Posts by Techwriter10

Thanks for the post and I agree completely. It's a simple fix and it's strictly the lawyers going after this guy. As I wrote, he stated on his Home page that the AIR evangelists are on his side. But a move like this makes Adobe look bad and it's really completely unnecessary. I actually use a few AIR apps and I like them very much. I have plans to write about them at some point, but when Adobe pulls a stunt like this, it's hard to ignore.

Nothing's wrong as far as I can see
We make it harder than it has to be
and I can't tell you why
~Eagles, I Can’t Tell You Why.

Apple and Adobe have both gotten some press lately for going to the trademark police after a couple of small business people had the audacity to publicize their products by including corporate trademarks in their business name. First there was the case of Apple going after The iPod Mechanic as reported by my colleague Davey Winder (aka Happy Geek) in his Inside Edge blog. Now comes news from ReadWriteWeb that Adobe is going after a guy for setting up a web site called FreshAIRapps, which apparently violates the sanctity of the Adobe AIR (all caps) trademark. Enough is enough.

These companies fail to understand there is a bright line between a trademark violation and using the trademark in a legitimate fashion to promote a business that’s a natural off-shoot of the brand. Perhaps if the two site owners had actually pretended to be representing the companies in question, Adobe and Apple might have a genuine beef here, but all indications are they didn’t. They simply honored the products involved by including the names of the products they were working with. The iPod Mechanic fixes iPods. Imagine that. FreshAIRapps provides a site for AIR developers to show case their AIR Apps. Nothing wrong with that as far as I can …

It seems to me that it's Viacom that is being irresponsible and possibly illegal here. What possible grounds could they have for going on such a wholesale fishing expedition that they have to see the logs including user information. Why would they need to see user information at all? More importantly, what could that judge have possibly been thinking?

My proposal is this: If Viacom doesn't want to deal with Google, give them what they want and strike them from the Google index. That would teach them a tough lesson indeed. At any rate, this whole thing has clearly gone way too far and both parties need to take a step back and do the right thing by YouTube's users.

I’ve been highly critical of many of Microsoft’s moves lately, mostly because they have felt like the awkward ramblings of a company one step behind the curve, but the other day Microsoft made, what in my view, is a smart play. They bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based semantic search company and with it, they got themselves a nice piece of technology that could vault them ahead of the pack.

Semantic search involves looking beyond keywords at the meaning of the search itself. When you search for “jaguar” are you looking for information on the car, the operating system or the animal? The context of your search, information about your location and machine, other searches you’ve made; can all give contextual clues as to what your true intent is. At the very least, it can give you tools to begin to break down the search to be more meaningful for you.

It would seem on its face, that this purchase is a pure play to one-up Google by buying this technology while it’s still fresh, but John Blossom speculates on his ContentBlogger blog that Microsoft is really going after Ask more than Google with this purchase. Blossom writes:

“Given Powerset's ability to parse natural language questions as well as to provide "factz" topic clusters that could draw in related content, the target for Microsoft has to be the revived Ask.com portal as much as Google's leading search engine.”

But when …

Seconds after I posted this, I got an email from Apple with a link to a preview of the 3G iPhone.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/guidedtour/tour/large.html

You might have woken up this morning to a distant noise not unlike the pounding of hoof beats. Yesterday you could see the dust cloud forming far off on the horizon, but today, July 1st, it’s a little easier to hear the slow and steady march toward July 11th when Apple releases its second generation iPhone. The masses have been champing at the bit, waiting, waiting for their $199 iPhone and as the day draws closer, the number of blog entries increase and the drumming grows ever louder.

I know I’m not the only one who has been having an internal debate about whether or not now is the time to finally get one. When the first generation iPhone came out last June, I admit I lusted for one, but the price tag kept my desire at bay (unlike the immensely talented David Pogue who had to have one as he articulated in this hilarious NYT video). I wrote an entry called I Think Therefore I Won’t iPhone (for now) in which I argued that as much as I wanted one, I just couldn’t justify $500 for a phone (the opening day price you may recall for a 4GB iPhone). It seems I was wise to hold back.

