PR Thoughts

Wifi hotspot love RSS !

I've been testing it already several times in Paris and again just now, amazingly when you're working in a space covered by a wifi network, say in any public place as airport, hotel etc..., it's usually possible to refresh your RSS feeds even if you don't connect yourself to the network.... !
Seems like wifi hotspots securisation "don't see" RSS readers uploading the feeds, so another good reason to have a RSS reader... ;o)

I was expecting to work and get a 30 min. connection pass while waiting for a meeting, unfortunately (or one more time) my provider is temporary unavailable (shame on you SFR...), so I launched my RSS reader ( I am using NetNewsWire by the way...) and it's working ! I can read all my favorites blogs !

Technorati Tags: RSS, SFR

Podcast interview with Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel

In this Podcast planet's show, my guest is Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel, expert of the online communication, talking about how to track and listen to the online world to protect a brand reputation.

Click on the icon below to listen to the show in Windows Media Player, right click to save and download it.

You can also directly click on the "play" button below...

Length: 13,48 min.

Links we've mentionned during the show: Google, Google Blog Search, Market Sentinel's survey "Blog search"

Find all our podcasts from Podcast Planet directly on our dedicated blog.

Technorati Tags: marketsentinel, podcasting, PodcastPlanet

Blog en Nord in Lille

Tomorrow I'll be participating as speaker at "Blog en Nord", a blogging conference in Lille's university, with a focus on corporate blogging. This will be my first trip in Lille, I am happy to have this opportunity to meet bloggers there and make new connections !
Thanks for inviting me.

Technorati and Edelman to launch a "Blogger PR Survey"

Technorati and Edelman have launched a new survey to analyze how bloggers interact with companies and their products. The goal of this survey is for part of it, to get opinions on best practices for companies wanting more active involvement with the blogging community.

Certainly a good idea and I am looking forward to see the results.... But... I'd like to react on Question #9: If you know a message is sent to you from a PR firm, how much are you likely to trust it on a scale between 1 and 10, where “1” is "not at all" and “10” is "complete trust"?

Although I am a PR blogger, I often receive informations/products from companies that are looking for my "voice" ... I don't think that a message is loosing immediately credibility as soon as he has been send out by a PR firm. My answer is a blogger one, not a PR one by the way here. The most important is how the message coming from this PR firm is formulated, knowing that the target audience must be taken in consideration in the way the message is written. As blogger, I am happy to get informations about companies that are in my scope of interest, but it will be boring to get traditional press releases from them, I am not a journalist. Which doesn't mean that I don't want to be informed. I wan't the sender of the information to adapt the content for me or what I represent. Send me information plus links to help me get additional inputs on the story and let me form my own opinion.

So, my answer to the question is "5", depending of the content, not only of the sender ...;o) How many times are we spammed directly by companies to promote products, often pharmaceuticals or software, of no interest to us at all... ? Would those companies be working with PR firms, then they would certainly not be spamming us... ;o)

Just my 2 cents...

Technorati Tags: Edelman, technorati

Reporters Without Borders publishes a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.

This campaign has been launched by Reporters Without Borders to help bloggers beat censors in countries from China to Iran. Bloggers from around the world have been involved, including famous Dan Gillmor.
Read the full story on RWB web, Yahoo!News also has an article.
Download the guide in english & in french.

Thanks Teebo for the link !

Les Blogs 2.0 : speakers list updated !

We've got a lot of new answers from speakers to join us at Les Blogs 2.0, the event that we are co-producing with Six Apart in Paris on the 5 & 6th december, confirmed speakers to date are:

• Robert Scoble, Microsoft
• Shel Israel
• Mark Rogers, CEO, Market Sentinel
• Fegus Burns, CEO, Nooked
• Scott Rafer, CEO, Feedster
• Jan Ni, Nokia Lifeblog
• Steve Olechowsky, CTO & co-founder, Feedburner
• Philipe Borremans, External Communications, IBM Belgium & Luxembourg
• Roy Lindeman, Country manager, Readspeaker
• Bob Wyman, CTO & co-founder, PubSub
• Jeff Clavier, Soft Tech VC
• Hugh MacLeod, Gaping Void
• David Sifry, Technorati
• Rebecca MacKinnon, GlobalVoices

You can register on line there, hope to see you join us in Paris, we'll do our best ot make it a great event !

Podcast #O2 - Conversation: Octavio Rojas, first spanish PR Blogger

In this show, I was happy to invite the first spanish PR blogger, Octavio Isaac Rojas Orduna, to share his thoughts with us on the impact and development of blogs, wikis, RSS in his life of PR pro. Octavio also published a book recently on this topic, so he was definitely the best spanish guy to answer those questions.

Click on the icon below to listen to the podcast with Windows Media Player...

... or click directly on the "play" button:

Chris Kimber to open Podcastcon UK

This it, the show is on, if you want to get real time informations about Podcastcon UK, happening in London right now, stay tuned here, I am moblogging from the Berners hotel, and my pictures are going thanks to Lifeblog there

If you have questions for speakers, just leave a comment or skype me on "dugardier", I'll try to get them on time and ask them for you, we have a quite good wifi spot here...

Edelman & Intelliseek to publish a second survey on blogging

Edelman published with Intelliseek the second survey on their serie about blogging, "Talking from the inside out: The rise of Employee Bloggers".

You can download it at Edelman or Intelliseek as pdf file, 22 pages. I didn't have had enough time to read it carefully at that time, just had an overview, but will do in the very next hours as it seems to be of the same good quality as the previous one. A joint webinar is also announced on Intelliseek's web for the 21st. September on the topic "employee bloggers".

