A few notes from the Churchill Club's 10th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends event on Wednesday:

Trend: Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority
— Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners

• "The world is running out of usable water." This will kill millions more people in our lifetime than global warming.
• Connection to Davos: Anders Berntell, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute cited similar stats at the World Economic Forum. Sunita Narain, winner of the Stockholm Water Prize and director of New Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment, warned against "looking for quick fix technological solutions to what is primarily a governance issue." No mention of this at Tech Trends.
• Schoendorf proposes desalination is a solution.
• "There's some real chance that they could write about us as the generation that was worried so much about global warming that they forgot about water." Fellow VC and panelist Steve Jurveston (of DFJ) called this a "siren call" for the venture capital community to address severe water shortages in the developing world.
• Vinod Khosla said that his firm has invested in two water tech companies (Quos and NanoH2O, both working with desalination). He's now "looking for more because of its criticality." To no one's surprise, Khosla forecast another trend in the "green" category, this one having to do with ethanol.

Schoendorf framed his forecast as a matter of priorities, but he also raised the question (inadvertently) of how to approach the problem: as an illness in itself—humans need more fresh water, so let's make some—or as a symptom of something larger and more complex. Yesterday, the United Nations released a report that seems to point to the latter. Based on a survey of 104 countries—both developed and developing—it reads, "The traditional fragmented approach is no longer viable, and a more holistic approach to water management is essential." Perhaps desalination is a piece of this—but the science isn't there to pursue it whole hog without addressing climatic changes that further stress already tapped freshwater systems.

In an evening dominated by forecasts of innovations that could improve life on Sand Hill Road (smart phones and mobile devices, mostly), Schoendorf stood out in drawing attention to markets in the developing world. But he used the trope of social responsibility to suggest that the world cannot afford to address both water and climate. After all, if it comes down to either preserving glaciers or saving toddlers from drought and contaminated formula (or Silicon Valley from a 60-year drought), as he described, few would side with the glaciers.

If only it were that simple. The journal Science recently published a study finding water cycle changes already being seen in the Western United States can be traced largely to human-induced, or anthropogenic, greenhouse gas emissions. Alexis Madrigal described how this works in the January issue of Wired:

Small increases in winter air temperature, the research found, reduce the amount of snow falling in mountains. In turn, snow packs that previously acted as time-release water storage provide less water as they melt in the spring.

This isn't just a West Coast thing. Working Group II of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear that freshwater systems and climate do not function in isolation. Rather, they concluded "Any change in one of these systems induces a change in the other." So how about a little tweak to Schoendorf's forecast? Water tech will replace global warming join climate change as a global priority.

Photo: Drought at Lake Mead (cc) ChrisMRichards via Flickr

Is it good or bad that premiere journalistic publications are now snatching up blogs?  Truth be told, I am not sure.  On the one hand, you can assume that blogs are becoming a more valuable resource, and large publications are willing to shell out the green stuff to snatch them up.  However, it also shows the willingness of bloggers to sell out.  What happens when all the large publications reap the profits of smaller blogs that are snatched up left and right, and then, perhaps, gain monopolistic ties with advertising entities?

However, I would just like to congratulate Ars Technica.  I really do like Wired Magazine and Wired.com.  Hopefully this combination works out well, and I am looking forward to more great content from Ars Technica in the future.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/05/securitymatters_0515?comment_text=&postComment.x=31&postComment.y=11

Effectively, Ars Technica is now part of Wired. Look for an official announcement next week.

This marks a new beginning for Ars Technica, which was originally founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher (based in Boston) and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes (based in Chicago). They, along with their 8 or so employees, will remain with the company as it is integrated into Wired Digital.

I hope Wired doesn't screw up the forums!

In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest.

OSNews has been working on an ongoing series about home automation and new home computing technology, and we've been collaborating on a home being built in Park City, UT to recommend and spec out various home technology options. One thing that we recommended is lots and lots of cable. Every area where we've determined that a computer or home entertainment device is likely to be located, we've run 2-3 strands of RG6 coaxial cable and 2-3 strands of cat5e ethernet cable. We've also included conduit to major A/V and computer areas to facilitate running fiber or any other future physical transmission medium. We've also run speaker cable through the walls in many rooms to enable surround sound, and special structured cable in many areas that's specially-built for wired surveillance cameras.