Starting July 11th, I can get an 8GB second generation iPhone for the reasonable price of $199 U.S. Now, that’s more like it. Not only do I get double the storage of the debut model, I …

Thanks for the comments. I agree with what you say. I'm not sure what Microsoft will do, but I know if it were me, I wouldn't invest in Vista regardless of what Microsoft says Windows 7 will or won't be. I don't see people switching from XP until they have to, but when they do, if they are evaluating the options, Linux absolutely, in my view, has to be on the table as an option. At that point, it's a matter of if a flavor of Linux can meet the needs of the individual organization.

Interesting follow-up to this piece. I found this discussion started by Stan Beer on iTWire in which he proposes that the Asus Eee is the Linux Trojan Horse, which mirrors the idea I presented in my conclusion to this entry. Very interesting discussion going on here. I encourage you to check it out:

http://discuss.itwire.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=49

Great point. Thanks for the links and the comment.

Sorry, screwed up the Dvorak paragraph. Fixed it so it now reads he only postulated. He didn't argue and postulate. Darn. Sorry, heat is getting to me.

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently wrote a piece on his fine Practical Technology blog called Dear Microsoft, Thanks for the help, Linux in which he argues that Microsoft’s ill-timed decision to cut off easy access to XP tomorrow (June 30th) combined with its announcement it would be releasing the next version of Windows in January, 2010 effectively lends a death blow to Vista and creates a huge opportunity for desktop Linux. With all due respect to my esteemed colleague, this is not the first time I’ve heard such a prediction.

I am certainly not as immersed in Linux coverage as Vaughan-Nichols, but I’ve covered it enough (and been around the block a few times too) to have heard this line of thinking a couple of times before. In fact, back in May, 2004 I wrote an article for Linux Planet called Is Linux Desktop at the Crossroads?

The opening at that time was the 12-24 month window created by delays of the Longhorn OS. Longhorn, you may recall was the code name for the Microsoft OS that would become Vista. Red Monk Analyst Stephen O’Grady argued at the time that Linux desktop had an opening to capture some market share during the delay in shipping Vista. Vaughan-Nichols, by the way, points out that experience dictates that Windows 7 actual ship date will in all likelihood slip beyond the announced January, 2010 ship date, leaving a similar window as last time.

…

Apple may have a point, but they are way over the top here. This is a small business person after all. He may have taken liberties with the iPod name, but one side is a mega corporation and the other is an average joe trying to make a living. Triple damages seems a bit much.

Thanks for the link. Very interesting.

I actually think that's an entirely plausible scenario, but it's also possible it was rejected and leaked anyway. My feeling is that you can never underestimate the stupidity of a corporation. :)

Quick correction: The December 2007 concert was Led Zeppelin's. Fixing that now.

Yesterday a (slightly) risqué ad for JC Penney made the rounds on the internet. It depicted two teens getting ready for a date by timing how fast they could get dressed. At the end of the ad, the boy comes over to the girl’s house and they let the stern looking Mom know they are going to “hang out” in the basement. By late morning, JC Penney officials had foolishly tried to distance themselves from the ad, claiming they never authorized it, all because supposedly it meant they condoned teenage sex.

What JC Penney failed to understand is that this ad did them far more good than harm. The people they want to reach saw it and were talking about JC Penney. When was the last time this 20th century company had any buzz on the internet. How about never? As for the people who think the video condones teen sex, chances are those people aren’t watching YouTube.

My friend, David Meerman Scott (whom I interviewed in this space back in May) wrote a column in the April issue of EContent Magazine in the form of an open letter to Warner Music Group. Scott wondered out loud why WMG would order YouTube to take down fan cell phone videos of Led Zeppelin's December, 2007 reunion concert in London when those videos were likely to stimulate sales of the band’s back catalogue. Instead, the lawyers got caught up in …

Last week Adobe surprised a few people—well, at least it surprised me--with the announcement that it was including Alfresco content management services as part of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1 package. The surprise was two-fold, that Adobe felt it was necessary to add content management services at all and that it chose open source vendor Alfresco as its content management partner. I spoke to Alfresco CEO John Powell to get his perspective on the pact and how it can help push open source into the enterprise mainstream.

Powell is understandably excited by this arrangement and one of the main reasons, he says is because the Adobe partnership gives his company credibility with companies that might otherwise not even sniff at an open source vendor. “Adobe went through a lengthy evaluation and having picked Alfresco, it means we offer a quality enterprise-grade content management system. Working with Adobe gives us a wider access to people who wouldn’t normally have access to open source applications.”