The press releases announcing the survey is available there.

Technorati Tags: blogging survey, internal blogging, Edelman, Intelliseek

Google to launch a blog search engine

Google has launched a new search blog service in beta, I've tested it a bit, seems to be working quite well... I'll have to make additional tests and comparaison with other blog search services... Back soon with deepest feedback...

Via Micro Persuasion

Technorati Tags: GoogleBlogSearch

Podcast Planet launched !

Today I launched a new podcast, "Podcast Planet", a weekly show about participatory communications, blogs, wikis, RSS, and of course podcasting !

First guests are Jacques Froissant, CEO of Altaïde and Christophe Labedan, Founder of the Social Media Group. Jacques is the most well-known french HR blogger, and Christophe has launched the first blogzine portal in France. Both have very interesting comments and thoughts about their market, so don't hesitate to have a look there. You can automatically subscribe to the show by copy-pasting this link in iTunes or your iPodder.

We'll invite each week other CEOs, head of marketing, communicators to discuss new communications trends and strategy in a 10 minutes format. The show will be either in french or in english, depending of our guests, we hope it to be lively, so don't hesitate to leave us your comments.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, PodcastPlanet

Around the Blog to combine with Les Blogs 2.0

Last Thursday we got some very exciting news. Loïc Le Meur of Six Apart has invited Blogging Planet to co-produce Les Blogs 2.0, a two-day event scheduled for December 5-6 in Paris. Given how close the dates are for Les Blogs and Around the Blog, we have decided to move the October 11 event to December 6, making it Day 2 of Les Blogs. We are duplicating the entire schedule of Around the Blog and have invited all of our speakers to participate on December 6.

The first Les Blogs was held in April in Paris and was very successful, with 250 people from 25 countries attending the one-day event. This time, the event has been expanded to two days, the first focusing on the phenomenon, the second on the tools. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have signed on to speak, and we'll be announcing more speakers soon.

More information is available here. The cost will be 200 EUR VAT excluded which will include the two days conference, lunch on both days and the cocktail party on Monday evening. You can register here.

I hope you can join us!

Technorati Tags: around the blog, lesblogs2

eBay to Acquire Skype !

... for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.

This is the hugest news of this fall ! You can find the full release there, I know two men that must be the happiest of the world today... Congratulations Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis !

Technorati Tags: Skype

PR Thought's podcast launched !

Today is the beginning of PR Thought's podcast, I am very excited about it and will be happy to meet you there on a regular basis.
Stay tuned !

You can listen to it by clicking here, this will open automatically Windows Media Player, copy paste this link in iTunes to subscribe to the podcast and automatically get new shows, or simply click on the play button below:

Smart icons for your computer

If you want some nice and smart icons to personalize your computer, you should have a look at Fasticons, they have some really nice and great designed icons available, some for free download, others that you can pay through Paypal.

FeedBurner to join Around the Blog speakers

We got confirmation today from FeedBurner, Steve Olechowski, co-founder and COO will join us in Paris on the 11th october at Around the blog to share his vision and thoughts with other speakers and participants.

This is a very good news, I think we'll have a great session about RSS !

Technorati Tags: around the blog

Launch of my moblog: Winks...

I just launched my moblog few days ago, I'd like to explore the potential use of moblogging and I will store some winks online there...

Let's wait and see...

Nokia Lifeblog, Typepad and a Nokia 6680

Done ! I now have the full material for an easy and efficient new moblogging life ! I've been waiting for months to make a decision and choose the good camera phone including Nokia Lifeblog (or is it just a plugin...) and here I am, finally...

Unfortunately it never rolls the first time easily as soon as you need to have more than 2 players in the game...

I downloaded the last version of Nokia Lifeblog and thanks to Nokia PC Suite (yes, I still have a PC at home for software that don't exist in Mac version...) I've been able to transfer Lifeblog on my new Nokia 6680.

All these first steps have been working well, also the set up of the Lifeblog account directly on the camera phone, nothing specific to underline.

The main issue poped up as soon as I wanted to connect and download the list of my blogs and moblog my first post... At this stage I've been falling in the deepest mystery of SFR, french mobile operator... Although I was able to surf on internet with my mobile (yes Loïc I confirm it was working, thanks again for the hotline), impossible to access to my typepad accounts...

Hopefully I made some additional tests and I found that the configuration of the internet connection was not the same depending if you wanted to surf on the web or get emails or reach your typepad account with Lifeblog...?!? Ok, I am not a geek, but rather IT friendly, and I have to say this could have been made simpler...

So the solution is, for those who are using SFR + Nokia 6680 + Lifeblog: in the configuration menu of your 6680, lifeblog>options>paramètres>param weblog>"your account name">param compte>point d'accès internet> (sorry, such a long path..) you have to choose "mail " as the way to connect to internet , even if your browser says you are using "vodafone live".... Don't ask me why...
But it works ! Sigh...

A question still remains: how to import a photo that you take with the camera phone in lifeblog ??? No idea how to do it... Not ending story... All pictures are going in the library, not in Lifeblog and I didn't found any way to get the new pictures I took there... Any idea ? Update following morning...: in fact, as soon as you have at least one photo that you took with the camera phone, it becomes automatically available in Lifeblogs directory.... Don't know why it didn't work yesterday although I had some that I took, but it's working now, I just made another test.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, nokia 6680, Nokia lifeblog, SFR, typepad