New media news aggregator site 'Mediagazer'

I learned about today's launch of a new media aggregator site called Mediagazer, which aims to "present the day’s must-read media news on a single page."

I love media news. I don't care if it's the latest Rupert Murdoch-content provider squabble, I try to read as much as I can get. So I'm ready for Mediagazer. We all seems to get news from everywhere these days, but a concise approach for media news may work for many people. I like the idea of that. This info below comes from its blog page:

"The media business is in tumult: from the production side to the distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry. What do news organizations need to do to survive? Will books become extinct? When will an audience pay for content? Can video bring television and the internet together? Will the iPad save us all? Keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, as essential media coverage is scattered across numerous web sites at any given moment.

Mediagazer simplifies this task by organizing the key coverage in one place. We’ve combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors to present the one indispensible narrative of an industry in transition. We collect relevant takes on an issue and package them together in a comprehensive group of links. That way, you not only get the lead opinion on an issue, but you can easily find the supporting, opposing, smart, controversial, notable, and previously unseen viewpoints. You get the big picture.

We make it easy for you to get your media news fix. If you want to share the latest media news with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, you can use the easy “share” button next to the headline title. (See more here.) If you’re on the go, you can easily access Mediagazer on your smartphone by viewing mediagazer.com/m in your mobile browser, though mediagazer.com will redirect there on iPhone and Android devices. If you have a simpler phone, mediagazer.com/mini will bring you the same information in a simpler display."

Try it out and see how you like it - drop comments below. I'd appreciate that.

The Strategic Value of Community Relations

Phoenix-based Avnet hosts a Business Marketing Association seminar on "The Strategic Value of Community Relations." The seminar will be held on Tuesday, March 9th (tomorrow!) at 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm at Avnet HQ (2211 South 47th Street, Phoenix).

Speaking on the topic will be Teri Radosevich, VP-Community Relations for Avnet, Inc. and Shelly M. Esque, Intel Corp.'s VP-Legal and Corporate Affairs, as well as Director of the Corporate Affairs Group.

From the blurb:
"Join us as we tap into the expertise of two local and very accomplished executives from Fortune 200 companies that work to represent community outreach and corporate responsibility for their firms. Learn about the strategy behind the service, the expected and unexpected outcomes of execution, and how you can integrate simple but effective ways to improve your employee engagement and brand… all while making a difference in the community."

Click here to register. $10 for members, $25 for non-members.

State of the Internet (by Jesse Thomas)

The State of the Internet - Lots of Numbers! Read more at the blog of Jesse Thomas who put this together. (Made aware of this by Evo_Terra - thx)

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

O' Dwyer PR Agency Rankings

PR Newser had a fine piece about veteran PR industry newsletter O'Dwyer's Public Relations News seeking to gain some fees from large PR agencies, or risk being dropped from its rankings of PR firms.

It seems that O'Dwyer wants $2,000 for agencies with $2M in fees, $3,000 for those with $5M-$10M in fees, and $5,000 for those with $10M and more. Founder Jack O'Dwyer himself goes on in PR Newswer's comments about his rationale - some of it makes sense, and some of it sounds like sour grapes. Here's part of what he wrote below - Click over to PR Newser for the full rant.

"Wagged (Waggener Edstrom) likes being No. 2 on our list but only wants to have one $295 subscription for their 840 employees. No wonder media are going out of business right and left. Despite attempts to smear us as "charging for ads," what I'm charging for is website access for firms with scores and even hundreds of employees who want to get by with one subscription. I'm not going to rank them if they treat us in this unfair manner. PR firms are cooperative and even-handed with the press. They don't play favorites. Firms who act like the penny-pinching ones we're going to toss from our rankings are not PR firms and don't belong on our rankings."

This might be too inside baseball, major-city PR stuff for any readers of this blog, but having been there before earlier in my life, I can see the shitstorm that's being kicked up. On one hand, O'Dwyer's is a PR industry publisher, surely PO'd about the major players buying one lousy subscription to pass around the office. On the other hand, perhaps O' Dwyer's industry insights and rankings don't play as large a role in clients and companies choosing PR firms as they used to. And the agencies are themselves getting less in fees than they used to, so they cut corners where they can. Ah PR times, they are a-changing.

Yelp, the lawsuit and its CEO response

I like Yelp, the online listings user-review site. For many of us, Yelp is our first online stop before we check out a new business, restaurant, club and other services and products providers.

And Yelp is expanding here in the Phoenix Valley, seeking sales people to reach out to the Valley's business establishments. And the startup continues to throw fun soirees for its loyal members. As a user, I've been fortunate to be invited to several cool Yelp events over the past 18 months.



But I'm not a business owner who has a listing on Yelp. (Though if you are, here are some great tips to supercharge your Yelp listings). Some business owners are stirring up the pot a bit. Last week, Yelp was hit with a lawsuit calling it out for alleged unfair business practices.

TechCrunch wrote: "The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review."

