PR – NerdBeach

Seek is a sleek wrist mounted GPS with pullout screen

While wrist mounted navigation devices existed in the 1920s, a lot can be said for the modern version. The Seek is a portable GPS device that would make a traveler wonder how they made it without one. The wrist mounted device pulls open to present a touch screen with a map. This should make it easy for someone new to town to find the their destination.

There is also a portable media player, and more functions. At this point it appears to be a concept piece, and there is no word yet on price or availability. But it does look nice. And can you just imagine the PR now – "Need to find something? Seek it out". Even as a new verb – "When you get there, just Seek me". This could catch on.

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How Google Became Pwned by Web 2.0

Greg Chaffins

If you spend any time at all researching what Google wants to have in a web site, particularly on Google's own web site, they ALWAYS take the high road and request that you have plenty of original content and that you do not try to do activities designed for search engine manipulation.

Then Google does exactly the opposite.

Let me give you an example. If you place a well constructed entry on your low to medium traffic blog, there is a good chance that Google may eventually pick it up for indexing. But given the way the web has became extremely time sensitive, by the time your post is picked up chances are it is no longer a hot topic. Big sites, with that mysterious and all-important PR, get their content picked up quickly, so your small blog gets there a day late and a whole lot of pages down in the results.

So what does the hard working blogger do? Well, more than likely at some point they turn to social networking, via Web 2.0, to try to get their blog out there. Soon they realize that they can trade favors with others on the social networking sites (Digg, etc.) and have their posts appear to be more popular than it is. But it does bring in traffic.

And that is where Google, in their infinite algorithmic wisdom, visits the social networking sites and grabs links to the "popular" items. Now the blog, which could not get their posts into Google in a timely manner, has their posts bootstrapped into the Google index faster than a hundred paid link exchanges.

And Google seems to love it.

Google is being manipulated here, worse and quicker than they have ever been in the past since social networking can change its structure in a matter of minutes. Google is pwned by Web 2.0.

Google really should be ignoring the social networking sites, since there is NO ORIGNAL REAL CONTENT ON THESE SITES. There are comments, but by their very nature Digg and others are not about creating content, but rather sharing what is interesting and/or important. Google's mantra about all original content should kick in at some point and they avoid it.

I promise you they do not. I can create a post and if someone Digg's it, it WILL get into the indexes faster. Time and again, I have tested this when someone out there was kind enough to digg an article of mine.

So why doesn't Google simply avoid the Web 2.0 sites? They are caught in an effort to walk the line between web 1.0 (which in a lot of ways they defined) and become obsolete in the fast moving trends of the socially moving web 2.0. Google is slow moving by the sheer size of its task at hand – we are talking billions of pages. In order to keep up with the new, it seems that Google has elected to let the social networking sites bubble through the popularity chain, and then crawl those sites, hard and often.

After all, if pressed it can be justified that they are getting the traffic. If not any real content.

So, with that happening, who is dictating what appears in a timely fashion in the Google indexes, while it is a hot topic? Why, the Digg gangs, the Stumble buddies, the Reddit groups, they are making the decision for you. It has now became a popularity contest.

The web, equality for all, is so 2005. Welcome to the future.

Free Headsets for Those Ticketed Without One

Greg Chaffins

The following is an opinionated rant, and reading by sensitive individuals or minors is not recommended.

Headsets.com is giving out a free Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset to anyone that has been ticketed (since July 1, 2008) for talking on a cellphone without a headset while driving. Well, anyone in this case is limited to the first 734 offenders.

Okay, why reward the folks who 1.) Are obviously sentient enough to use a computer and find out about the reward and 2.) still did not bother to use a headset. I bet they knew that the law was in effect when they were caught. They simply did not bother (or find the time) to start using a headset. Having one given to them will probably not change their basic behavior. Any hope of them showing their non-headphone wearing friends how it can be cool to wear a headset is dashed if they do not use one. So, if it does not help that much with advertising, why reward the offenders? No doubt some people will see news of this, and they will connect the dots between headsets.com and not getting tickets, but there could be some negative press from this as well. People don't always like the ideal of rewarding those who ignore local laws and ordinances AND get caught.

But perhaps this will catch on. Hardware stores can give crowbars to convicted burglars. Maybe they can get a specially endorsed model by a famous cat burglar and work a PR angle into it. With any luck maybe the word will spread.

Office supply warehouses could offer whiteout and calculators to embezzlers. Again, with a little branding you could get a lot of mileage out of such a campaign. Just imagine Oliver North being photographed with his branded Gold Plated Shredder at the reward ceremony.

But there is more. How about Bob Bondurant or Skip Barber having a free racing class to anyone who can present a valid speeding ticket? The deal is that it has to be at least 15 MPH over the limit. At least you might speed a little safer in the future (just not in school zones, no matter how low they drop the limit).

I don't know if the company will get a lot of publicity from the offer, but remember, if you live in an area where headsets are required and the person passing you are talking without one, they just might be playing the free headset lottery. After all, it is the company giving them out for free, so why shouldn't anyone that qualifies not take advantage of it?

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Bloggers Note That Mojave Experiment is Not Showing Vista Problems

Greg Chaffins

Microsoft has turned to the web for trying to fix Vista's PR problems. Like an old coffee commercial, the Mojave Experiment is a website that features users shown a supposedly new operating system, then they are told that it is actually Vista. The ideal is to get users to experience Vista without the negative buzz surrounding the product.

While it no doubt has found some users that may see Vista in a new light, the experiment does not take into account the biggest issues with Vista, and bloggers are taking note of this. On Canadian magazine Maclean’s, blogger Colin Campbell, wrote that

Microsoft seems to be shifting blame for its bad P.R. problems over to their customers

Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age magazine and host of “On the Media” on NPR, reflects on the similarity of the Mojave campaign and the 80's Folgers Coffee switch commercials by writing,

Like the Folgers campaign, the Mojave Experiment is a clever test that demonstrates nothing

A big issue with Vista involves setting it up and installing drivers and applications. The Mojave Experiment, with its pre-setup and fully tuned demonstration, showed none of this to the test subject. Adam DuVander of Webmonkey notes that the website shows,

no videos of connecting new devices, attempting to get on a Wi-Fi network, or tunneling into work’s V.P.N

Ben Carlson, the chief strategy officer for Bradley and Montgomery, the firm conducting the experiment, stated that these complaints are based on misunderstandings of the Mojave Experiment’s purpose, and he had this to say about the blogger's reactions:

It’s not about saying Vista is perfect, or that all these people fell in love with it…what people have heard about Vista is different from the reality

Getting a better PR buzz around Vista is important to Microsoft, since Vista is only halfway through its intended 3 year life cycle. And with 140 million copies of Vista sold Microsoft is not exactly hurting from Vista. But their concern is with the next OS version, since bad buzz from Vista could open the door for an alternative to be considered in the near future.

Now, to note Microsoft has a history of bringing out a strong product after a stumble. For example, Windows 3.1 was a vast improvement over Windows 3.0, and Windows NT 3.51 triumphed over NT 3.5. The horrific Windows ME gave way to XP, arguably one of the best OS ever (certainly most popular). So, with all of the Vista flap I am expecting some really good things out of Windows 7. If not, Microsoft find its grasp on the PC market seriously weakened.

But one thing to take note of – the Mojave site was done in Adobe Flash, not Microsoft's own much touted alternative Silverlight. I find that interesting in itself.

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