To save time, we used structured wiring that comes as a bundle of two coaxial and two cat5 ethernet cables. All this cable terminates at a patch panel where it can be purposed for phone, data, or AV. We also ran extra strands of cat5 and RG6 cable to areas where we thought we'd need them. We always erred on the side of too much cable. "Wasting" some by never using it, we believed, was better than needing it later and not having it.

That being said, we have also run cable to central areas specifically to accommodate Wi-Fi hotspots, and we've recommended a two-line wireless expandable phone system. It's not that we're against wireless. We love it. I was a very early adopter of wireless networking; I purchased the first affordable Wi-Fi products: the Apple AirPort base station and the Lucent WaveLan cards when they first came on the market, and I've never looked back. I'd sooner give up running water than Wi-Fi. I've taken bucket showers. It's not so bad.

First of all, let's talk about wireless' clear superiority in some instances. Obviously, it's wireless, so any time you need to network a device that you need to be able to carry around, wireless is a no-brainer. I remember my beloved Newton Messagepad 2000. In some ways, it was better than any handheld computing device I've ever owned, up to and including my iPhone. However, it had two networking options: modem connected to a wired phoneline and wired ethernet. There was no Wi-Fi back then. There was an early municipal wireless system called Ricochet, but not in my town. So the Newton was missing its killer app.

Wireless is also welcome and indispensable when you need to locate a networked device in an area where running cable is not practical: Old homes, rented apartments, the corner by your bed where you want your Wi-Fi alarm clock to go, etc. This actually applies to most homes and apartments today. Unless you built your own house, you don't have enough cable in the walls. An ordinary builder just won't include enough wiring to serve the needs of even the most typical home technology consumer. Consumer electronics vendors realize this. All of the major game console makers, for example, support wireless networking. The Wii has Wi-Fi by default, and ethernet support requires the purchase of an add-on dongle. Nintendo, rightly, realized that more Wii buyers would have Wi-Fi than an available Ethernet jack near their TV.

So we've established that wireless is awesome and indispensable. What are the wireless disadvantages?

Wireless has an inherent bandwidth limitation. The latest 802.11n MIMO (Multiple in, multiple out) Wi-Fi routers offer bandwidth of just over 100 Mbps if you're right next to the router, fairly evenly dropping down to 80 Mbps or slower as you move farther away. So that looks pretty good. Fast Ethernet is also 100 Mbps. But in real-world use, Fast Ethernet delivers about 50% faster performance than 802.11n. Gigabit ethernet's real-world speed boost is about 4-5 times that of 802.11n. New wireless standards will surely improve bandwidth and transmission quality, but new wired standards already exist to blow them away. Let's not even mention fiber.

To be fair, this is all academic if your bandwidth needs are modest. 802.11n actually gives you enough bandwidth to safely stream HDTV content, though if you're also transferring other files on the same network, you'll probably get hiccups. Bottlenecks are also important to acknowledge. You can have gigabit ethernet in your home, but if you're connecting to the internet via a 1.5 Mbps DSL line, all the gigabit in the world isn't going to make your web sites load any faster. The bottom line is, aside from streaming HDTV, most consumers are going to have a hard time hitting up against the upper limit of wireless networks.

Wireless networks suffer from (and cause) interference. Wi-Fi exists because in 1985 the US Federal Communications Commission freed three bands of the wireless spectrum to be used without a license. As explained in a June 10, 2004 Economist article: "the FCC, prompted by a visionary engineer on its staff, Michael Marcus, took three chunks of spectrum from the industrial, scientific and medical bands and opened them up to communications entrepreneurs. These so-called "garbage bands," at 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz, were already allocated to equipment that used radio-frequency energy for purposes other than communications: microwave ovens, for example, which use radio waves to heat food. The FCC made them available for communications purposes as well, on the condition that any devices using these bands would have to steer around interference from other equipment."

This then-obscure decision unleashed a torrent of innovation in the consumer technology arena, because it enabled regular people to use sophisticated wireless communication without getting a license from the government, which used to be required for just about every type of wireless device, including CB radios. The problem is, since all of these devices are crammed into the same part of the spectrum, and have to share it with microwave ovens and other "garbage," it can cause performance to suffer, and other problems. The most common example of this is the inability for otherwise-wonderful 2.4 GHz cordless phones to play nice with Wi-Fi networks.

