Category: Technology (page 6 of 10)

1 June 2012 / 0 Comments

The Internet we know and love is at serious risk

[Originally written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup.]

Public relations – the pursuit of mutual understanding and goodwill – has been transformed by the Internet. Of that, no regular reader of The Conversation and the Roundup can be in doubt. And yet it is all too easy to take the Internet for granted.

The way the Internet has evolved to date has been critical to the way social media has evolved and our corresponding facilities as citizens, employees and consumers to participate, to innovate, to produce, to mashup, to share and to converse.

The open, decentralized Internet, governed by many stakeholders, is under threat. Right now, several countries, including China and Russia, are proposing to expand the powers of a non-transparent global institution, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), allowing it to change the rules on how our internet is used and governed.

And what's worse, the ITU won't even release their negotiating documents to the public or give internet users a seat at the table. The ITU simply isn't used to public accountability.

25 May 2012 / 6 Comments

Trial rides on the new London Underground, 150 years ago

Mr and Mrs Gladstone on the Metropolitan Railway, Trial Ride, 24th May 2012

Yesterday marked 150 years since the first 'trial ride' on the London Underground, the first underground railway system in the world. I know this only because I visited the National Portrait Gallery in March and found this photograph (more precisely, this is my photograph of the photograph). The gallery's accompanying text is as follows...

13 April 2012 / 4 Comments

Future Vistas for SEO

Future SEO Vistas 2012 from Philip Sheldrake

The Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We're expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I'm up immediately after the "Ask the engines" panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web's development might take today's SEO practitioners.

What's the hypothesis for future vistas?

Well without web search there would be no search engine optimisation, right? (You can see why I get invited to speak at such august gatherings ... pure insight!) And yet the SEO skillset no longer needs the fuel and constant vagaries of public WWW search to keep practitioners in full employ.

SEO can be considered with ill repute when it's perceived to be about gaming (read "fooling") search engine algorithms in order to serve solely the website owner's perceived needs. However, when you view SEO skills as working in partnership with search engines to help deliver the right information to the web user at the right time in the right format, suddenly the reputation is transformed. How incredibly useful!

Moreover, we are moving beyond WWW search. All sorts of data and information and knowledge repositories are growing fast as the age of Big Data, Big Information and, hopefully, Big Knowledge dawns. Anybody with the facility to help make sense of that data, transforming data into useful information and information into knowledge, has the right skills at just the right time.

2 April 2012 / 0 Comments

The Business of Influence for REALLY BIG Digital Impact

Here's my slidestack for PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#PRSADiConf) today.

I hope it goes without saying that I'm happy to answer any questions this stack or my presentation today may raise, or just have a chat in general. Always my pleasure. My contact details are always easy to find on philipsheldrake.com.

Thanks of course to the PRSA team for the opportunity.

PRSA Digital Impact Conference April 2012

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake

2 April 2012 / 1 Comment

The REALLY BIG Digital Impact, at #PRSADiConf

PRSA Digital Impact Conference

I'm in New York today at the PRSA's Digital Impact Conference. In fact, I get the opportunity to present at 2.30pm this afternoon, and I'm really looking forward to it.

And the more I think about the conference title, Digital Impact, the more I've come to recognise that my presentation has two main thrusts...

First, most organisations don't yet feel the digital impact of 2012 fully. They haven't yet wholly adapted to today's social media and digital technologies.

Second, we haven't seen anything yet! The rate of change over the next five years will make the last five look like we were taking our sweet time. And that's what fascinates me and informs my presentation. This is the REALLY BIG digital impact!

When I presented at Dreamforce in San Francisco last year, the dominant phrase amongst delegates was Socialize the Enterprise. It's now time to make that happen, and I'm hoping we'll have a great #PRSADiConf dialogue this afternoon.

15 February 2012 / 1 Comment

UK businesses will have to pay a UK media license – Copyright Tribunal implications

Yes, you read the title to this post right. Are you in business? In the UK? Online or use email? Then you apparently owe the Newspaper Licensing Agency some money.

I first expressed my interest in an increasingly aggressive Newspaper Licensing Agency in a 2007 blog post suggesting a more appropriate title for the body – Newspaper Licensing Anachronism. Please note that I have nothing against the monetization of copyright content (hey I'm an author!), I just think the way the NLA conducts its business is all rather 20th Century. And this week, we’ve had a Copyright Tribunal Interim Decision. [The square brackets below reference this decision.]

