The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #95: December 19, 2005

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #95: December 19, 2005

Content summary: Latest survey on corporate blogging; the declining trust in corporations; Google buys AOL stake; Pheedo study on ads in RSS; Gmail on cell phones; Topix.net accepts user content; Steve Rubel quits Across the Sound; Lee Hopkins’ report; listeners’ comments discussion (why blogs and wikis are so good; a Christmas list for communicators); does blogging equal transparency?; the TypePad communication crisis for Six Apart; upcoming interview; the music.

Show notes for December 19, 2005

download mp3 podcast

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 95-minute conversation recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Download the file here (MP3, 38MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In this Edition:

Intro:

  • 00:28 Shel introduces the show; what the show’s about; how to contribute your comments; upcoming interview on Wednesday December 21 with Andy Abramson on Nokia’s blog relations campaign; update on the FIR Frappr community

News Briefs:

From Our Correspondent Down Under:

  • 28:58 Lee Hopkins reports - a proud father with a hoarse voice; a wrong font and bad syntax; aligning all the pieces of the puzzle for ‘nuanced communication’

Listeners’ Comments Discussion:

  • 38:28 David Phillips with the reasons why blogs and wikis are so good and such a threat to the control freaks
  • 42:29 David again, with an audio Christmas list for communication professionals

Features:

Outro:

  • 90:45 Neville wraps the show; how and where to send your comments; reminder of interview on Wednesday December 21 with Any Abramson; where to find the show notes
  • 91:54 Outro podsafe music via the Podsafe Music Network - Did You Think by Adrina Thorpe

FIR Show Notes links
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info.

If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday December 22…

Posted by neville on 12/19 at 10:26 AM

  1. Thanks a lot for your discussion of the Peppercom survey on corporate blogging.  Having PR and Marketing people rail against insincere blogs for the sake of nothing but promotion was a great thing to get to write about on certain sites I write on!

    I also appreciated the tip on the Daily Dog as a news source, until I saw that this large body of information appears to offer no RSS feeds!  What are they thinking, that I’m going to actually visit their web site on a regular basis!?!  It looks like a good source of information, for sure, but not so much better than the 300 sites I read feeds from that I’m going to go to the trouble of visiting this one site in particular. 

    That’s pretty ironic given how much the site cheerleads for getting with the new times and tech.  I imagine they are concerned about eyeballs and ads.  If that’s the case they should check out the Pheedo study on the effectiveness of ads in feeds.  Sheesh.  I suppose it’s just as possible that they haven’t given it much thought. 

    Well for me I don’t even want to read all the Daily Dog news.  Just the stuff on blogging.  So I’m going to subscribe to the MSN Search feed for site:http://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog blogging   The RSS feed even!  There’s an orange RSS button at the bottom of the search results page - that’s something you can’t do with Google.

    Anyway, thanks again for the continued good work.

    Posted by Marshall Kirkpatrick  on  12/20  at  07:18 AM

  2. So much for keeping your show to an hour—and you didn’t even have any long comments from me. ;-) I’m more than happy to spend 90 minutes listening, though, and would rather hear your commentary than straight news announcements—I can get those elsewhere, but Shel and Neville’s insights only come on FIR.

    As someone who ghostwrites blog posts, I’m intrigued by the controversy around ghost blogging, as if blogs were somehow a sacred medium. I also get rather annoyed by the assumption people make that if a thing is badly written, it must have been done by a ghostwriter. Good ghostwriting *isn’t* obvious. That’s why it’s *ghost*writing. (Not to mention the fact that “ghosts” are usually much *better* writers than their clients.)

    I’m planning to do more research on this topic and write an article about it, but given the unforseen circumstances causing a backlog of work on the eve of my mother’s arrival from Cleveland, it might be a while before I can do so.

    I’ll be listening to episode 96 on my new MP3 car stereo on my way to the airport.

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  12/22  at  12:07 PM

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Next entry: Interview - Andy Abramson, CEO, Comunicano - December 21, 2005

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