AOL vs. Digg
You know I like Digg, right? I’m sure I’ve mentioned the tech news community
where the top stories are decided by the votes of the members before. Just once
or twice.
This week AOL gave Digg the sincerest form flattery and established a new
service under the old Netscape brand that will bring the news community concept
to its millions of customers. Netscape, which is in its beta – public test –
phase at the moment, has around thirty "channels" of different types
of news.
Many see the move by AOL as a spoiler for Digg’s own non-geeky, general news
service which Digg itself says will launch in a couple of weeks time.
News aggregators and "meme trackers" like these are going to
become increasingly powerful forces in the market for people’s attention. In the meantime,
expect the wraps to come off a few more Digg-a-like services from major online
brands. Mark my words.
PR communities online
If you read blogs regularly, or you’ve just tried out some of the tips in
last week’s Electronic Media supplement you’ll know that there is a thriving
community of PRs in the
Here are two new online resources that use the Digg approach that are well
worth a look and adding to your RSS reading list (if you have one, if you don’t
get one soon!):
- New PR (newpr.crispynews.com):
a bit like Digg, people submit stories they like to this service and then
others vote for the ones they find most useful - Marktd (www.marktd.com): As with New PR, Marktd takes the Digg model for community news but includes all forms of marketing.
Who knows, when the PR Business website is up and running and PR Week gets rid of its password protected pay-walls maybe we will be able to proudly share and discuss our favourite articles from our [UK] trade mags with PR and marketing colleagues around the world.
[PR Business’s editor has since committed to a launch date of 27th June – hurrah!]
I am the one in ten (bloggy newspaper readers)
As a PR you should know not to trust statistics at face value but ask first
what agenda they are serving. While there seem to be hundreds of surveys about
blogging out there, many are next to useless because of sloppy methodologies,
usually because they have been carried out merely to generate a cheap shot news
angle.
Thank goodness, then for Universal McCann, the media buying agency which has
produced a credible picture of blog reading habits around the world. The
survey, among newspaper readers found that 13% of
in the US.
This is no great surprise.
America has a head-start in the uptake of blogging and blog-reading. Rather than think
of how few people read blogs here as opposed to over there, I would say that
more than one in ten newspaper readers also looking at blogs, when a little
over a year ago people barely knew what they were is a sign that they should be
taken very seriously indeed.
More concerning is that only 5% of those asked said they would trust
something they read on a blog as opposed to information in a quality newspaper
which 55% . Perhaps the lack of trust is down to the very new-ness of the
medium, but it seems to speak against the "more likely to trust people
like me" thesis put forward by the Edelman Trust Barometer thesis, or
maybe people prefer not to think of "bloggers" in general as being at
all like them.
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