He adds that there are still polarized views about open source inside the enterprise, partly due to FUD spread by companies such as Microsoft. “Definitely some organizations still feel that open source isn’t ready for mission critical applications. If you have that prejudice, it’s difficult [for companies like Alfresco] to overcome.” Working with Adobe can help Alfresco get its open source application in through the back door and let these companies see that it really works.

From Adobe’s perspective, …

Cloud computing or software as a service (SaaS) has a lot of advantages, especially for small and medium sized companies with fewer resources to devote to an IT infrastructure. The cloud vendors, whether Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com (or whatever company) provide all the software and back-end infrastructure support. They even update the software on the fly sparing your company many of the headaches associated with implementation and ongoing maintenance.

Given that all the transactions are actually crossing the internet, however, it would make sense that it would simply add to the increasingly clogged byways of the internet. But when I spoke to representatives from Google and Salesforce.com at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston last week and asked them about this (in separate conversations, I might add), I was surprised to hear them argue the opposite—that Cloud computing could actually *reduce* traffic. Confused? Read on.

As a bit of background, the idea of a clogged internet has been on my mind recently. At the beginning of May I published Will P2P Really Kill the Internet? and a week later I published What Does the Future Hold for the OS? in which I argued that the OS will become increasingly less important as we do more of our computing in the cloud, that is, on the internet. In that post, I got a comment that stated “It won’t happen. I doubt the net could handle that …

You should only buy a product if it's good, not because it's popular, but I've honestly found that this is the best computer I've ever owned and I would buy another one in a heart beat.

I'm writing this on a Mac Book Pro myself, but I'm not blindly buying a product just because it has the Apple label on it, and this product to me is just not a good value.

You're not getting my point--no business as in they won't be getting any business. Fact is .mac did not do very well. My guess is people will look for free or lower-cost services before forking over another $100 to Apple and these alternative services exist already. Your Apple fan boys don't even have to look very hard. Faced with that, I don't see Apple doing very well this. In other words, they will have no business with MobileMe. :)

It's a play on words, linux. You are taking it literally, but you could see it as meaning it doesn't make good business sense to charge for MobileMe.

Little typo in the title. Misspelled MobileMe, but it's fixed now. Must remember to check the title carefully before publishing.

Not everything Apple touches turns to gold, a case in point is the .mac service which has recently been rebranded with not terribly clever moniker: MobileMe. What Apple fails to understand from the get-go is that people expect their cloud services to be free or at least extremely cheap and $99 per year (you can’t fool people by not making it an even hundred, by the way) is simply too much to charge.

If you look at most cloud services, they are free. Google offers almost all its consumers services free of charge in exchange for viewing text ads—no such thing as a free lunch—but most people are willing to make that trade-off. As a consumer, let’s say I own a Mac Book Pro and an iPhone, a scenario that will likely be true when I buy an iPhone next month. I would think that for what I have paid for these devices, Apple would be give me syncing services out of the box for free as a service for being a loyal customer. It should go without saying, but instead, Apple wants to bleed its loyal clientèle for a few more (meaningless) dollars.

To Apple’s credit, they have increased the amount of online disk storage substantially to 20 GB from the meaningless couple of gigs they offered with .mac, but a better approach than charging for 20 GB might be a tiered service structure starting with a free set of basic services including syncing and 5GB of …

When I opened my mail box today and picked up this month’s Streaming Media Magazine, David Caruso, aka Horatio Caine on CSI Miami, stared out at me from the cover in his trademark shades. Not exactly what you expect from a magazine aimed at video geeks, but apparently Caruso is more than an actor, he also has some ideas about how to transform media delivery and has teamed up with two streaming media industry heavy weights to form a new company called Lexicon that has the lofty goal of changing streaming media as we know it.

Caruso has joined forces with Nils Lahr whose resume includes helping define the spec for a codec that would later become MPEG-4 and who was there at some key moments in streaming media history, while the other partner, Frank Nein, has been involved in major event web casting for years.

While the article doesn’t get into a great deal of detail about where Lexicon is headed—partly because it says the company is still developing its products, only surfacing to get some media attention—there are some clues about what they intend to do and it seems to follow two separate tracks.

