Welcome

Welcome to another edition of the Prompt Communications newsletter. Flying insectoid spy-cameras, robot-monkey-heads, our thoughts on the problem of measuring influence in the blogosphere, oh yes, we've got it all this week...

Technology News

My, oh my, a robotic spy. Or maybe it’s a dragonfly…
By Duncan Heaney

The Washington Post reports that there has been a series of sightings of robotic insects in America. Citizens watching a protest rally in Washington DC have claimed to have seen small, insect shaped mechanical devices flying around the crowd. The purpose of these devices is unclear, but their presence at a politically sensitive event have led many to theorise they are the latest high-tech government surveillance tool.

However, a lot of people are sceptical as to whether these robots exist. Many have suggested that the witnesses may have been seeing actual dragonflies, which do have a certain robotic look about them. The general consensus amongst experts is that miniature robot insects are a practical impossibility. It is only very recently that scientists have understood how insects fly, and the constant motion of the wings raises difficult questions about how the robots would be powered.

The American Government denies any deployment of insect sized spy drones, but some agencies admit that they are trying to develop that kind of technology. At least one federally funded team is attempting to create remote controlled ‘insect cyborgs’. The idea is to grow live insects with computer chips inside them, attach miniature cameras and other surveillance gear onto them, and manually control their flight. The hope is that these insects could be used to follow suspects or search disaster sites for survivors.

It is unclear what it was the crowd saw in Washington; real bug or surveillance bug? If the insects do turn out to be real, that is some truly amazing technology…

Firefox: “We will rock mobile web. Sing it!”
By Lance Concannon

Writing on his blog, Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Mozilla has made some major announcements on his blog about Mozilla’s plans to develop a version of the Firefox web browser. Scroepfer said: “People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it.”

Wow! We can’t wait to have our mobile internet experience rocked! Although it looks like we’ll probably have to wait until 2009, because according to Schroepfer, mobile devices are only just starting to pack the kind of horsepower needed to run a decent web browser, and it’ll take a while for Mozilla’s code-monkeys to optimise Firefox for those kinds of devices. Oh well, I suppose in the meantime we’ll just have to struggle along with Opera-Mini, which has been providing a decent enough web browsing experience on mobile phones and other handheld devices for the past two years.

US Media News

By Tarryn Morley

US

Wendy Sheehan has been appointed senior editor at PC Magazine. Prior to joining PC Magazine on October 10th, she was editor of Computer Shopper. In her new role, Sheehan will be responsible for the consumer electronics team.

Dan Golden will join Conde Nast Portfolio as a senior editor. Golden will also write pieces for the magazine. He will begin his new role this month. In a further change at the publication, Hilary Stout has also been appointed senior editor. She will be joining the magazine in late October. Stout is currently the editor of The Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section.

Carl H. Lavin has joined Forbes.com as Managing Editor. He was previously Deputy Managing Editor for online and multimedia at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Before joining The Philadelphia Enquirer, Lavin spent 20 years at The New York Times.

Carly Fiorina has been hired as a contributor for Fox Business Network, a cable and satellite news channel that will be launched in the near future. Fiorina is a well known business figure who has served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. She has also worked for AT&T Corporation and Lucent Technologies.

UK Media News

By Tarryn Morley

UK

Ed Fear has been hired as a staff writer for the print and online editions of Develop, a European gaming magazine published by Intent Media. He has recently completed a degree at Oxford Brookes University. Fear previously worked as a freelancer for Pocket Gamer and downloadable magazine HGZine. Sara Yirrell has been promoted from deputy editor to editor of Incisive Media’s CRN (Computer Reseller News) to replace former editor Sara Driscoll. Yirrell will also take responsibility for of the magazine's associated web site, ChannelWeb.co.uk.

Expansive Media, a company that produces covermounts for UK magazines and newspapers, is launching the world's first entertainment magazine on DVD. The interactive magazine will feature more than an hour of exclusive cinema and television-related content, including trailers, interviews, and behind-the-scenes footage. When used on a computer, Entertain’s menu will expand to include trials of the new PC games, downloads, web links and reviews. Entertain will be released next month as a covermount on leading tabloid newspapers and a men’s magazine. It will be available on news-stands from January for £3.99.

BitTorrent piracy technology sails into mainstream; Radiohead go overboard
By Dave Wilby

As attempts to throw off the image of piracy go, BitTorrent’s partnership with legit online-TV platform Brightcove this week was about as effective as Long John Silver trying on a bowler hat.

BitTorrent, the online file-sharing technology synonymous with media piracy heralded the Brightcove deal as a major push towards legitimacy, but torrent addicts happily stealing free albums, films and games this week knew differently. BitTorrent software was created six years ago by Bram Cohen. It turns users’ computers into a massive collective distribution network, allowing digital content to be downloaded in fragments from numerous sources, removing the single point of weakness – the server – found in traditional P2P networks. To distance itself from obvious copyright infringement, BiTorrent.com opened a paid-for video store in February and as part of this new deal will distribute feature-length films in a YouTube-style service.

However, BitTorrent also showed its true colours Wednesday morning, when it hosted perfect illegal copies of Radiohead’s long-awaited download-only seventh album ‘In Rainbows’ just minutes after zip files were sent to adoring fans. The controversial album was sold on an ‘honesty box’ principle, which crooner James Blunt thought was a bad idea, but former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr thought was great. A survey by The Times revealed that out of 3000 fans polled, the average priced paid was around £4, with a third paying nothing at all and 351 forking out for the £40 box set. Presumably everyone else just burned it off BitTorrent, despite the band’s best attempt to cut out any middle man for them.

