Wine, Roses, and Oil: PR and the Truth

Last night I happened to watch  Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.

My mistake.  It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made [...]

The Great Ghost-Blogging Debate

As he does so often and so well, Mark Schaeffer has sparked yet another fascinating debate on his blog today. Reviving a topic addressed last March by Jon Buscall and Mitch Joel, he argues against their position that CEOs should not use ghost writers for their blogs. While Schaeffer agrees with them in theory, in [...]

Monetize Your Typos

Doctorow: Make money with typos

A while back, I lamented how social media seem to lead inevitably to the decline of editing and proofreading. I was given new hope this weekend, though, while listening to Leo Laporte’s podcast “This Week in Tech.” Towards the end, guest Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer and Boing-Boing co-publisher, [...]

What B2B Publishers Don't Get: You Can't Own the Conversation

Although there may be a few exceptions, Stephen Saunders got it right this week  when he wrote on Folio:‘s web site that most B2B publishers are miserable failures at social networking.  He argues that you can’t build and maintain an online business community unless you produce lots of your own content to [...]

Social Media and the Decline of Editing

Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed:

“Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the [...]

Google to Rein In Content Farms?

Matt Cutts: Raising the Bar

Is Google poised to slow the growing domination of its search results by content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content? At the end of last Saturday’s episode of the podcast This Week in Google, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, suggested that it would: “If your business [...]

Reports of Twitter's Death Exaggerated

Twitter, says Constantine Von Hoffman this week on eMedia Vitals, is a dead-end technology. Why? Because young people don’t use it:

“Just 7% of those between 12 and 17 use Twitter, according to a Quantcast study. These numbers appear to improve with the next age group: 47% of those between 18 and 34 are Twitterers. [...]