On one hand, you have Caruso pushing a vision of a mashup platform under the protection of the media brand, so you might be able to have access to every shot from every scene in your favorite show (including maybe even …

On Monday afternoon I arrived in Boston a couple hours ahead of my first event at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and I decided to make a pilgrimage to the new Apple store on Boylston Street.

I guess from the hype around the opening and all I had read about this store, I had set the expectations bar a bit high. When I got there, I found a rather nondescript flat glass front that left me thinking perhaps they would been better off leaving the Fenway Park Green Monster-inspired scaffolding in place. The temperatures outside was pushing 100, so I was looking forward to escaping inside to the air conditioned, climate controlled world. I would be disappointed.

A young man opened the door and welcomed me. As I had read, the whole first floor was devoted to computers. I played with the Mac Book Air for a few minutes and tested how heavy it was. It is surprisingly solid for something that thin. Given the number of employees in this place, and there were a lot, I actually found it difficult to get somebody's attention. Nonetheless, as I ventured up the sleek glass spiral stair case to the iPod-laden second floor, I noticed I was sweating. It was hot in the store too.

I found one of the many employees, a nice kid, who helped me purchase some iKleer to give my Mac Book Pro screen that sheen it had …

Thanks for the comment. I agree it's possible that there's room for that, but the fact that you have to use a sign-on and there is an audit trail means it's probably less likely to happen than it would with the traditional way of sharing information among analysts. And the analysts reviewing that entry would hopefully push back if the information seemed wrong.

Quick correction: The Intellipedia Evangelist's name is Sean Dennehy, not Donnelly as I had written. Working to get that corrected as quickly possible.

I spent the day yesterday at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, all in all a fascinating day and great conference, but what caught my attention was a presentation by two representatives of the CIA, and I’m not talking about the Culinary Institute of America, but *the* CIA, as in the preeminent intelligence gathering organization in the U.S. It seems that the CIA has found that the wiki is a very efficient way to analyze large amounts of information and has dubbed their offering: Intellipedia. Fancy that.

According to speakers Don Burke, who has the very cool title of Intellipedia Doyen (which is defined, by the way, as a senior member of a group—I had to look that one up) and Sean Dennehy, who has the less lofty title of Intellipedia Evangelist, the wiki seemed like a natural fit for a community of intelligence analysts to share information.

But getting his colleagues to see this was not always easy at first. As you would expect in any large organization with a tendency towards institutional inertia, there was a pretty hard push-back and it was even more pronounced in the charged environment of intelligence gathering. In fact, back in 2006 when they were trying to just broach the idea of a wiki, they were accused of being nuts, and worse, of risking the lives of operatives in the field.

But Burke told the old joke about Wikipedia: ‘It doesn’t work in theory, only in practice.’ He …

Hey Eddie:
The newest version of the Eee, the 901 will also ship with the Atom chip set. Its release is imminent, whenever that it is. :)

Tomorrow marks the start of the much-anticipated Apple World Wide Developers Conference. Rumors of all sorts are flying ahead of the conference, but in the midst of all the hype and hoopla is actually some real news as Zoho and Transmedia Glide have announced brand spankin’ new versions of their online software tuned especially for the iPhone.

Zoho has released a new mobile version called iZoho. You can see some pictures of the various apps by following the link. What’s nice is they have obviously put together a version of the application designed to work in a comfortable way inside the iPhone footprint. You can see a list of the most recent documents. Clicking a document opens it in the iPhone. Unfortunately, the screen shots do not reveal what an open document looks like. It’s one thing to list files. It’s another to read it and another level altogether to be able to edit inside a device the size of the iPhone, and what will be interesting is how Zoho deals with these issues. For now, it’s good to know they are thinking about the problem and creating applications that make sense on a small screen.

Transmedia released Glide 3.0 last week with the promise of cross-platform synchronization for the iPhone. They describe it in their press release thusly:

Glide Syncs the 3G iPhone with Windows, Solaris, Linux and Apple Computers and Android, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian and …

Thanks. Glad you liked it.

Ron

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
~Dylan Thomas.

Every once in a while you come across a blog post from a writer that makes you sit up and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that.” That happened today when I stumbled upon Giving Thanks to Bill Gates in David Strom’s Strominator blog. Now, if you’re like me, you might have thought that Strom in a moment of quiet reflection sat down to write a tribute to the good Mr. Gates for his years of valued service to the software industry and his skill at building a corporate juggernaut at Microsoft from humble beginnings. But you would be wrong because Strom in a humorous way without the slightest hint of malice (well, maybe a slight hint) takes Bill Gates to the cleaners.

