To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman. David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”. Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Continue reading →

Forget Holby City and Casualty, two blogs tell us what it’s really like to work for the ambulance services – the London Ambulance Service to be more precise. Tom Reynolds is an Emergency Medical Technician. His Random Acts of Reality (Trying to kill as few people as possible…) tells us about life as part of an ambulance crew in London’s busy east end. NeeNaw is written by Mark Myers, who’s Continue reading →

The phenomenon of consumer blogs having such a disproportionate influence on major brands, which we highlighted in our “Search is Brand” study, derives in part from the failure of brands to create functional, easily indexed sites for themselves, and to produce lively, relevant and topical content. But some companies get over this by cheating. They do deals with unethical agencies who use spam and dummy websites to create phoney relevance Continue reading →

How can relevant content beat out spam? Sunir Shah of Socialtext explains why Wikis, and in particular Wikipedia gets such a powerful ranking on Google. He suggests that it is to do with the highly relevant internal linking of the Wikipedia site, combined with a vast number of comparatively low value links. His suggestion is that Wikipedia is a kind of collaboratively-created summary of the web, and hence resistant to Continue reading →

Technorati have launched a mode button on their search which allows the user to sort by authority. They are trying to solve a problem that bedevils the consumer blog search companies: how to filter out spam results. If spammers are targetting keywords – last week we saw a blog targeting the christian name “Alan” – then live searches become gradually less and less effective. One approach is to say that Continue reading →