The NLA’s relevance in the 21st Century has been tested, as far as the law is open to interpretation, by the innovative media monitoring company, Meltwater. Actually, the description the Copyright Tribunal uses to describe Meltwater, or rather Meltwater’s witness, is “unnecessarily combative” [35]. Well, talking of combat, the latest battle in this war concluded yesterday.

The result is a mixed affair, with neither the NLA or Meltwater coming out on top. I’ve just recorded an interesting conversation with Meltwater’s JP Glittenberg about this week’s decision... do take a listen, particularly if you work in media, PR or copyright.

[audio:https://philipsheldrake.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Meltwater-interview-15Feb2012.mp3|titles=Meltwater interview 15th Feb 2012]

Now the Tribunal is quite restricted: by law; by precedent; by previous adjudgements in this ongoing case; by its own terms of reference. Generally, on reading the entire 60-page decision, I find the Tribunal to be most diligent, but given my background, I get a bit uptight every time I read something that indicates a lack of technical understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web (yes, they are different things!)

Despite some stumbles however, they get somewhere interesting in the end. In fact, they end up showing up UK copyright law for the shambles it is. Read more

6 October 2011 / 6 Comments

The Role of PR in a Digital Age

European PR Congress 2011 – The Role of PR in the Digital Age

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

I'm in Kiev this evening preparing my presentation for tomorrow's European PR Congress 2011. I'm the first session of the day so I have the challenge of exciting the delegates, with getting some energy in the room. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm from the audience when I presented last month in San Francisco, so it'll be interesting to compare the two.

Now, I was briefed by event organiser Marina Starodubska (General Director, Partner, Mikhailov&Partners.Ukraine) that social media in Ukraine has not yet gained the momentum it has in Europe and the USA for example. She estimates that household broadband Internet penetration is just 26% [updated following the first comment below]. Interestingly, however, according to Total Telecom in July last year: "Ukraine as a whole had 55.60 million mobile subscriptions... putting penetration at 121.2%."

Whilst I haven't been able to find a breakdown of feature phones and smart phones, the waiting staff in the restaurant this evening indicated that such devices are booming. In the car to the hotel I also noticed that Nokia is investing in quite a big outdoor advertising campaign here for its feature and smart phones.

My stack for tomorrow is included here. The majority of the slides are taken from the longer stack from last month's Dreamforce, so if you took a look at that, you might not want to take the time here. But it's more the narrative I intend to tailor for this event. The emphasis tomorrow is simple – Public Relations, as defined by the Excellence Study, has a very bright future. Read more

16 September 2011 / 0 Comments

Click and type or touch and swipe

Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup:

Regular readers will know I've argued for some time that we've really past the point where we can talk about digital media as if it's the exception. The majority media is now digital, or has a digital component via something like a QR code, image recognition and augmented reality. If anything, we should be calling out analogue media in its minority role by now.

And yet in 2011 it's probably still pertinent to make the distinction between 'being online' versus 'offline'. Sure, your smartphone is always on; and sure, it always knows where it is and reports that data back real-time to all those app vendors that demand this data (even if it's just to allow you to chuck an angry bird around the screen). But you'll find yourself hard pressed to find someone who considers themselves to be actively online 24/7.

However, this is changing. And fast. In just a few short years we're well down the line in moving from so-called 'click and type' interfaces to 'touch and swipe'. Think about someone just like you living a century ago... the actions of clicking and typing would have been alien to them, yet touching and swiping are quite natural. Read more

2 September 2011 / 0 Comments

Socializing the enterprise. Are you?

[Post written for the CIPR Conversation Friday Roundup]

I adopt the US spelling of socialize here because I'm doing the roundup this week from San Francisco where I'm attending the Dreamforce conference, a conference dedicated to this very theme.

Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce.com conference and with 45,000 registered delegates this year it is now, or so CEO Marc Benioff assures us, the largest corporate tech event of its kind. There is a palpable enthusiasm for the theme, regularly articulated as "awesome" by the American delegates.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

Salesforce.com advocates a three-step approach to socializing the enterprise, in no particular order: Read more