Morgan McLintic on PR and Performance

Portland airport has free WiFi

Just on my way back from a meeting in Portland, Oregan and discovered that Portland International Airport (PDX) has free WiFi in its departure concourse. How great is that?

Technorati Tags: PDX, Portland, WiFi

New version of Firefox

Out now and available at Mozilla.com. See what's new on the release notes - faster, safer etc. Yum yum.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Mozilla

Sony Bravia KLVS26A10 26“ WEGA HD-Ready Flat Panel TV - Initial impressions

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is by tradition a shopping-fest where all the stores slash their prices and shoppers stampede for bargains. Not to be left out, I hightailed it down to join the throngs at Best Buy to stock up on some new kit.

First in the cart was a new TV - a Sony Bravia 26“ HDTV LCD Flat Panel TV. I don't have a High Definition (HD) cable service yet and for best results you obviously need the signal to be HD, but it works well with an analog signal and for DVD playback. In fact the picture quality is better than my previous Sony Trinitron for analog cable TV.

One thing which I learned when shopping for tvs is not to judge each television by the quality of the picture you see in the store. Evidently the signal to each of those sets is split up to eight times, so it's not representative of what you'll see in your living room. In fact the image on the Sony Bravia in the store was far worse than a JVC sitting next to it. I was tempted by the JVC on that basis but opted to trust the store assistant, and am glad I did.

First impressions of the set are good. It was surprisingly easy to set up using its auto-set up program. One frustration was that the Bravia requires its own co-axial cable connection, but doesn't come with a signal splitter or an additional co-ax cable. This necessitated a second, rather irritated trip back to the store. This is par for the course when setting up new AV kit, I have found, but from a customer perspective it would be better if the manufacturers included more cables rather than grinching them. The additional cost would be more than offset by increased customer satisfaction.

The set has a good design and looks modern without being too showy. The remote is fairly easy to understand. The Bravia has a WEGA-gate feature which is a central menu where you can configure settings, favorite channels and set up new inputs, such as camcorder or games console. It also has a number of needless features like freeze frame, and channel jump which don't add much value.

Being a flat screen, the set is also extremely light, which means you can mount it on the wall and maneuver it around your home without much difficulty. The same can't be said of my Sony 'Beast' Trinitron which takes two people to even adjust the positioning.

The sound is good but perhaps on the quiet side. There's not much stereo effect since the speakers are positioned along the bottom of the set rather than at either side. This keeps the set small but compromises the sound. It does have surround-sound capability for those interested or for larger living spaces.

Overall this is a good tv, with a clear screen, easy set up, elegant and modern design and a wide range of picture configuration options. The one downside is the sound which is a little flat. I'd shop around since I've found the prices range quite a bit, but it's certainly one to consider alongside Samsung and Sharp which are the other leaders in this space at the moment.

Technorati Tags: Bravia, Flat panel, HDTV, Sony

Amazon rolls out wikis

While browsing through Amazon's site, I've just noticed that they've added wiki functionality to each of their product description pages. Here's what Amazon is recommending users should put in the wiki:

Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read. You should put in relevant factual information that you believe will be of value to others who visit the page. A Wiki is not the place to express your opinion; that's what Customer Reviews and Customer Discussions are for. As always, please treat the Amazon community with respect by not writing inappropriate or off-topic comments.

There isn't any information in most of the wikis I looked at yet but this is potentially a great resource for customers to pool information and share knowledge. And another example of how consumer companies are losing control over the very facts about their products. The wikis aren't for opinion - they're for facts gathered by the Amazon community. So that might be information about overheating, component failure rates, noise levels etc which would not normally form part of the product data sheet.

Amazon may have been doing this for a while, but I've also noticed that the company is encouraging customers to submit product shots.

I discussed this yesterday with the Xbox 360 screen shots generated by customers. Here's another example of how you can't spin the visuals with lighting or post production. This facility will show authentic, real-life product use. As these technologies open products for deep scrutiny and the market becomes more transparent, firms must ensure they are being truthful with their customers and themselves. if the product doesn't work as well as described, don't fool yourself into thinking no-one will notice. At Amazon, the marketplace really is enabling the conversation between buyers.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, photo sharing, wikis

Are blogrolls bound for the scrapheap?

A blogroll is the list of links to other weblogs which you typically find down the side of a blog. The idea is that these are the blogger's friends and influencers, so the topics discussed on those blogs are relevant to the central blog's theme. You can reasonably expect a blogger to read the blogs in his or her blogroll. If you want to know what's on a blogger's mind - just read what's being said in the linked blogs too.

For the newcomer, blogrolls are a good way to get to grips with the ecosystem discussing a particular topic and to find new blogs.

