Website Members Take Over Football Club

By | November 22, 2011
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A new model of football ownership? The BBC website reports that

Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United.

The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and they will all own an equal share in the club.

Members will have a vote on transfers as well as player selection and all major decisions.

What’s interesting is that the website has only been going since April. It has 50,000 members, 20,000 of them paying the registration fee. MyFootballClub was actually approached by nine of them clubs, none of them from the Premier League, before deciding on Ebbsfleet. The £700,000 was raised in 11 weeks.

I have no idea what the implications of this are. But given that the members/owners will now demand a say in the picking of the team, it could be more like the Israeli model I mentioned a few weeks back. Not everyone agrees it would work.

BBC SPORT | Football | My Club | Ebbsfleet United | Fans website agrees club takeover

The “Have I Got a Story For You” Trick

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m no fan of bad, sloppy PR, and to me there’s nothing quite as sloppy as pitching a product to a journalist s/he has already written about. Do these people not have any records at all? Do they have no idea of what coverage their product has already received?

I’ve been pitched two products in the past week that I have written about already in my WSJ.com column. OK, not everyone reads the WSJ, and not everyone reads the column, but it’s not exactly a backwater publication that would have not shown up in someone’s records, had they been keeping any.

First there was the Unotron washable keyboard, which I pretty much dedicated a whole column to a couple of years back (it shows up on the CollegeJournal with a search unotron wsj). In response to a request to the PR/expert source clearing house ProfNet a few days back I received a pitch from a PR guy which began

If you are looking for the latest technological advancement in computer keyboards, I may have your answer.

What surprised me here was that my column was copiously cited on the company’s own website.

Then there’s something called the Loc8tor, a tracking device I wrote about a few months back in another WSJ.com column. I just now received a pitch with the breathless subject line: “STORY IDEA: New RFID Tracking Device Finds Valuables with Directional Capabilities”:

I am contacting you regarding a new product story that will help your readers stay organized and find their valuables. 

The original column doesn’t show up high in the search engines if you look for loc8tor wsj but a reference to it clearly shows up in a link to Peter Morville of findability.org, whom I interviewed for the piece. Seems the PR company could use the product themselves to keep track of previous coverage of their client’s product.

(It’s only “new”, by the way, in the sense of newly available in the U.S.; the product’s been around for at least a year in the UK and elsewhere. The PR person involved clearly doesn’t have a particularly good database as my column has carried an Asian dateline for the past year, and my blog and webpage make clear I’m not U.S. based. Minor details, I grant you, but I feel sorry for the poor sap who’s paying the agency if he’s hoping for a well-targeted PR campaign.)

What’s telling, to me, in both of these cases, is that I had originally dealt with the companies themselves, not with their PR companies. In fact, I’m not sure either had PR companies working with them when I dealt with them. In other words, these companies have hired PR companies to go get coverage, who then go undo the positive work the company itself had done by pitching to the self-same guys who have already given them coverage.

I can understand, I suppose, this kind of thing happening. But it’s still sloppy, and clearly indicates that the PR company, when hired, does little or no research into what coverage the product has already received. Surely that would be the first thing you’d do, if only to see whether those publications or writers have already written about you might be worth cultivating for follow-up coverage down the track? At the very least, I guess I would assume you don’t want to alienate those people by showing you have no idea what they’ve been writing about?

PR note #273: When you get a new client, Google them.

The Power of Tiddly

By | November 22, 2011
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This week’s Loose Wire Service column, a service for print publications,  is on the TiddlyWiki, a piece of software I find myself coming back to from time to time:

This isn’t for everybody, but I’ve found myself recently going back to a little itsy bitsy piece of software that turns your browser into a notebook cum database.

It’s called TiddlyWiki, and it takes the two concepts — tiddlyness, as in smallness, and Wiki, as in simple editing software — about as far as you can take them. The result: a flexible piece of software that contains both the programming needed to run the thing and the information you put it into in one file.

