PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

• E-mail = "occupational spam" — Maurene Caplan Grey (April 19, 2001)
• E-mail is where knowledge goes to die — Bill French (April 22, 2003)
• RSS is like TiVo for the Web — Sean Bonner (August 28, 2003) & RSS newsreaders are TiVo for blogs — Phil Wolff (June 6, 2003)

Ten years ago, on March 25, 1995, Ward Cunningham has started the first wiki at http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki, hosting the Portland Pattern Repository.

A heartfelt thank you to Ward Cunningham and to all the people who have contributed, in a way or another, to the WikiWay.

• Ward Cunningham’s page at c2.com
• Wiki History

Source: The Star-Telegram, March 16, 2005.

Note: Periodical updates on the numbers of weblogs are listed at the end of this entry.

Summary: A new list of PR blogs has more than 160 entries and includes personal, consultants and corporate blogs, with authors from 17 countries.

More:

I know, I know… you must be rolling your eyes by now, asking yourself, why-oh-why do we need yet another list of PR bloggers?

Why isn’t Headlines from PR Blogs enough? After all, it has more than 100 PR blogs already. Yes, it’s great, but it includes only weblogs written in English, and that is because people have subscribed to the list’s RSS feed, and I wasn’t sure that adding German or Swedish blogs is something that makes sense for the list’s audience. A more inclusive list was needed.

Another problem is that the group has an automatically generated blogroll, but it’s not possible to make any changes in RSS feeds’ names. An alphabetical list is great as long as it has less than 30 entries, and if you know already the blogs’ authors. But when you have more than 150 weblogs, and when just a handful of them have authors’ names included in their titles, things are becoming complicated.

Here’s the new list:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/prblogs (OPML)

And here’s a list of answers to some questions that you might have:

• Q: What’s a PR blog?
• A: PR blogs is a nickname for weblogs about Public Relations and communication in an organizational context. (Not included: blogs about advertising, branding, marketing.) Some PR blogs are personal; others are published by consultants focusing on how weblogs can be integrated in the business practice. Weblogs authored by principals or employees of PR firms and acknowledged by their employers will fall under the category of corporate PR blogs. If a weblog is (or is not) a PR blog is determined by the blog’s author and by its readers; there is no universally recognized set of criteria for it.
• Q: How was the list made?
• A: I combined the list of PR blogs from Blogdigger Groups with the NewPR Wiki’s list of business blog consultants, I eliminated duplicate entries, and added a couple of PR blogs (written in other languages than English). I compared the list with Jim Horton’s list of PR blogs and with Tom Murphy’s blogroll. Then I sorted the weblogs by using the country where the blogger lives as a criterion. In time, this will give us an idea about the adoption of PR blogs in different countries. Moreover, the blogs were sorted by type in: personal, consultant, corporate, and education blogs. There are separate categories for wikis, podcasts, book-related blogs, event blogs, and international group blogs.
• Q: My blog is not in the list. Why?
• A: Probably because your blog was not in the lists I mentioned earlier, or because I just missed it somehow. Please drop me a line and I’ll be happy to add your blog.
• Q: I don’t want my weblog in that category. Can you move it?
• A: Sure, just pick another category, and please remember that a weblog can’t be included in more than one category (because Bloglines doesn’t accept the same RSS feed twice).
• Q: The list doesn’t include some PR blogs I read/know. Why?
• A: If they are written in any other language than Romanian, English, French, Italian and Spanish, then probably I wasn’t able to figure out that the blog is about PR. If you know any PR blog that should be added to the list, please let me know. Another reason might be that my definition of a PR blog is different than yours. But we can discuss about it and find a way.
• Q: What’s happening with the Blogdigger Groups-based listing?
• A: It will continue to grow and to aggregate the PR blogs written in English; the same goes for the group aggregating weblogs of BizBlogConsultants. As soon as Blogdigger Groups will offer more control over the blogroll, I’ll consider moving the current Bloglines-based listing there.
• Q: I can’t add a blog to the list. Why?
• A: Because you need the password for the Bloglines account. Headlines from PR Blogs is an open group that can be edited by anyone; I make weekly backups of its OPML file, so the group can be reversed to a prior state if -knock wood- vandalism occurs. But I can’t do the same thing for the Bloglines-based list; if the password is public, a vandal could change it and take control of the list. This doesn’t mean that I should be the only one to have the password. If you want to be a constant contributor to the list, please let me know.
• Q: Is there an RSS feed for the headlines of all blogs, like the feed for Headlines from PR Blogs?
• A: No.
• Q: Can I use the list for reading blogs’ postings?
• A: Yes, but please consider subscribing to the RSS feeds of the blogs you want to read. That’s another way of saying that the purpose of this list is to be a directory that can be easily imported through its OPML file, and not to be an RSS feed aggregator. However, you can use the list for reading the blogs — here’s how:
  • To read the last postings from one blog, click on the blog’s name in the left side panel (click on the + sign to open the folder, first).
  • To read the last postings from blogs included in one category, click on the category’s name in the left side panel.
  • To read the last postings from all the blogs included in the list, click on the name of the top folder.
• Q: Can I subscribe to the blogs included in the list?
• A: Sure.
  • If you want to subscribe to only one or two of them, it’s better to go to their homepages and find their RSS feeds.
  • If you want to subscribe only to the consultants’ blogs, you can use this list and import its OPML file.
  • If you want to subscribe to the entire list of PR blogs, you can use the list’s OPML file (save it as somename.opml, than import the file in your newsreader; also, your newsreader might give you the option of selecting which feeds do you want to import).

Updates:

• June 6, 2005: The directory is currently listing 219 personal, consultants and corporate PR blogs, 3 wikis, 6 podcasts, and 3 linkblogs, with authors from 20 countries.
• November 6, 2005: Please note that the directory is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
• December 31, 2005: The directory is listing 330 feeds.
• January 31, 2006: The directory is listing 374 feeds.
• February 28, 2006: The directory is listing 407 feeds.
• April 8, 2006: The directory is listing 446 feeds. The OPML file for the list is hosted now by opml.org, instead of Bloglines.

March 15, 1999: Netscape Opens My Netscape to Millions of Web Publishers:

The My Netscape Network is built on the RDF Site Summary format (RSS). RSS is a new, open file format that enables the exchange of content summaries and e-commerce data between Web sites. By joining the My Netscape Network, publishers can use RSS to create their own My Netscape channel. This channel can then be used by the publisher to deliver frequently updated content to the fast-growing My Netscape audience.

On the same day - Dave Winer:

Our announcement: Scripting News is the first site to support RSS. [...] Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today).

Remember:

• My Netscape Network: RSS 0.9 specifications
• RSS History (Berkman Center @ Harvard Law School)

(Via Dave Winer’s Scripting News.)

6 years old, already? What’s next — going to school?

Ed Brill (Lotus Software, IBM Software Group):

IBM is actually working on a formal blogging policy for employees right now; I’ve got a to-do on the weekend list to visit the wiki where it’s being shaped and formed to offer perspective. Maybe one element should be to have a form of "press policy" like Scoble does.

Found on Ross Mayfield’s Linkorama.

If you need advice and help in starting a blog for your business, or need a better understanding on how personal publishing is changing the business practice, here’s a pointer: there is a list of BizBlogConsultants at the NewPR Wiki.

Most of them are blogging (of course); you can read the headlines of their postings on this Blogdigger Group aggregator, subscribe to its RSS feed, or import the OPML file in your newsreader (save it as filename.opml, then look for a Import OPML feature in your RSS aggregator).