Nobel Nanotech
By Dave Wilby
When Peter Gruenberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics this week for a discovery that led to the miniaturised hard disks used in all modern laptops, iPods and smartphones, all he could say was that it was “slightly expected, but not completely because then I would have worn a tie."

Together with colleague Albert Fert, Gruenberg has worked on breakthrough implementations of nanotechnology that enable unprecedented volumes of data to be squeezed into ever-smaller devices, making gadgets like Apple’s current generation of iPods possible.

‘Giant magnetoresistance’, or GMR, provides a large electrical response to a tiny magnetic input, making it possible to stack nanometre-thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic atoms. When these atoms are then laid down on a hard disk in ultra-thin layers, they interact in a manner that makes it possible to pack more data on disks.

"You like physics?" Fert asked reporters at the prize ceremony. "If you are able to listen to music on your MP3 player, it is in part thanks to what I've done." Gruenberg and Fert now join some of the greatest names in science, including Einstein, Curie, Bohr and Rontgen.

Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

Measuring blogger influence

We’ve been having numerous discussions with clients recently about how to measure the influence of blogs on buying decisions.

For corporate communicators, measuring influence is an essential activity. Assigning a quantifiable degree of influence to individual publications and journalists has allowed them to concentrate their limited resources on those that are the most influential, and to discount those that are not.

It also allows them to quantify to some extent the value delivered by PR. ‘We had a mention in the Wall Street Journal, which is read by 2 million business decision-makers,’ they can say. That 2 million is a nice, high number, likely to convince the powers that be that PR is getting the company message across to the right people.

Of course the more pertinent, but infinitely more difficult, questions are: ‘how many people read that particular article?’ and ‘of those people, how many were moved to buy our product?’. These aren’t easy questions, and finding the answers costs the kind of money that few PR teams are able to spend.

If the exact influence of the established media is difficult to measure, the influence of blogs is even trickier. It’s rare for a blogger to reveal how many readers they have, and when they do, they rarely seem impressive. This week, techblogger Robert Scoble (the 36th most popular blogger in the world, according to Technorati) revealed that he gets 6,000-22,000 visitors a day. Compared with the Wall Street Journal – hell, compared with the Aberdeen Press & Journal – those figures are tiny.

And then there’s Jeff Jarvis, who infamously created a PR nightmare for Dell in 2005 when he wrote a post about Dell’s customer service practices. It caused so many other people to weigh in with their own comments, links and blog posts that it was picked up by the mainstream media. But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Jeff is always influential. I know this because he once linked to a post on my blog (which I was very excited about, because I thought it would lead to unimaginable popularity and possibly free gifts), but only a handful of people clicked on it.

What made Jeff’s ‘Dell Hell’ story influential wasn’t necessarily that it was written by Jeff Jarvis, but that it struck a chord with a lot of people. And the beauty – and danger – of the blogosphere is that a story that strikes a chord with a lot of people rapidly gets taken up by a lot of people, creating an amplification effect that can quickly become larger than the sum of its parts. It only needs one other person to write about it on their own blog – or ‘share’ it on Facebook, or Digg, or del.icio.us – to start a snowball effect that may see it filter all the way into the public consciousness.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be asking ‘how influential is this blog?’, but ‘how influential is this story?’. If it’s interesting enough, it will be picked up and amplified. If it isn’t, even if it’s covered by a ‘top’ blogger, it’s unlikely to make a difference in the grand scheme of things. PR folk, then, might be better off thinking about how to write their own stories on the internet that other people will want to read, comment on, circulate, ‘share’ and write about.

But that’s a topic for another time.

Review - Wowwee Alive Chimpanzee

By Lance Concannon

There comes a time in every man's life when he suddenly realises that he can't possibly live a minute longer without owning a robotic chimpanzee head. For me, that time came last week while I was idly browsing through eBay and happened upon an advert for a brand new Wowwee Alive Chimpanzee.

Alive Chimpanzee is essentially a life-size animatronic ape-head, which is marketed as being astonishingly lifelike. I've never had a face to face with a real chimp, but I can safely say that while the Alive Chimpanzee is fairly realistic, it definitely feels like a toy rather than anything that might pass for Hollywood standard animatronics. The main giveaway is the whirring and clicking of the internal servos and motors, which ruin the overall effect a little, but that said, it's still an entertaining toy and fairly good value for money.

You can use the supplied remote control to manually operate all of the chimp's head movements and facial expressions, or you can put him into automatic mode, choosing from four of the pre-programmed mood settings - curious, fearful, happy and angry - and leave him to interact with his environment. Angry mode is the most fun, because he screeches and growls at anybody how comes near - he's got various built in sensors which allow him to track slow moving objects (like copywriters) and respond to sounds. If you really want to have fun with one of these things, we recommend setting it to "angry" mode and hiding it in somebody's fridge.

Website of the Week

By Duncan Heaney

www.funtrivia.com

How much do you know about … goats? Or juggling? Or Linux operating systems? Funtrivia is the website that will help you find out. The site collects short quizzes, based on almost any topic you can think of. It doesn’t matter if you are interested in pizza or particle physics, there’s probably a quiz for you somewhere on the site. An inspired touch is that once you have completed a quiz, you can compare your results to those of others. Funtrivia is very entertaining, but be careful – it is addictive, and with over 60,000 quizzes online, you could be spending more time there than you expect...


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