Manufacturers have been pretty good at devising ways to heed the FCC's mandate to "steer around" interference issues, but the hard truth is that if you have too much traffic sharing the same band of spectrum, there's going to be trouble. So, the more wireless devices you use, not only do you fill up the precious bandwidth supply, but interference can downgrade the performance of every device sharing that slice of spectrum.

Wireless eats batteries. Though there are wireless technologies that have been specifically designed to conserve energy, such as Bluetooth, Wibree, and Ultra Wideband, even they need to expend extra energy to broadcast a wireless signal; far above what little electricity is required to send a signal over copper wires. Wi-Fi in particular is an energy hog when it comes to battery-powered devices. The problem is, almost by definition, if something needs batteries, it probably needs wireless too. Nevertheless, on occasion I have my laptop at a conference table, with no power supply. It's nice to have a couple of stray ethernet cables sticking up through a hole in the table, to help me save my battery while I'm playing Peggle or updating my Facebook page in the conference room instead of working at my desk. Try it sometime. It makes you look like you're working harder, when you're actually slacking off. Table of contentsPage 1Page 2

We've been tracking CloudTrade since February, when we got our first glance at its application for letting users share music for free via smartphone in return for watching video ads or playing games with a company logo as the songs download. The company has announced that music from its first two label deals, with ATO Records (Radiohead's U.S. CD distributor) and the jam-band-friendly Sci Fidelity Records, is now available for trading on its network.

"Our market research taught us a valuable lesson in dealing with the next generation of music consumers," said CloudTrade CEO Raj Kanapur. "Wherever possible, we must leverage advertisers' desire to be in front of consumers on interactive mobile devices and offer a fully ad-supported free model of digital music downloading."

Our hands-on test of the service last month confirmed what Kanapur first showed us: His application works, and it could offer music fans -- especially young ones with more time than money -- a great new way way to discover, share and listen to music without messing around with a computer or a credit card. CloudTrade is looking for up to 10,000 people to participate in the beta test of its smartphone app, which allows users to trade songs with each other through a mobile social network.

I have been wondering what it would be like to sell reale state without feeling all tied up in technology. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just stay away from the cell phone and the lap top for awhile.

The next generation of the Flash Player is here. Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player 10, which promises better performance, improved text handling, custom photo effects filters and native 3D animations. It's available as a free download at the Adobe Labs website.

Zen, check out the rest here.

Une interview intéressante ce matin, publiée dans les colonnes des planeurs d'Influencia. Chris Anderson, rédac chef de la bible geek Wired nous offre un aperçu de son dernier essai traitant de l'économie du gratuit sur Internet : Free.

Théoricien du Long Tail - littéralement baptisée "longue traîne" par nos net-académiciens - Chris Anderson fait partie de cette bande d'utopistes du Web façon Berners-Lee ou Stallman décidés à utiliser Internet pour changer nos modestes existences. Prenant à contre-pied la séculaire loi de Pareto (également connue sous le bucolique sobriquet de loi des "20/80") CA - des initiales qui ne s'inventent pas - défend la rentabilité des 80% d'objets qui ne rapportent "que" 20% du chiffres d'affaires aux entreprises. Mis en perspective avec un fort volume de vente, cela peut devenir intéressant.

Son nouvel opuscule - disponible en anglais ici - se propose de détailler les pistes que le gratuit empruntera dans les années à venir : voyages offerts, services téléphoniques gracieux et toute une palanquée de menus plaisirs sponsorisés par le cross-selling.

Amis marketeux, ce sémaphore éclairant le brouillard épais de la votre révolution numérique n'attend que vous.

