. More time was spent on eBay than on any other web site, and social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten sites by time spent. Women aged 25-34 spend over 20% more time online than their male counterparts. ‘Silver surfers’ also account for an increasing amount of internet use with nearly 30% of total time spent on the internet accounted for by over-50s (although, as over-50s account for 41% of the UK population, their internet usage remains significantly lower than average).
Seven hrs every day on comms and web usage
Ofcom estimates that, on average, each person now spends more than seven hours cumulatively every day watching, listening, making phone calls and web-browsing. Driving this is the widening availability of increasingly sophisticated telecoms services and a greater amount of ‘converged’ equipment, capable of receiving services from more than one operator and over multiple platforms.
Death knell for old TV?
Ofcom also commissioned new research which looks at the impact on traditional media of two key digital technologies: the mobile phone and the digital video recorder (DVR). Almost 78% of DVR owners claiming that they regularly fast forward through advertisements while watching recorded programmes, and growing substitution of the new generation of high specification mobile handsets for devices such as cameras, portable music players and games consoles. More than 75% of 11 year olds claim that they own each of: TV sets, games consoles and mobile phones. If you aint got heaps of time, here are some toplines I picked out for you… Read more

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