The smart kids at KBuzz recently wrote about Yelp's sales situation and how allegations of negative reviews being buried have surfaced. And the The Wall Street Journal blog covered Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman's blog post in which he wrote about the company's “weird” automated system. From the WSJ:

"So if Yelp is doing nothing wrong, why do these accusations keeping surfacing?

"In Stoppelman’s eyes, it’s partly because of the company’s “weird” automated system that often removes reviews from business pages in order to filter out spam. “Because this is a difficult task, sometimes that results in legitimate reviews being suppressed from business pages,” writes Stoppelman."

At his blog post on Monday, Stoppelman laid out a point for point rebuttal of the claims in Yep's business dealings with advertisers. He wrote:

"Myth #1: Yelp offers to remove or reorder reviews in exchange for money.
Truth: Yelp Sales Representatives sell sponsored search results, enhanced listings and targeted advertisements. Period."

"Myth #2: Yelp's sales department has the ability to suppress and/or add reviews (and this ability is somehow used to coerce would-be advertisers or punish businesses that decline to advertise)
Truth: Our entire sales department is prohibited from creating any review content on the site. No member of the sales department has the administrative capability to remove reviews."

[Yelp even goes to lengths on its site to dispel the myths about its listing procedures and business operations.]

CEO Stoppelman concluded in his post with: "As I've said, many might say we're weird, but we have nothing to hide. We're doing things differently, but we have never and will never extort businesses; the accusation is beyond ludicrous. In fact, it's deeply ironic that the very mechanisms and processes we've created to preserve Yelp's integrity generate these accusations that we have no integrity. Millions of people rely on Yelp each week to figure out where to spend their hard-earned money and thousands of business owners benefit from the word-of-mouth Yelpers provide. We know this case is without merit, and we will continue to fight these false claims aggressively, as well as fight the guys who are actually being shady with reviews."

My hope is that Yelp can overcome these allegations. Plenty of new business get hit with lawsuits. Google,Microsoft, Facebook - they've all been the recipient of lawsuits about business practices. Heck, even the team behind the Farmville game (Zynga) has been hit with class action suits. Maybe it's a rite of passage for our next emerging corporate titans. Time will tell.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project 2010

Last week, The Pew Internet and American Life Project released this year's "The Future of the Internet IV" its fourth look at how the Internet is changing our daily lives. The organizers asked some 900 or so smart thinkers, industry pros and academic leaders the following questions:

* Will Google make us stupid?
* Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
* Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
* Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
* Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

Some of the surveyed responses to the questions help form the Pew report. Here's a sampling.
* Will Google make us stupid?
"What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking." - Nicolas Carr

* Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
"We are currently transitioning from reading mainly on paper to reading mainly on screens. As we do so, most of us read MORE, in terms of quantity (word count), but more promiscuously and in shorter intervals and with less dedication. As these habits take root, they corrupt our willingness to commit to long texts, as found in books or essays. We will be less patient and less able to concentrate on long-form texts. This will result in a resurgence of short-form texts and story-telling, in ‘Haiku-culture’ replacing ‘book-culture.’" – Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine

* Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
"For me augmented reality has to be the future for 2020, together with it's close cousin the internet of things. I think that these two will grow up together over the coming years, and slowly creep more and more into our daily lives as more and more devices become web enabled, and the ability to connect to the web becomes ubiquitous. It will become commonplace to be able to overlay reviews of a product simply by pointing a screen at it, or check the weather forecast by pointing your phone at the sky." – Rich Osborne, Web Innovation Officer, University of Exeter

* Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
"This will be an ongoing debate, particularly when traditional organizations see the Internet encroaching on their legitimacy and relevance in the Internet Age. These groups will flail around to protect their business models and perceived relevance, but there will be equally powerful capabilities emerging from the Internet community that will break through/counter those new controls/restrictions on the flows of information." -- Richard Forno, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

* Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
"The key here is ‘publicly disclosing’ -- that is, folks can maintain anonymity in the basic sense, but there will be more technical ways to identify the user, even by associations and patterns as well as IP. That is, folks will continue to be able to choose to post things anonymously -- more accurately, via pseudonym, where they have an ongoing identity, but not their identifiable real self -- but there will also be more systems requiring identification." -- Ron Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project produces reports exploring the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The Project aims to be an authoritative source on the evolution of the Internet through surveys that examine how Americans use the Internet and how their activities affect their lives. Always a good read.

Using Google Hard Drive (via Google Docs)

Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson writes today:
"A month ago, Google announced it would provide users a free, online hard drive through Google Docs. We tried it out over the weekend. It's awesome. Here's how you can use it, too."

Here's Google's original blog post - "...upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online. Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to backup large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud."

It's all about online file storage. You have you own local storage on your laptop, PC of Mac. And maybe you might even use an external hard drive, storage keys or discs to capture some of your critical files. And there are other services to use like Drop.io or Drop Box. But are you willing to upload your files to Google? I am. However, some of the more paranoid commenters in the link above feel you shouldn't. I guess it depends on your comfort level with sharing files online. One commenter shared a link about Google's privacy info regarding Web History (you can read more about that here).

