Easton Ellsworth has a great suggestion:
Calling all sentient bloggers: Monday, May 1, 2006 will be Blogtipping Day. (Perhaps the first Monday of each month can be Blogtipping Day – let me know what you think.)
What’s blogtipping? It’s where you forget yourself for a few minutes and think about another blogger. It’s a win-win. All you do is this: Say three nice things and offer one simple tip.
Sure appeals to me. So, tomorrow and the first day of every month, I plan to “blogtip.”
As I sit here choosing whether to dive into the half foot high pile of “things I really want to read” or to find time to blog (after a hectic week in which I had time to do neither), I have to admit I’m stretched too thin. So what to do?
Kathy Sierra offers some great advice for cutting down on the backlog of reading. While she has written primarily for a tech audience, these ideas can be put into action by anyone who needs to cope with exploding information flows – and that’s all of us. The picture accompanying Kathy’s post sums up the problem:
She offers practical advice for what I call “reading list triage.” Some of the best tips:
Kathy offers additional tips in her post. I think you’ll agree that reading it is time well spent!
Experienced PR practitioners agree that measurement of what we do is one of our industry’s most pressing challenges.
Tomorrow, a group of volunteers sponsored by the CPRS and NewsCanada will take a major step forward to provide Canadian public relations practitioners with MR2P, a valuable new tool to measure the effectiveness of our media relations programs (disclosure: David Jones, a Vice-President of Thornley Fallis worked on the volunteer committe that developed MR2P and 76design, our webdesign firm, developed the MR2P blog.
And there’s more good news. On the eve of the launch of MRsP, Bowdens announced that it is fielding its own upgraded measurement offering.
Canadian PR practitioners can only benefit from better tools to measure the value and results of what we produce. And the twin offerings by Bowdens and the MR2P group provide choice now and the promise that no one will rest on their laurels.
Congratulations to the MR2P team of PR volunteers, NewsCanada and Bowdens.
Nick Bradbury points with justifiable pride to the positive review of FeedDemon 2.0 in PC Mag.
PC Mag calls FeedDemon 2.0 “simply the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and intuitively organized RSS feed aggregator/reader for Windows.”
The review concludes by pointing to FeedDemon’s
amazing combination of simplicity and flexibility that lets you easily organize feeds into folders, sort and share feeds, subscribe to new feeds, and generally manage everything from within a single interface. Keeping track of your feeds (sometimes even seeing them all) is generally much harder in browser-based RSS readers. You’ll save money using them, but you’ll lose time. If you can’t live without your RSSand a whole lot of itand you prefer to keep your feeds in a standalone application instead of teasing them out of an Outlook add-in or a browser, the FeedDemon 2.0’s $29.95 price tag is a bargain.
Amen to that.
… and where have I been, you ask?
Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my office. The world was in order. Business was good. All was fine. When….
One of our consultants walked into my office, closed the door and said, “I have bad news. I’ve accepted a job with a competitor.”
These aren’t words that an employer ever wants to hear. But they are words that we all will hear sooner or later. And when we do, we have to be ready to put in the extra effort to meet the expectations of clients and honour commitments made to them.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks. And, as I approach the Easter long weekend, I’m feeling a real sense of accomplishment that we met all of our commitments and kept our clients smiling and satisfied.
And by the way, if you are an experienced public relations consultant working in the Ottawa region, I know of a great public relations firm that is hiring. If you are interested in applying to join our team, email your résumé to me at joseph.thornley[at]gmail.com.
FIR (For Immediate Release Listener Survey
Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz are asking for listener opinions on their podcast
How to: Get a job in PR
Morgani McLintic has some smart advice for people interested in a career in PR
The State of Online Feed Readers
Frank Gruber reviews nine web-based feed readers: attensa, Bloglines, feedlounge, Google Reader, gritwire, NewsAlloy, newsgator, Pluck, Rojo.
Terry Fallis and David Jones have launched a new podcast, Inside PR, a weekly podcast on the state and future of public relations. Terry and David are President and Vice-President respectively of Thornley Fallis Communications. (I work there too!)
In their inaugural podcast, Terry and Dave say that want to “take a look under the hood” of public relations. They plan to cover “everything from agency life to the tarnished and dubious reputation of our industry.” The guys say they will talk about “what it takes to succeed in our world and also the latest techniques and best practices.”
In their first episode, topics covered in depth include the newly formed Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms, the upcoming Web2.0 mesh conference in Toronto and a new philosophy for media training.
Inside PR should prove to be an interesting perspective on PR from two of Canada’s most thoughtful public relations practitioners. Congratulations guys!