Except that's not really the case anymore. I'd be surprised if bloggers restrict their consumption to just those sources listed on their blogroll. Blogroll maintenance is often sporadic and doesn't keep pace with the creation of new relevant information sources. As a result, blogrolls are now being merged with RSS aggregators to provide a more accurate view of what a blogger is reading (using a format called OPML). Some bloggers make their RSS aggregator OPML file public for just this reason.

And for the newcomer, there's really no need to read through blogrolls to find relevant information. Blog search engines like Ice Rocket, and the system of tagging posts has made it much easier to find information about a particular topic. In fact, there's too much information rather than too little.

In the world of bloggers, the blogroll used to be a way of giving some link love to each other. And that's still true to an extent. But it's far more common now for bloggers to link to a particular post if they like it, rather than generically link to an entire weblog. To give more Google juice, you just link to more posts. It's also more useful for the reader if a blogger links to a specific post than to say - there's some good stuff 'over there somewhere'.

So will we see the end of blogrolls? Are they now a dated practice from the early days of blogging? Is it rude to delete your blogroll? Should we publish what's in our RSS aggregators instead? Is there even much point in that given search technologies and the massive proliferation of info sources anyway?

As with any social medium the norms are changing. Blogrolls are probably a throwback now and taking up space which can be used more valuably. We'll probably see them relegated to the bottom of sidebars, and then gently shuffled off into the ether as they get out of date. RIP Blogroll - and thanks for all the links.

Technorati Tags: blogroll, OPML, RSS, tags

No turkey for Xbox 360 team

Looks like Microsoft's Xbox 360 PR team will be working over the Thanksgiving break following reports that the new Xbox 360 console crashes. There are screen shots up on Flickr here too. After all the hype, it's inevitable that there'd be some kind of backlash. The comments up on Flickr suggest the problem highlighted in this shot might simply be loose connections. Meanwhile a poll conducted on an Xbox Scene forum reports about 15% of the devices could be affected.

One takeaway here for consumer brands is how customers can share images of their experience and those images then spread to forums, blogs and fan sites. You might prepare your product and screen shots carefully in the studio, but users will also create their own which seem far more authentic. There are currently 4,723 images tagged Xbox up on Flickr at the moment for instance. So you can't spin the visual message either - you have to bake it right into the product.

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving folks.

Thanksgiving - not really an export

I overhead this exchange on a local radio station the other day:

Presenter: “I wonder how Thanksgiving is celebrated in other countries. I mean, in Japan, do they have turkey sushi rolls or something?”

Co-host: “Err no.”

Brilliant.

Under The Radar - Photos

Courtesy of Kurt Foeller, here are the first few shots from Wednesday's Under The Radar event.

We had a great time listening to the 32 companies present and hearing their CEOs put through their paces by the VCs. One CEO confided in me that there are few things that make him sweat these days but being grilled by VCs in front of 100 people is one of them. Another confessed that he was a bit rusty, so the event was good practice for getting out on the funding trail. One more admitted that he didn't like the feedback but it was good to know and clearly they needed to straighten the kinks in their business model.

Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher moderated two of the tracks and has some comments about the event here. John Furrier of PodTech was busily interviewing many of the companies, so we can expect to see those out soon. Robert Scoble made a brief appearance at the VIP party on Tuesday and was circling the Microsoft Campus where the event was held. I bumped into several other PR types including Margit Wennmachers from Outcast and Jason Mandel of LaunchSquad. It was also good to meet Sam Whitmore of Forbes and his eponymous Media Survey, who also moderated two of the tracks. Jeff Nolan, who recently left SAP Ventures, has some thoughts about the event on his Venture Chronicles blog. One of the companies - Coverity - was boot strapped and won the audience choice award for its track. The CEO confidently claimed he didn't want any VC money which caused quite a lot of raised eyebrows and mutterings among the VCs, and wry smiles among the other CEOs.

There was a real sense of optimism and buzz at the event. Scott Dietzen, president and CTO of Zimbra, the AJAX poster child, even claimed 'the Valley is back' as he lofted his Innovation Award. Let's hope he's right.

Technorati Tags: IBD Network, Under The Radar

Yes, but is it art?

The entrance lobby of our office block in San Francisco is decorated with corporate art. Every six weeks or so, the paintings rotate to other buildings. It's a good idea since it keeps the entrance fresh and gives emerging artists a showcase for their work.

I'm not wild about corporate art in general - it's often 'blart' not art. In the current series, decking our entrance hall is an entirely white canvas simply titled 'Why?'. Why indeed. If you look carefully, you can see that the artist has even lightly stenciled the letter Y in white on a white background. It's acrylic on canvas. Perhaps it's supposed to represent a deeper meaning. The futility of trying to be the purest of the pure or questioning our need to stand out as individuals. Or perhaps it simply aims to spark a response such as this, and so the conversation is the art not the picture.

I don't know. It's not much to look at though, I'm sure you'll agree.

Technorati Tags: art