This is how it works. You download the software from www.tiddlywiki.com, a site run by the TiddlyWiki’s creator, Jeremy Ruston. The file itself is just an HTML file, the same as most web pages you visit.

Inside that one file is all the code you need to start your own TiddlyWiki. Once open, the file has a title, a menu on the right and a couple of basic entries — called Tiddlies, in the trade — already open.

You can then add your own entries by clicking on “New Tiddly”. You can change the title and subtitle of the page by editing the corresponding Tiddly. It’s both nerdy and intuitive: You quickly learn that it’s possible to convert plain text to bold by adding you add two apostrophes before and after the text you want emboldened.

To highlight text in yellow add two @-signs before and after the text. And so on. To edit a Tiddly just double click anywhere in its text; when you’re done, hit Control + Enter, or else click on the Done button.

The power of the TiddlyWiki is, in my view, in how you can organize your entries. You can add tags, or labels, to each entry, adding new ones on the go or from a pull down list of existing tags. You can then see at a glance what entries you’ve got with those tags. You can see your entries in chronological order, or alphabetically. Or you can search through the entries looking for specific words.

Why might you want something like this? Well, there are a number of advantages:

You have a project and you want to keep all the data in one place. Or you want to create small databases of, say, recipes or contacts for a specific project.

You don’t want to splash out for expensive database or outliner software.

You like something like EverNote, but you can never find what you’re looking for.

You crave simplicity. TiddlyWiki is not as fancy as most programs, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

You’re using both Macs and Windows computers (or Linux); TiddlyWiki works on most browsers, and of course doesn’t care what operating system it’s on.

You like trying something new, but don’t want to get a headache. Tiddly, as they say, ain’t fiddly.

You want something you can put on a USB stick and carry with you, and use on any computer without installing something.

You want to create a quick and dirty website (TiddlyWiki can be uploaded and used as a website, though it’s not overly elegant; as all the data is in one HTML file, it may slow loading the page.

You like programs that are always improving themselves; a passionate user base is always coming up with improvements and add-ons. A great way to waste an evening.

I messed around with it a couple of years back and enjoyed it, but bumped up against its limitations. My main problem was that adding too much to a TiddlyWiki makes it unwieldy. This time around, instead of adding everything to one TiddlyWiki, I made different ones for each specific project.

Keeping the entries smaller and the number of entries to 20 or so made it much easier. It got me through a tricky project, I have to say.

Downsides? Some people swear by the TiddlyWiki, but I suspect it’s the kind of thing you play with, and perhaps come back to from time to time, as the mood and need take you.

I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone either; some of us just need things to be a bit more straightforward than TiddlyWiki presently is. But for the rest of you, this is a great way to try something a bit different and see if it fits a need you have.

The Jakarta Post – The Journal of Indonesia Today

How to Monitor Your Flickr Album

By | November 22, 2011
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The best way to keep tabs on who is linking to your Flickr photo album is through Technorati, the blog-tracking service. But it’s not as straightforward as it could be, so here’s a guide, based almost entirely on that provided by the Technology Evangelist Ed Kohler, for which I offer grateful thanks.

Setting up the Technorati end

Sign up for Technorati if you don’t already have an account.

Go to Technorati’s start claim page, and click on the Blogs tab:

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Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Claim a Blog section and paste in your Flickr.com page into the URL box:

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Click on the Begin Claim button:

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You’ll be taken through a four step process, the next stage of which is to choose your “claim method”. Use the Post Claim method if you’re offered more than one, by clicking on the blue link, as per below:

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In the next screen follow the instructions by selecting the prepared code in the light green box:

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Setting up the Flickr end

This is where it gets trickier: open a second browser window, go to your Flickr account and choose a recent photo that’s public. Choose the “Edit title, description, and tags” link on the right hand side:

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In the description box of the photo delete all existing descriptions (copy them if you like to a text file — you can always paste them back later.)

Copy the code from the Technorati box into the Description field of your Flickr photo, deleting all the stuff that isn’t the link:

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(Removing both other descriptions and the HTML code seems to be important. Without it, it might not work.)