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crimanimalz.com and The Freeway Traffic Jam Ride on ibikeu Wiki

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music "Why Didja Duh Eeet" by FUNDERSTORM

What more do you want? This is fucking art. Digg link diggs LAist article, yes!~! This is participation! Brrrat brrrat brrrat, boh boh boh, cough cough cough __ -> . . . Culture Ugh OH*Δ/

Covered by Boing Boing and WIRED among many others

• Here Comes Another Bubble - A catchy (and funny) music video about the state of Web 2.0 and the Internet business set to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."
• Tony vs. Paul - A tale of two friends torn apart via stop motion video. The video was shot in a bunch of different towns in Massachusetts - including Upton. Wicked pissah!
• Coke's Happiness Factory - An animated movie from Coca Cola. So great!
• National Geographic - Your Shot - NG posts readers' photos. Love looking at these.
• Post Secret Blog - People anonymously submit their "secrets" to the editor, who posts them. Simple and successful concept.  (I'll be posting later with my list of other great amusing blogs....stay tuned)
• Milk Get the Glass - Got Milk? Well, you might after playing this visually impressive and fun online board game.
• Atom Films - Tons of great online video.
• Toyota Tacoma World of Warcraft Ad - This guy is the "lawgiver." Hilarious ad - you may have seen this on TV, but I believe it started on the web.
• Bud Light Swear Jar - Put a quarter in the jar....its for the good of the office!
• Starz Bunny Theatre - Popular movies cut to 30-seconds and re-enacted by animated bunnies. Huh? Exactly.
• Wired.com - Website for Wired Magazine. Cool beans!
• HowStuffWorks.com - Self explanatory. 

My issue mainly was how the WaPo, which, whatever one thinks about its editorial line, has a deserved reputation for disciplined and credible reporting, could hook up with a blog that has a track record of running poorly sourced items that prove unfounded (see this on a report Jerry Yang would soon be ousted at Yahoo! or a similar piece on Ballmer getting offed at Microsoft).

Don't get me wrong, I think these stories are the exception on Techcrunch, which is one of the most useful blogs around and is part of my hourly reading. But I take their "scoops" with a grain of salt. I don't do the same with the Washington Post.

Today Arrington was full-on into one of his notorious spats with a competitor, in this instance Wired, over one of its writers' expressed astonishment over the TechCrunch/WaPo tie-up -- but on another issue: Arrington's habit of writing about companies he has invested in. See here for the Wired piece, and here for Arrington's reply and this for the take from Kara Swisher (who frequently calls Arrington out on misguided 'scoops').

I'm still pondering all these things (as a recovering journalist with some 30 years of baggage in mainstream news media I'm hesitant to trust my instincts on these matters -- which is why I didn't write anything last week). But there is clearly food for thought in this and I'll be watching the converation with interest in the coming days.

The Style.com application, Fashion Flash, offers the inside scoop on fashion, shopping, beauty and celebrity style. In the application's first week, more than over 1,200 users installed it.

The Epicurious.com application, Recipe of the Day, serves up a different, tasty food each day, drawing from a selection of more than 25,000 professionally created and tested recipes.

For the Wired.com application, Wired Gadget Lab, Wired News bloggers bring their sharp eyes and wit to the world of gadgets.

The flip application, flipbook creator, can be used to make and share online scrapbooks called flipbooks. Users can upload photos, video, and music; rotate, resize, and crop images; write text; add a soundtrack; draw freestyle; and share their flipbooks with friends. Registration is required to make a flipbook.

MySpace first introduced its Developer Platform site on February 5, 2008, beginning a month long application development period that made it possible for companies including CondeNet to build and test their applications in a secure environment before going live to the MySpace community.

On March 13, 2008, MySpace launched the public beta of the Application Gallery, enabling broader testing of approved applications by allowing public installation. MySpace members can now discover and add new applications from a variety of categories, including Fashion, Food & Drink, Fun Stuff/News & Weather and Fun Stuff/Photos to both their home and profile pages.

"We have found social networking applications to be an effective vehicle to speak to our existing audiences in a new way, as well as a wonderful tool to reach new users," said Chris Gonzalez, Product Manager, Distributed Content, CondeNet. "As one of the first content providers to have a presence in the MySpace applications offering, we are thrilled to be able to provide members the ability to interact with our brands."

As with all MySpace Developer Platform applications, the Style.com, Epicurious.com, Wired.com, and flip.com applications will be able to safely access publicly available profile information, including a user's friend list, interests, photos & albums, and video, as well as status & mood. The four applications will have real estate in five places within MySpace including:

• A MySpace application profile (users can "friend" the apps).
• Access to embed applications on the user homepage (inward facing-for you to see).
• Access to embed applications on profiles (outward facing widget-for friends to see).
• An Application Gallery listing.
• A canvas page.

