OPEN

A
frenetic week last week left little time for keeping up with my favourite
blogs, never mind writing my own.

I usually manage to find time to write for this blog by aggregating lots of scraps of spare time, keeping a virtual scrapbook in Microsoft OneNote (an excellent utility) of stuff I’d like to comment on or share, and actually writing posts while waiting for meetings to start or on trains. When I’m at my most prolific it usually means I’ve temporarily given up sleeping. Last week it was all swept away.

Now, I’m a bit behind so this post is a smorgasbord of bits from the last 10 days or so that I want to share (and bring us all up to date):

BusinessWeek on Wikis, blogs and IM at work:

A thought-provoking piece on BusinessWeek online about how
many companies are embracing blogs,
wikis and instant messenger systems internally.

Micropersuasion:
Wikipedia breaks into the top ten US news & information websites

The
rise of the Wikipedia phenomenon continues. Mr Rubel tips the company as "the
next Google" – he goes on to explain his rationale for this at length
here.

New
York Times: Placing Ads in Some Surprising Spaces

The
New York Times covers the use of "non-traditional media" by
advertisers, focusing on the Budget car rental campaign in the US, which used
blogs around a multi-city treasure hunt promotion, apparently to great success.
Scott Deaver, executive vice president for marketing at Budget’s car rental
says: "I can’t outspend Hertz," Mr. Deaver added, "but I can
outsmart them."

Wired:
Blogging with a wooden tongue

The
French have a much more eloquent put-down term for corporate-speak: la
langue de bois, the "wooden tongue." Have a look at the article (click on the headline above) for more on the subject.

BBC
Online: BBC launches local news pilot

Noted
with interest, following ITV’s lacklustre (so far) trial of ITV Local in
Brighton & Hove and Hastings. Like ITV, the BBC is looking to citizen
journalists to contribute content.

Media
Guerrilla: RSS + SMS + PR 

Interesting
take on the capabilities of Yahoo!’s new alert services.

Think
Secret: Apple’s new media experience coming soon

While
we’re still reeling from Christmas, Apple will unleash its Apple Expo launch-fest on us in
January. ThinkSecret, a site with a history of being first out there with Apple
leaks, thinks that there will be a new content distribution system being
unveiled. I am very, very interested in what that will be, given my views on
content distribution and the future of PR.

Guardian:
Guardian launches new RSS reader

Haven’t
played with this enough to give comment on its usefulness yet, but noteworthy
as yet another new media initiative from Farringdon Road.

BBC:
Blogging makes journalism interactive

A
paean to the power of connected media by Go Digital‘s Bill Thompson. He
describes bloggers as complementary to media and the increased interactivity as
a check on lazy or willfully inaccurate hacks. Top read.

Union
Square Ventures: the sale of del.icio.us

As
Yahoo! assimilates another top Web 2.0 company, the brilliant (I use it and love it) del.icio.us bookmarks/folksonomy site, read the insider’s view on the
blog of a pleased-as-punch VC who put up cash eight month’s ago and is seeing
his return before Christmas in the same year. Boom? What boom?

Buzzmachine:
The last presses

An
extended monologue from Jeff Jarvis about the death of print, that’s a
must-read for anyone interested in the media. The headline is taken from a
comment from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who noted that the printing
presses the paper invested in to launch its new berliner format could well be
the last the Guardian ever has – in other words in 30 years time there is
unlikely to be such a thing a s a printed newspaper. Mr Jarvis is encouraging debate around this topic on his blog as he prepares to adapt the
post for a column in the Guardian.

Ben Metcalfe: Les
Blogs: blogger love-in turns sour

Les
Blogs in Paris was meant to be a blogger love-in, but its all gone a bit Stones-at-Altamont. Have a look at Ben Metcalfe’s account of it (click on headline). Ben describes public denunciations (of him) and shamings on his blog and
the battle is still going on. Mena Trott, founder of blog hosting and software
service, Typepad (on which this blog is hosted), gives her account here. (Full disclosure: I really wish I’d been able to make it to Les Blogs and not just for the fighting.)