Gates it turns out has been good for Strom’s career because as he points out his career would have been so much less exciting if Gates and Microsoft had actually made better products. Now I can see the Microsoft fan boys (and you know who you are) getting hot under the collar right about now. Gates, the folk hero to his minions, should not be trifled with in such a way, but lighten up boys. Let’s face it, Microsoft is far from perfect.

Even his most serious …

Google released a shiny new version of its hosted enterprise search product today that includes new custom indexing and a synonym dictionary. While they were at it, Google changed the name of the product to Google Site Search, which replaces the old (rather awkward) moniker Custom Search Business Edition.

If you are like me, you may be wondering how Site Search is different from the free Google search widget I have on my Typepad blog, By Ron Miller. For one, the widget is free and Site Search starts at $100 per month for 5000 pages (reasonable I think by anyone’s pricing benchmark). When you look at results on my blog, you see Google ads, while Site Search results are ad-free. What’s more, using the Google XML API, you can completely customize Site Search results including the order of the results and pages that might not show up in the generic Google results. You can’t do that with the search widget. Finally, you also have control over the look and feel of search results (or you can leave it with Google branding if you prefer to have the power of the Google search brand on your site).

Although it may new to us, some customers have been using it since last summer when Google began rolling out the enhancements to select customers. Jennifer Dyni, Manager of Emerging Technologies at TechSmith, a software vendor that makes SnagIt and Camtasia, says her company has been …

There is an interesting series of articles on climate change in the English version the German magazine, The Spiegel.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,k-6975,00.html

I'm a bit shocked at the number of contrarians on this issue. But I must respectfully disagree with you all. I'm not sure what you think is causing the degradation of the ozone layer, the melting of the polar ice caps, the severity of weather patterns over recent years from Katrina to Tsunamis and countless other severe weather disasters. You can't simply explain these away as normal weather patterns. I don't claim to be a scientist, far from it, but I believe the problem is real, is due to the introduction of C02 into our atmosphere from human made pollutants, and I believe we need to act quickly or delay at our own peril (or at least that of our grandchildren's).

But the climate change you refer to is brought on by warming temperatures. I encourage you to check out the report I referenced in my previous comment. It lays out a lot of scientific research in clear language and it makes a compelling case that the earth is warming at a far more rapid rate than at any time in our history and this is due to human actions within the system.

But for the sake of argument, let's suppose there weren't anything to this (even though I believe the problem is very real), wouldn't it make all the sense in the world to reduce pollution because when you reduce pollution it improves the quality of life. It makes no sense to have everyone in single cars on the road at the same time every day. There has to be more efficient ways of dealing with this issue.

Even if pollution weren't having a profound effect on our eco-system (and I believe it is), it clearly has substantial health effects related to it and so it's worth reversing, as is our dependence on oil and coal as our main fuel sources.

So you can believe what you will about global warming or climate change, but pollution is very real and it will benefit us all in very real ways to reduce fossil fuels as quickly as we can.

You obviously believe you know more than the world's leading scientists, so it's hardly worth trying to convince you otherwise, but I suggest you check out the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change at http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm. You may want to read AR4 Synthesis Report/Summary for Policy Makers: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.

These reports are put together by 1000s of scientists from around the world backed up by research and extensive peer review. If facts don't persuade you, it's clear you are just trying to be contrary.

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.
~Robert Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy undoubtedly wasn’t thinking about global warming when he made this statement all those years ago, but what he said applies today as much as to what was happening back then. After spending parts of Thursday and Friday at the Climate Change Think Tank: Transportation’s Impact and Solutions at UMass in Amherst, MA I came away with the gnawing feeling that perhaps, just perhaps we could innovate our way out of the problems we are facing and that our current crisis represents not only a threat, but also a substantial opportunity.

Just as innovation led to the development of the internal combustion engine, so could technology and innovation provide us with the solution to the global warming crisis we most assuredly now face as a result of all that innovation during the Industrial Revolution.

Congressman John Olver, who has served the first congressional district in Massachusetts for many years was the keynote speaker. Olver cited many statistics during his speech such as the fact that the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and produces 20 percent of the green house gasses (and that percentage would be higher if it were not for the increasing industrialization of China in recent years).

