Hoi Polloi

Voting Booth

I'm not a big fan of the cameras in camera-phones, but since it was a beautiful --and very important--morning, I took this while standing in line to vote. As any photographer knows, sometimes the subject compensates for the bad camera or cameraman.

Today was my opportunity to vote for the first time in the U.S. As a new immigrant, this is indeed an exciting day for me. Too many people tend to take voting for granted. It annoys me that people complain about the long lines outside voting booths, but have no problems spending as much time in a queue at Starbucks. The line this morning at Starbucks was much, much shorter, so one hopes that some of that lost traffic was queuing up elsewhere...

Can the iPod Killers out-PR Steve Jobs?

Sony and Apple may be the two most creative companies on the planet. I say this not just because I am a Vaio user, and a Mac follower. The marketing, design and PR around the iMac, the Sony-Ericsson phones, and the Walkman are stories we relate around campfires and boardrooms. (Did you know it’s the 25th anniversary of the Walkman?)

Then there’s iTunes, a whole new ballgame, and there’s the NW-HD1 (extreme left image) from Sony, the iPod killer –at least from Sony’s point of view.

No matter what device emerges or what download service grabs the limelight (even Wal-Mart has an $.88 cents a tune download service, and Microsoft isn’t far behind) you can trust Steve Jobs to always generate the kind of PR that translates into sales.

Is Microsoft ignoring bloggers?

I was a bit surprised today when the brand/PR director for Microsoft, Janice Kapner, who presented at the IABC conference in Los Angeles, checked off the value of several forms of online communication tools (portals, email, Instant Messaging, virtual tours, whiteboarding..) but didn't mention blogs.

In her defense, she was talking of the growing importance of Live Meeting, and Microsoft's work on enterprise-level collaborative tools --IM and an amazing device, tentatively called 'RingCam.'

But Kapner did deal extensively with how PR collaborates with the media, and gives journalists access to product information in a virtual environment. These virtual, real-time exchanges between PR folk and reporters seems to diminish the potential of the press conference. It's not the only way to get the story out, she said, but its value increases when it is complemented with the online PR tools.

So I asked her if the several bloggers at Microsoft --with or without corporate approval-- frustrate the PR role, or add more slings to her bow. She replied that for the moment, they are watching what bloggers can do, but have no immediate plans to incorporate blogging into their strategy. I am not so surprised, considering how Microsoft ignored the Web phenomenon for quite some time.

Business models merge

“Now you're ready to tame the vast wilderness of the Web.”

Can you guess which site this statement was culled from? It’s not a search engine. It’s not a news aggregator. It’s from a site called ‘SaveThis’. A pretty useful spot where you can save your favorites, and can access them anywhere, from any PC. Click here: www.Savethis.com/

What biz will they be in?
And while we’re complaining that "it’s a jungle out there,” consider this: What business are the following companies in? Dmoz, Fast, Inktomi, Alltheweb.

They are part of that ever-evolving ‘search’ business more or less owned by brands such as Yahoo!, Google, Alta Vista and Lycos.

But do we really know what business they are in? What business will these one-time search engines and indexes be in, one year from now? We have seen how fast Google and Yahoo! Have moved into the advertising and email space within the last few months. Google is into Blogs. (Blogger.com is a Google property) and even allows you to do a product search on a cell phone! (a ‘Froogle’ service in beta test mode.) Yahoo! allows you to download screen-savers to a cell phone, etc. So it’s possible that areas as diverse as music, or custom publishing may be sucked in. I’ll be watching. Let me know if you spot any clues.

Indeed, Search Engines have relationships!
To find out their not-so subtle relationships, click here for a neat, interactive, map.

Looking for blogs, or a blog directory? Find them on Blog Search Engine.

E-campaigning

I am writing an article for IABC, on how political campaigns have been adopting forms of electronic communication. There seems to be a huge divide between a few blog-savvy politicians, and those still spending millions on TV ads. But consider these baby steps that tell me we will see a flurry of activity by the end of the year:

Sonia Gandhi sent a text message to a cricket-obsessed electorate with the words "You are India's pride. Team India." India, of course, is a country where SMS has grown by 200%. Mobile phone operators have agreed to use SMS to urge people to go out and vote in the elections this week.

The Prime Minister’s Office, Australia. Australian Prime Minister, John Howard has his own blog, as does Bush and Kerry.

Oh, yeah! Canada. Canadian mobile phone users have been given a 4 digit number to reach their country's political parties via Text Message.

Mangalore, India –a city in Tamil NAdu, South India. Mobile phones of the media were targeted with an SMS message, IN ALL CAPS, about withholding a vote for two people.

Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan elections that just concluded may be considered a new model for campaigning. The Marxist party of a former rebel group, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, contested and won parliamentary seats after using SMS, and other grass-roots forms of campaigning. So did a new party comprising Buddhist monks, called the Jathika Hela Urumaya. One report, even outlines how SMS was used in a form of negative campaigning. Outgoing cabinet minister, Milinda Moragoda, also uses SMS, but was voted off the island, so to speak, when his party, the United National Front lost the general election.
See the story here.

If you have any recent examples, please email me.

How much data could you live with?

It’s hard to predict where RFID is headed, in the context of an ‘always on’ culture that has to also get used to being always alert.

RFID is a fascinating area to watch, because it brings up issues of privacy and commerce –specifically whether the clothes we wear or what we buy at a grocery store could be monitored, and the implications of embedding the technology in currency notes and passports. But here’s a different angle:

Dan Gilmore writes about the University of Tokyo’s Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory where researchers see a future where RFID tags work with everything around us:

“Someone eyes a radish in a supermarket, and by scanning the vegetable with a handheld device -- perhaps one of tomorrow's smart phones -- the customer can learn whether the radish was grown organically and how long ago it was picked.”

He then cites a Microsoft researcher, working on a project named ‘Aura’ that turns a hand-held computer into a scanner –it scans bar codes off a product, wirelessly connects to the Net and then scans databases, including search engines, to provide information about the product.

“The results can be illuminating. For example, Smith shows a supermarket scan of a box of cereal. The top item in Google reveals that the maker had at one point recalled the product because a significant ingredient wasn't on the label.”

These will be the next generation of communicators and readers. Wireless and ubiquitous, and so small that it would be hard to not carry one.

I am not sure I could handle so much information on a daily basis, but it might change everything from packaging information, how a company markets a product, to checkout counters.

Google Hack for Writers

I just discovered an amazing Google hack called a “Google Duel for Writers” created by Geoff Peters, a Computing Science and Business student at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada.

Google Duel for Writers is an amazing way of finding out which words (or phrases) from a group of synonyms, rank higher on Google. You simply type in up to 10 words or phrases into GoogleDuel fields and the results pop up in a few seconds.
http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/cgi-bin/pear/writers.php

I typed in the following 7 words:
ambience
mood
environment
feeling
nuance
context
scenario

I then clicked on the 'Let the duel begin’ button. Guess what won?

“Environment” took the victory stand with 25.2 million mentions.

“Context” got just 10.1 million mentions.
“Ambience” got a measly 412,000 mentions.

The original Google Duel works for any 2 words.