Save changes to the photo:

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Wrapping it Up

Now go back to the Technorati page you were on before and click on the button “Release the Spiders!” This will instruct Technorati to go look at your Flickr page and look for the code:

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When this is complete you should receive a message on the Technorati page saying it’s successfully added your Flickr page to your list of monitored blogs. If it’s unsuccessful, go back to the Flickr image and check

  • the photo is public 
  • you’ve removed all other Description text 
  • you’ve removed the HTML from the link

and try releasing the spiders again.

Monitoring your Flickr photos

So how do you actually keep tabs on the Technorati page?

Once your Flickr page is “claimed” it should appear on your Technorati page (http://technorati.com/people/technorati/[YOURNAME]). Click on the green Authority button below the link to your Flickr page:

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You should see a list of those blogs and websites linking to your photos:

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Either bookmark this page, or else subscribe to its RSS feed. Either way, you should now be able to keep tabs on who’s linking to your Flickr photos.

How Technology Shrinks and Amplifies Distance

By | November 22, 2011
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Two pieces in the NYT/IHT that weren’t about technology, but kind of are, illustrate how technology can shrink distance but also grow it.

First off a piece by Geoff D. Porter,  an analyst in the Middle East and Africa division of the Eurasia Group, explores how African would-be immigrants to Europe are now making their way to Europe via the Canary Islands, some 50 miles off the coast of Mauritania. Until technology came along, this was a very risky business: The Atlantic is big, and the Canaries are small, making it hard for sailors in small fishing boats to find them.

Still, chasing fish stocks is different from finding a small cluster of islands in the middle of the ocean. At least it was until battery-powered, handheld GPS units became widely available.

Over the past several years, GPS technology has become smaller, more user-friendly and – most importantly – cheaper. A simple unit costs little more than $100. And because GPS uses satellites, they work as well on Fifth Avenue as they do 50 miles off the coast of Mauritania.

With the new oceangoing canoes outfitted with handheld GPS units, the Canaries were no longer so far away nor so hard to find for the Africans.

Cheap GPS has shrunk the distance between Africa and Europe, perhaps not for the better if boats are still getting lost, and the illegal immigrants are simply caught and turned back. Perhaps it merely creates more business for snakeheads. But there’s no denying that GPS has become a tool of the masses, even in the developing world, and that that carries with it huge implications for the size of the world and the shrinking of distance.

But sometimes technology has the opposite effect. Another IHT piece, by author and diplomat Judith M. Heimann, explores how U.S. airmen shot down over Borneo in 1945 quickly learned the local Dayak language and helped turn the local people into a formidable guerrilla force. Ms. Heimann’s point is that those individual airmen who were isolated from their comrades learned Dayak faster, and stands in contrast to the soldier of today in Iraq or Afghanistan:

And now, as I read the newspapers, I cannot help noticing how in today’s unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers’ and leaders’ current lack of success in co-opting the local people contrasts with what was achieved by a small number of American airmen 60-odd years ago.

How come this difference? And what can we learn from it?

The difference may well be directly related to the number of soldiers involved. The airman who was the quickest to learn the local language and to become a competent survivor, was the one who was alone in a Dayak village for months before meeting up with any of the other Americans.

The slowest to become capable of helping themselves and being part of an effective anti-Japanese unit were those in the biggest group – four American flyers.

Think about it. When do you learn a new language most easily? When you have no choice.

Compare this with the gizmos every soldier today carries — communications devices, sustenance, translation gadgets, night vision goggles — and you realize that while such devices may sometimes save him, they also isolate him from the sort of contact with local people and culture that turned a disastrous flight over Borneo into a successful grassroots campaign against the Japanese. Here technology merely creates a gulf, a sort of shield where the soldier remains dependent on his devices and reduces the chances of building the kind of bonds those stranded airmen did with the headhunters of Borneo.

‘Guests’ can succeed where occupiers fail – International Herald Tribune