"We have had tremendous response both from companies and our members since announcing the MySpace Developer Platform," said Kyle Brinkman, vice president and general manager, MySpace Developer Platform. "CondeNet is one of the early adopters to implement applications, particularly within the publishing industry, as they realize the importance of connecting their brands with our members."

"Rather than calling somebody or sending an e-mail or a Twitter or an IM, you just open up your contact list and click on their name. Wherever they are, your communication reaches them via the most convenient and appropriate means. So, they're walking on the beach, their iPhone rings. If they're in a meeting, they get a text message. If they're at their desk, they get an e-mail. If they're in Asia, they're probably asleep, so they get a voicemail.": The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are | Compiler from Wired.com

According to a 2003 German time-use study, informal learners with the highest education levels learn because they love to learn. If you’re not quite there yet, or if informal learning seems like a sort of like a ‘eat your veggies’ exercise, then you might benefit from ‘Brain Age’ for the Nintendo DS player, or the handheld game called, ‘Brain Games’ from Mattel’s Radica division.

Both Brain Games and Brain Age occupy a ticklish position. Both purport to be based on honest-to-Pete science. Both suggest that a regular diet of the mental exercises included on them will help keep your brain strong and young. Brain Age goes so far as suggesting that regular use could help you lower your brain’s age. Get it? Both cost around $20 in electronics retailers and the mass merchandisers.

Nintendo’s Brain Age, by far has the better buzz. Radica makes handheld games like Solitaire, Suduko, a 20-questions game called Q, and the like, so this is a natural line extension. Nintendo looked at the numbers and bet that there was a market for adult learners. So far the bet’s paid off wildly. Brain Age was one of the top 10 video game sellers in 2007 and sold some 4 million units in 2006. 

Brain Age runs only on Nintendo’s handheld DS player, which starts around $130. Radica’s Brain Games is self-contained in the $20 unit.

The criticism of this approach to informal learning can be summarized in the American idiomatic expression ‘teaching to the test.’ It means learning not much more than you need to pass a test.

Or as writer Greta Lorge, put it in Wired:

“After diligent effort, players routinely see their ‘brain age’ plummet from, say, a sluggish 60 to a taut 30. But the improved performance may not be a sign of wit-sharpening. Many users start with little gaming experience, so it’s not surprising that their scores improve — a phenomenon known as the practice effect. Sadly, there’s no evidence that in-game gains translate to the real world.”  

I think there’s more to Brain Age and Brain Games than the practice effect. But to explain why please indulge a personal anecdote. When I went through Army basic training my drill sergeants explicitly ‘taught to the test” when it came to the 2-mile run, 1/3 of the Army’s fitness test.

We did very few long slow runs. There wasn’t time in the training schedule for that. Instead we did sprint work and more 2-mile runs on the track behind the barracks than I could possibly count, always timed by a stopwatch.

Surprise, surprise, my final 2-mile time was several minutes below my first time. Teaching to the test helped me do dramatically better on the test.

At the end of basic training I went directly to advanced training, which was less regimented. We seldom did physical training in groups, although all the fitness tests were conducted that way. So to stay in fighting trim I began to run around a course that had several possible mileages depending on the paths you took.

What I found was that the base of fitness I had acquired in basic training… while training to the test… enabled me to become a fair runner. During my 13 weeks in advanced training I got to the point where I could easily run 8-10 miles at a time, further if I choose. My 2-mile run time dropped even further.

When it comes to informal learning teaching to the test is problematic if that’s where you stop. But if you treat Brain Games, or Brain Age like an ingredient in the mole and not the whole enchilada, than either one could be a nice addition to your learner’s toolkit. 

Wired notes that it's odd the Washington Post, one of the nation's most trusted and revered newspapers, would run stories written by an ex-lawyer who admits he may advise or invest in companies that are covered on his site.

While I appreciate that Arrington discloses his ties to the companies he covers, this is one instance where I think Journalism 101 rules apply to Web 2.0.
Technorati Tags: wired, journalism, blogs, Web 2.0, techcrunch, michael arrington

Google and Amazon both mastered the art of cheap, massively parallel, fail-safe computing. Increasingly, they are offering their hosting services to others. HP, it seems, is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting.

