Morgan McLintic on PR

Blog stress

Just wanted to reassure all those of you who have read today's New York Times piece, that my prolific blogging is in no way impacting my health. Running a PR firm's a killer though.

Technorati Tags: blogging, NYT, stress

Farewell Navigator, Hello Flock

RIP Netscape Navigator - AOL today finally stops maintenance and support for the browser many of us used in the 90s. I liked Navigator though in later years it became hopelessly bloated on the Mac platform. Its demise is the stuff of anti-competitive history.

From the ashes of NetScape, both Firefox and now Flock were born. Flock is a social media browser, so as well as all the basic web browsing you'd expect, it also connects to FB, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. There's also blog integration (from whence this post), social bookmarking with del.icio.us and an in-built RSS reader. Or you can easily subscribe to your fave online or offline reader from the navbar.

At first, Flock is rather confusing since it has a persistent window on the left hand side with people in your networks or web clippings, as well as streaming pictures across the top, in addition to tabbed browsing and your toolbar favorites. That's a lot of information to take in, but after some acclimatization it becomes more understandable.

I always find with new apps which you rely on so much, such as email or browser, any change can take some getting used to. Now that I have it configured, I quite like Flock. Sure, there isn't the full suite of Extensions you're used to on Firefox and no-one has yet volunteered a single new Theme, but it's clean, fast and has some great features which might suit the social media maven.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Netscape, Firefox

Connecting Twitter and Facebook

Facebook's Status and Twitter serve largely the same purpose - short updates on what you are doing. Updating both individually is duplication, meaning often people prefer either/or.

But you can get them to mirror one another.* [See update below - choose just one of these].

Feeding Facebook's Status with all your Twitter updates is relatively easy. Twitter has a Facebook Application which now allows the integration of the two. Simply add the Application, the hit the 'Want Twitter to update your Facebook status?' option at the top of the page and allow the Application access to Facebook. Usefully it prepends 'twittering:' to your tweets to solve Facebook's additonal 'is' in the status.

Feeding Twitter with your Facebook Status is more convoluted since Twitter doesn't offer a reciprocal arrangement directly (that I can find). But it does have APIs - enter TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed will allow you to import any RSS content into Twitter - like your blog for instance. Or your Facebook Status. Finding the RSS feed for your FB Status is a little tricky. Here's how - go to your Profile, hit See All on your Mini-Feed, choose Status Stories in the right hand sidebar and on the bottom right, you'll see 'Subscribe to these stories: My Status'. This is the RSS feed for your Facebook Status. Thanks to Jeff Sandquist at MS for this tip.

Now you need to log into TwitterFeed which requires an OpenID login. You may already have one if you have a Yahoo or Wordpress account. If not, it's relatively simple and free via IDProxy. Once in TwitterFeed, you can add in your Facebook Status feed. TwitterFeed only updates every hour, or every 30 minutes if you change the options, so this is not real-time. But it should mirror the two to an extent.

One thing which is interesting is which social network will end up as the ultimate publisher. Like others, I've used Tumblr as the aggregator of my Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and blog feeds on Morganutiae. This works as long as those are all separate RSS streams. Now they are starting to merge themselves, you get repetition at the top level on Tumblr. More importantly, which will become the departure site of choice. If you can get Facebook and Twitter to mirror one another - when it comes to status updates, it doesn't matter so much.

*UPDATE - Getting both Twitter and Facebook Status to mirror one another actually turns out not work since they both end up self-replicating the same content in an endless echo chamber. Both of these systems work, but it should be unidirectional only. So it's best to just choose the input interface you prefer and get that to propagate to the other.

Morganutiae

You can now find all my updates to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Del.icio.us and PodBean on my Tumblelog - Morganutiae. If you're unfamiliar with Tumblr it takes feeds from a number of social media sites and general RSS feeds and aggregates them in a lightweight, sparsely formatted blog.

I've called mine Morganutiae because there's probably more detail there than anyone might need but it was quick to set up and I really like Tumblr's clean interface. It's interesting to see the aggregated digital output for each day. Sometimes it's just the odd tweet or FB update. Others, like today, there's video, blog posts, tweets and even a very short podcast. For those with enough time on their hands, the feed is here. Those who are yet to set up their own blog and who don't need much customization might consider Tumblr as their platform.

Technorati Tags: Morgan McLintic

If you can't beat 'em

Technorati Tags: MSM, NYT, TechCrunch

Nick Leonard is blogging

Nick Leonard, MD of OCTANE, is blogging. In fact he has been for about a month, so this post is overdue. Nick is one of the best and funniest creative writers I know. So what's his blog like? I'll leave you to find out...

Disclosure - I'm not sure whether this is really necessary, but just in case, OCTANE is a division of my firm, LEWIS. I've known Nick for about eleven years as a result. He's now heading OCTANE and has already opened in France and Germany and moved into swanky new offices in Victoria, London. Impressive stuff imho.

Technorati Tags: OCTANE PR, Nick Leonard

TechCrunch UK is back

After a hiatus since Jan, TechCrunch UK relaunches with Mike Butcher at the helm. Good to see a focal point for emerging Internet companies in the UK (and newly added Ireland!), and personally a great way for me to keep in touch with the scene over there. Good stuff and good luck.

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch

Tom Foremski celebrates three years as a 'journalist blogger'

Silicon Valley Watcher editor, Tom Foremski, has clocked up three years as a professional 'journalist blogger'. He left the Financial Times in May 2004, starting SVW later that summer. He was the first mainstream journalist, writing for an established and respected daily, to jump the fence into full-time blogging. And three years later he's still going strong.

Not only did he foresee the changes in the MSM, but also predicted some of the changes to the PR industry. For instance, it was under Tom's instigation that the whole social media press release initiative was born.

Congratulations Tom - and thanks.

Technorati Tags: MSM, PR, blogging, Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski

BBC Online adds social bookmarking to news

The BBC Online has added social bookmarking links to its News and Sports stories. Readers can bookmark articles via del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon. Given the BBC's reach and ability to cover news in depth, i expect we'll start to see more Beeb news filtering into social media news sites, provided it can break news fast enough.

Technorati Tags: BBC Online, social media

Clogger launches Copypunk

Tired of baiting Scoble, Silky's launching a new blog about copywriting called Copypunk. I love his insight and cutting humor. Subscribed.