LB's Rambles

Best Wishes

Wishing you all a happy and healthy New Year. As I always tell my friends, if it's healthy, it will be happy. All the best to you and yours from my family in 2008.

Busman's Honeymoon

The New Year is traditionally seen as a good time for new beginnings. So perhaps it's fitting that Dorothy L. Sayers' marvelous mystery, "Busman's Honeymoon," is featured this week on our Classic Mysteries podcast. After all, the story finds Lord Peter Wimsey, now finally married to Harriet Vane, on his honeymoon - only to find that someone has inconveniently left the body of a murdered man in the basement. What's a detective to do? Details, as always, are forthcoming by clicking the link to the file which you'll find in the right hand column - or why not try a free subscription via RSS feed? I mean, it could be a new beginning for you, too, and there are a lot more excellent mysteries to be reviewed in the coming weeks. Help yourself!

It May Not Be the Kiss of Death...

...but surely having the New York Times discover virtual worlds for kids must be a little like having your father tell you he really likes that punk rock music you're listening to. There's the Good Grey Lady nodding her head in the direction of Club Penguin and Webkinz and the like, while quoting eMarketer predictions of 20 million kids visiting virtual worlds by 2011.

No surprise, really. As noted earlier in this blog, there was a lot of discussion of the rise of virtual worlds for kids at the Social Media Club event in December. Those of us who think it's hard enough to cope with the real world are, again, being outpaced by our kids and grandkids. Which, come to think of it, has always been the way things work.

Hat tip: MediaPost

Stupidly Social

Memo to the geniuses at Google: just because you would like to get into social networking on a broader basis is no reason to mimic the worst idea Facebook has had so far.

You'd think after the furor over Facebook Beacon that Google might have had second thoughts before deciding to share everything a person reads using Google Reader with anyone they had communicated with via Google Talk (sorry if that's confusing, but all the various specialized Google Subprograms are confusing). Instead, they just went ahead and started sharing. So anyone you may have contacted on Google Talk automatically started receiving a list of everything you had read.

Bulldog Reporter has a good summary of the problem - and of Google's less than brilliant response to the furor so far. Among other things, Google Talk is used frequently within companies to allow employees to communicate with each other. Do you want your boss to know everything you read in your spare time? When you get an influential site like Slashdot complaining in a headline that Google "Ruined Christmas," you have a serious problem.

The Bulldog Reporter story sums it up quite succinctly and correctly: "It appears that privacy only seems like a non-issue on social networking sites where users frequently post pictures of themselves drunk and half naked for millions to see. But they do draw the line somewhere."

eMarketer Weighs In

We continue our efforts to become Prediction Central by passing along eMarketer's view of the coming year.

More Predictions

The year-end predictions continue over at Online Media Daily.

Media Predictions for 2008

As noted in the last entry (immediately below this one), it is the time of year when we usually see lots of news stories that consist of (a) ten-best or ten-worst lists - maybe just "ten"-lists, and (b) crystal-ball gazing for predictions of the year ahead in (insert any topic here).

That said, there's an interesting list over at MediaPost's Search Insider from Mark Simon, VP of Industry Relations at Didit, called "Ten Media Trends to Watch in 2008." It's an interesting collection, ranging from a further decline in television quality and profitability, not to mention a possible recession, to increasingly intrusive advertising and the likely demise of some web companies. Worth a read.

Filling the News Hole

The period around Christmas time is usually one of the slowest weeks of the year, as far as hard news is concerned. It doesn't take any large amount of sensitive listening to hear the manufactured news items that tend to fill up the bottomless news pits, even in the more traditional (read: non-24-hours-all-news-all-the-time) outlets.

Kim Nguyen at the Colorado Springs Gazette gets it about right: "The news never stops. Even when there seemingly isn’t any." She chronicles the efforts by a local TV station to come up with stories to fill the newscasts. Multiply that by a very large factor and you get an idea why you keep hearing the same predictable stories over and over again.

On the other hand, that's an opportunity for the PR professionals. If they can come up with something that sounds both interesting and newsworthy, this is the time of year when their efforts are likely to pay off.

Over at the Bad Pitch Blog, Kevin looks at a couple of the everlasting stories we always hear at this time of year (much to the joy of their PR sponsors): PNC Bank's accounting of the costs of the gifts named in The 12 Days of Christmas carol, and Merriam Webster's listing of the Word of the Year. You'll hear these and others every year. For those in the PR field who might want to get in on the action, Kevin offers some tips on creating...er...reporting similar year end stories. The good news (for PR pros) and bad news (for journalists) is the same: it works.

Royalty Goes YouTube

Would you believe Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain is now officially on YouTube?

It's called The Royal Channel, and it's about the British monarchy. And, yes, I said "officially" - this is a Buckingham Palace enterprise. According to the BBC, "The palace said it hoped the site would make the 81-year-old monarch's annual speech 'more accessible to younger people and those in other countries'. "

Welcome to the world of Web 2.0 communications, Your Majesty...

Hat tip: MediaPost

Sharing the Merryness

Somewhat belated, perhaps, but hopefully not too late, to wish you -

Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, a Good Eidd, (belatedly) Happy Chanukah, Cheerful Yule, and a (belated as well) Beneficient Winter Solstice.

If I missed anyone, it was not intentional. Good will to all of you. And I wish you the happiest of new years.