Kevin quotes Jeff Bezos of Amazon: "We've been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years," Bezos said. "We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished -- I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn't using our web services and now we're starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it's a very exciting."

Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: "Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies."

He continues, "Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: 'Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies.' "

While Google and Amazon may both be building "infrastructure businesses," in my humble opinion, this misses the point. What Amazon, and even more so Google have learned to do is to build enormous and profitable web-based businesses offering services, either totally free or very cheaply. They are really doing "software as services" while others are just talking about it. In future posts, we will look more closely at some of Google's emerging businesses, like Google Apps, which seriously threaten the desktop-centric order of things.

HP's CEO, Mark Hurd, is one smart fellow, and I'm sure he sees far more in EDS than merely the provision of consulting services in order to keep up with IBM. Perhaps, EDS has strengths in "cloud computing" that we don't know about, or maybe, just maybe, another shoe is yet to drop that will fill in the missing piece of the puzzle.

É a cultura do free, do preço zero, que Anderson vai defender em um livro que está quase no prelo.

Quando eu digo que não se pode mais cobrar do usuário comum, aquele que utiliza seu site sem fins comerciais, ficam em pânico. Mas só há uma certeza hoje sobre o conteúdo fechado: que ele o exclui das buscas na Internet, hoje a principal porta de acesso do usuário a um site. 

The PRs continue to use services such as Vocus and Media Disk to create long media lists and then spam the same email to all and sundry.  They might not think of it as spam but it is often irrelevant and as a result may as well say "enlarge your P@en*1s".

In October last year Wired's Chris Anderson named and shamed a lot of PRs.  One month's blacklists made it onto Chris' blog.  People from big name companies such as Bite and Weber were on the list.  All because there mail was not targeted or research well enough.  This has been followed up by another PR Spammers Wikipage.  And covered in the Guardian.

PRs are naturally defensive about it.  Yes, they didn't create the list.  Their boss is ordering them to send the pointless press release out.  The client has requested it go.  The client is paying.  And no one has the backbone to stand up to the client.

Actually, that last statement is unfair.  It is wonderful when a client accepts the consultancy it's paying for but all too often it merely sits down and ignores advice.

This has also got worse as the much needed transparency comes to the fore.  It's easier to justify a 30-40 journalist distribution to a client than it is a list of seven.  Even if Cycle Repair Monthly (sorry if there is actually this title) makes it into the press list for a release on a coffee machine.

It seems to me that a PRs need to learn the following:

1) Releases should be sent by RSS and an additional 5 or 6 journalists be contacted if it's relevant.  This would allow journalists to sign up and follow key companies.  And not get pissed off about receiving 100 releases about a company you don't care about and ensure your two mails a month get noticed and given the attention they deserve.

2) Push back on clients has to happen.  We've all been in the situation and it is what separates the men from the boys.  The best PRs I've worked with have lost clients because they've said no.  They've also used the newly available time to get clients that respect what PR is and accept the advice they're paying for.

3) PRs need to do more value add.  Anyone, and I do mean anyone, can distribute a press release.  I've seen agencies send out nothing more than 'This release was distributed by'.  Creative ideas that deliver the message work well.  The press release is dying.  This is because it has been done to death.  For a mere £500 you too can put out something that is perfectly on message without saying anything new and won't get picked up by anything other than reprint sites.

4) Learn that the press release is not what should get printed.  If it is then something has gone wrong in the world of journalism.  Therefore, don't worry about getting the press release to big up the company. Do not put a three liner at the start about what the company does.  Do not put the company tag line into every release.  If it gets covered with that in it will not get read by anyone.

5) Give a personal touch.  Darren Barefoot, co-founder of Capulet Communications has got phenomenal results with an 88 second clip posted onto YouTube.  Each is targeted and personalised.  Journalists know when the Hi <insert name> has been done.  It's especially easy to do that when it says Hi Features Desk or similar.  This apparently got a 2000 (yes thousand) per cent increase on web traffic to his client's site - that's earning your fees.

6) Make it different.  Fantastic, the new WF8357 has been put out by company z that does <insert three line waste of press release space>.  Why is this good.  Once again, WHY IS THIS GOOD.  Put this benefit bit early on.

7) Learn that Sally Whittle doesn't cover travel.