He also suggested that …

When Bill Gates gave a speech last winter and hinted that the need for a keyboard was going to be diminishing, the writer in me scoffed, but I should learn to take Bill’s little hints a bit more seriously because the next version of Windows (aka Windows 7) is going to feature the same touch-screen functionality found on the Microsoft Surface, the monster table computer introduced last year (and parodied here).

Microsoft gave a preview of Windows 7 this week and using a touch screen, you can do the same types of things as shown here in this Macrumors.com post including sorting and editing pictures. As though this weren’t enough to send keyboard fans screaming for the exits, just this week the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) announced the next generation laptop for the world will feature a dual screen absent a conventional keyboard. The feeling is that a sealed laptop without a keyboard makes more sense in impoverished areas where dust and water seepage through the keyboard could represent a serious issue.

As a writer, one who makes his living tapping the keys of the keyboard, I’m wondering how will I pursue my craft without my trusty keyboard or how students will type papers for that matter? Sure, you can edit and sort pictures with your finger. It actually makes sense and is more practical than a keyboard or even a mouse. In fact, most mouse-intensive …

I love browsing in the Refurbished section of Apple’s online store trolling for bargains. When the second generation 1GB iPod Shuffle dropped below $40 U.S., I couldn’t resist and ordered one in metallic green.

Just last year I had ordered a refurbished first-generation iPod shuffle, so I have the means to compare to the two first-hand. To start with, the first generation, looks crude compared to its high-tech second-generation cousin. Its plastic case, in particular looks chintzy and cheap, but the first generation had a couple of things going for it including a built-in USB connector (one less cord to lose) and a string to wear it around your neck. The first generation model I purchased was 512 MB.

The second generation started at a 1GB. The price of the refurbished 1GB model, dropped dramatically, not coincidentally, when the 2GB models became available. To be honest when the second generation Shuffles arrived on the scene I wasn’t impressed. I thought the size was too small and the separate docking station was a step backwards.

So I was surprised when I opened the package and saw that lovely little green, amazingly-small device staring up at me, and found myself impressed. Apple engineers as usual got it right. It feels great in your hand (something I’ve noted about iPods) and although the controls are small, they are simple and easy to operate. The built-in clip is designed to connect to your …

I can’t stand this indecision
married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
~Tears for Fears, Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

There has certainly been a lot of gamesmanship going on in the computer industry these past few weeks as the industry’s biggest players try to maneuver to gain the upper-hand in the ever-shifting landscape of our industry. If you have been paying attention, what seems like a list of random headlines is really about gaining world domination. We can only hope that the wrestling match continues unabated.

Let’s take a look at a few of these moves, some of which I’ve written about here:

• Microsoft engages in talks with Yahoo!, cancels the talks, restarts the talks.
• Google releases Google Friend Connect; Facebook blocks it from using its API.
• Microsoft offers to pay people to use its Live search tool
• Apple reportedly has launched a plan to take over our living room in the next five years.
• HP buys EDS.

All of these moves are designed in some way to keep these companies on top, which is hardly shocking, but it’s the flurry of recent activity that surprises me. It seems that we find ourselves in an interesting time and place in our industry. Microsoft was the top dog for many years, but then Google gained the advantage more recently. As companies get bigger, …

Jennifer:
You are right of course, and David never suggested the press release was dead. Those words were mine. I was admittedly engaging in a bit of hyperbole as an attention-getting device, but I also think as a journalist who receives many useless press releases each week, that many PR and marketing pros have failed to grasp David's new rules. I could have written 'The Press Release as We Have Known it is Dead,' but that's not terribly catchy. :-)

Thanks for the reading, the link and taking the time to leave a comment.

Ron

Is the press release dead? Earlier this month, Esther Schindler wrote in her You’re the Boss blog that “PR is broken. Social media might, might glue some of the parts back on.” To test this supposition, I spoke to David Meerman Scott, who is the author of the bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR (and also a fellow Contributing Editor at EContent Magazine). Scott, who speaks frequently on the subject, thinks Web 2.0 has changed the way everyone should think of marketing and that marketers who fail to grasp that are doomed to be left in the dust of 20th century ideas. That said, it’s important to understand that you can’t simply use the same rules and glue them on to Web 2.0 concepts. As Scott points out, your audience is now much bigger than a handful of journalists and editors.