Click here to follow the slideshow and start saving your goods to go on Google's hard drive to access from any Web connected computer.

Tiger Woods, Mea Culpa and a Fall from Grace

The world stopped at 9am this morning for Tiger Woods' staged apology show. Crazy enough that all the networks broke regular programming for this, but even crazier with all the control aspects around it. All the camera angles were pre-planned, the set was dark blue somber, and it looked as if Tiger spent the last two months rehearsing this.

But he did what he was coached to do, and he did it to the the T. The ultimate coachable athlete, I guess. The question is, was this staged apology show executed well enough to gain him favor with his audiences again? A spin around the web shows difference in opinion:

- The Wall Street Journal opined: "Executives in hot water, take note: You could learn a thing or two from Tiger Woods' apology Friday. Communications experts said Mr. Woods' frank but stiff speech provides lessons in what to do – and not to do – for business leaders when delivering bad news or facing a scandal. Good, they say, is forthright language: "I was unfaithful. I had affairs, I cheated," Mr. Woods said. But giving a speech in so scripted a way, and waiting so long to do it, isn't."

- MTV quoted public relations guru Howard Bragman of Fifteen Minutes PR, who said "What wasn't smart, Bragman said, was the tightly scripted nature of the event, which was boycotted by many members of the golf press, who decried being shut out. "I hate the format," Bragman said. "He's basically at war with the media, which is not what you want to do. ... He picked a fight by not putting himself in a traditional media format and not answering questions."

- Gawker wrote in a terrificly titled piece "Tiger Woods buries himself in recovery cliches" the following: "Then there was the weird part where he brought up being raised a Buddhist (his mom looked distinctly uncomfortable at that point), but said he had "drifted away from it in recent years." (No kidding.) Then he said, "Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint." Again, this felt forced and false."

- The Washington Post offered: "He apologized to almost everyone he had ever crossed paths with. He looked sad and choked up at times. He said that he had learned from his mistakes and is still learning after spending 45 days in a rehabilitation center -- though he never specifically mentioned where he had gone seeking help. He tried very hard to sound humbled.

He didn't pull it off."

No, he didn't. Too weird, too late. Let's all forget it and move on. The Waste Management Phoenix Golf Open is next weekend. Enjoy all the other golfers out there!

The New Media Future - Wired Magazine

A cool inside look at how digital technology is changing the way Wired Magazine is seeing the future of digital editorial matter and how the new visual innovations are changing the way we view 'journalism' - this video shows how Wired puts it all together with advertising, editorial, visual innovations, new relationships and more - sharp eye to the future.

Upcoming Business-Media-Marketing Events in Phoenix

It's business-media-marketing social season here in the Valley of the Sun and I wanted to pass along a few of the worthy ones coming up.

* February 18 - The Enterprise Network’s February Executive Forum features Brian Mueller, CEO of Grand Canyon University (GCU). He'll talk about how his team worked to turn around the university's fortunes to become a thriving public company with a market cap of more than $800 million. GCU is the only Arizona company to hold a successful IPO following the financial markets meltdown in the fall of 2008. (Register here)

* February 23 - It's the Networking Phoenix big free quarterly networking fest - already, some 600-plus people are registered to attend. It's the Valley's biggest free networking event. (Register here)

* February 24 - Maximize Search Marketing Opportunities. Presented by SEMPO, this event features Bill Hunt, author of the bestselling book “Search Engine Marketing, Inc.” Hunt has been a pioneer in Search Marketing and is considered the top thought leader on Enterprise and Global Search Engine Marketing. (Register here)

* February 24 - Mobile Marketing Strategy, presented by AMA Phoenix. Sean Bartlett, Director of Mobile Strategy for Tempe-based Sitewire will show you how to make the most out of your mobile marketing plan through case studies and discussion of today's mobile marketing ecosystem, best practices, mobile/traditional marketing synthesis and how to measure your efforts. (Register here)

* February 24 - TiE AZ's Mentoring Event - TiE AZ is hosting Mentorfest! on Feb 24th. It's a unique group mentoring event that gives start-up entrepreneurs a chance to learn from the TiE-Arizona mentors and other senior community entrepreneurs in a casual group setting. (Register here)

* February 24-25 - Building and Protecting Reputation 2010 A two-day event aimed at corporate communicators, business thought leaders and others. This conference is a short course into the dynamics of organizational reputation, and how to manage it. It is also about the role communications and public relations can and should play in helping senior management and employees build and protect an organization’s reputation. (Register here)

* March 18 - Produce a business news video in a day -
Part of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference from March 19-21 at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix. Arizona State University TV-production specialist Brian Snyder will equip you with the skills and build your confidence to shoot business news videos in this daylong training session. Register here.

If you know of more similar AZ events coming soon, please add links and info in the comments.