RM: For a long time, PR involved writing a press release and finding the most efficient way to distribute it. Do you think this type of press release is dead?

DMS: The rules for press releases have changed. In the old days, a press release was actually a release to the press. Everybody knew that the reason you issued a press release was to get the media to write about you. Nobody saw the actual press release except a handful of reporters and editors.

Not anymore.

While all PR people understand that press releases sent over …

Fool if you think it's over
'Cause you said goodbye
Fool if you think it's over
I'll tell you why
~Chris Rea, Fool (If You Think It's Over).

Those two crazy kids, Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again. I know. I know. You thought it was over. Everyone did. They had nothing left to say to one another, but you know how it goes. You go home. You cool off. You realize you were made for one another.

The fact is these two companies can’t live without one another and Google is the reason. Like the proverbial 10,000 pound gorilla, Google looms over this relationship like a bad ex-husband. And it’s not because Google cares about Yahoo!, it’s because Google has such overwhelming control of the online advertising market, that Microsoft has to do something drastic to get back in the game, and drastic in this case is spending in the neighborhood of $45M for Yahoo!.

BusinessWeek did a lengthy report in its May 9th issue called Inside Microsoft’s War Against Google, BW does a good job of stating just what Microsoft is up against here.

“It may be impossible to catch Google in search advertising. The company dominates the market, taking in 77% of the revenues from those little text ads that show up alongside the results for Internet search queries. Microsoft, after years of trying, is at 5% of U.S. search revenue, according to search marketing firm …

If you want to get a look at the store, check out this video. http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1185086463/bclid1497991044/bctid1554364875

Everyone in Boston and New York is aware of the sports rivalry that exists between the two cities. Now comes news that Apple has built its largest retail store in North America on Boylston Street in Boston, beating out the current front-runner...you guessed it: Apple's outlet on West 14th Street in Manhattan. Just one more thing, we can boast about in Boston.

In fact, in honor of the Red Sox, the store was adorned during construction with a replica of Fenway Park's Green Monster. But yesterday, the green construction cloak came off and the media was allowed inside. What they saw, according to the Boston Globe, was a "finely tuned retail machine."

The new store, which opens this evening at 6 pm ET, boast three floors of retail space, with the ground floor covering computers and the second floor devoted completely to iPods and iPhones. While this is clearly every Mac fan boy's wet dream, as if that weren't enough the third floor is completely dedicated to education and service. That's right, a whole floor just for to education and service with a whopping 165 staffers hired to take care of every customer's needs. Talk about customer relationship management.

Meanwhile Mac User reports, that Apple took this opportunity to also spruce up the Apple Store web site making it easier to "navigate and find information," just in case you don't want to leave the comfort of your home to go out …

Interesting follow-up point: Tech Crunch reports that Facebook has banned Google Friend Connect from accessing the Facebook API. I'm not sure what affect this will have on the Google tool, but it would appear to prevent them from accessing Facebook friends. If this is the case, this is the case, it's very disappointing and represents a very heavy-handed and clumsy step on Facebook's part to prevent Google from getting into the Social Networking game. We should be moving toward greater openness, not looking for ways to make it more difficult for the world at large to communicate across walled gardens. http://tinyurl.com/5kpx3j

The video is actually not available in the Google blog, but you can view it here. http://youtube.com/watch?v=BIEwUxMrJ4Y

Google might have failed in its attempts to build its own social network, but the Google Friend Connect system preview, announced on Monday, could go a long way toward providing web site owners with an easy way to add social features to their sites and get access to users on social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

The friend connect system, which is described nicely in the video you’ll find in this Google Blog post announcing Google Friend Connect, provides a way to add social applications, known as social gadgets in Google parlance. These gadgets could include a members gadget, a photo sharing gadget, a commenting gadget and so forth. Google provides some of the gadgets while third parties can also build and contribute gadgets.

After you add a gadget, you can customize the colors to match your site, then, and this is the neat part, you generate a code snippet, which you simply copy and paste into your site using your favorite editing tool. When you are finished, you have these gadgets, which not only provide a way for your site’s visitors to interact with you and other site visitors, they also provide links to other social network so you can invite friends from these other networks to join you on this new site. This creates a kind of social ecosystem where friends from various networks can get together on a site that has no actual connection to a social network.

What’s more visitors can …