Steve Rubel just wrote that his employer Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners.  Rubel says that many of the company's clients are already blogging.  Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media in some very cool ways, albeit learning from mistakes like the Walmart bloggers situation.  Here's a client list for A&R, you might notice that Mozilla is on there.  Interesting.  There are a number of people using these new social media to remake PR and save it from it's unsavory past.  Those efforts are said to be based in honesty - and that's a radical concept.

Valleywag has a more Valley-centric take on this.
Nicholas Carr has a hilarious response to Rubel style cheerleading of honest conversation as being of central importance.  Fair enough, and don't miss the comments.

Mark Glaser at PBS has posted a long, detailed story on the case of arrested Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah.   Alaa is someone Glaser interviewed for a previous story and today's coverage follows up after the man's arrest earlier this month. It's a great discussion of various tools being used in a no-cost, rapid-response human rights campaign.  Some very interesting insights from Egyptians on online vs. off-line activities, democracy campaigns and more.  Worth a look for sure.  It's important that all these exciting technological developments impact more than the shopping habits of people of privilege.  Glaser's write up is a great source of detail and thought on one key case study - and a real human being's trip to prison in an autocratic society.

Technorati just announced a partnership with the AP that will look functionally a lot like its partnership with the Washington Post.  News organizations that run the AP's news module (there are reportedly 440 nationwide) will display a box highlighting the 5 most bloggged about news items of the day and inbound links will be displayed on pages for unique articles.  This is great news - only makes sense.  Further proof that the traditional/new media dichotomy isn't the best way to understand what's going on.  I think this has the potential to be very good for both the blogosphere and for the mainstream media.

This may also give a real boost to local blogs when these publications run local stories - something the WaPo deal and Sphere's new parntership with Time.com won't do.

As you can see from this example page, the linked blogs may be displayed towards the very bottom of the sidebar.  Hopefully that will change.

The Berkman Center's John Palfrey has an interesting post proposing a theory on how digital natives, those who have grown up with the web central to our lives, read the news.  No more daily papers, broadcast TV or big anchors acting as the central source of information, but instead following a path of graze, dive deeper and a feedback loop like blogging.  That sounds like as good an explanation as any to me, though I wonder how many of us skip the dive deeper step?  If that step isn't taken it would seem a major flaw in the quality of the discourse.

 Much attention has been paid to the blogosphere's alleged lack of fact checking as is supposedly key to traditional media - but how many of us take the time to check other online information regarding our topic of interest before blogging?  How do we know when we've dove deep enough?  I know that before I write about a particular URL I at least search for other links to it.  Sometimes I'll do a Sphere search for related blogosphere resources, or look in del.icio.us popular under related tags.  If we don't have a formal structure for fact checking, research and editorial oversight - what do we have?

PR 2.0 firm Edelman Inc. has announced that it will fund the creation of localized versions of Technorati in German, Korean, Italian, French and Chinese.  This is good news if for no other reason than that it will make one of the most functional blog search engines more usable to non-native-english speakers and others.  It's a sign of respect, it seems, for the global community that is the blogosphere. There's some Walmart (Edelman client) money put to good use. This really may put Technorati over the edge in terms of blog search dominance.  If they can pull it off this will mean huge page views and advertising revenues. 

Charlie Wood at Moonwatcher has an interesting post today about the executive blogs at enterprise super-vendor SAP.  Apparently you can't subscribe to RSS feeds of the exec blogs.  SAP rep responds and says they are working on it.  This is interesting to me for a number of reasons:

• RSS is so strong in the consumer space that it is now being demanded in the enterprise space.  That's a path that's becoming all the more common in the Web 2.0 world.
• Enterprise adoption of a key, if not the key Web 2.0 technology is lagging.  I'm always curious about the pace of adoption in various sectors, so I'll be filing this one away.
• If you look at the image Charlie posts from the SAP blogs, it reads "Executive Blogs: Please notify me when new blogs are available."  That means send me an email notification of new posts, I presume.  It amazes me that such a big player wouldn't take the time to figure out that a blog is a series of posts and each post is not called a blog.  Jeez, through a couple thousand dollars at a business blog consultant already and make sure you don't look silly when engaging in an established and outspoken community.  Maybe I'm wrong here and that really means, send me an email when a new executive starts blogging - but I doubt it.
  

A row has erupted over LiveJournal's threat to shut down a user's account if the icon image of a baby and mother's breast mid-meal isn't removed.  (pic on left) The user is part of a breast feeding advocacy group, so this is some fight to pick.  Though it's acceptable to breast feed almost anywhere in real life, LJ is of the belief that the sight of breastfeeding in search results on the LJ site would be unacceptable.  What if said user had a signed letter signifying that the breast was at least 18 years old?  Indecency policies are rife with absurdity and I'm sure that LJ wants to avoid the kinds of labels that MySpace gets in media and popular culture - so this could go on indefinitely.

Breasts aside, though - the most surprising thing to me in this story is the following line from an email alleged to have come from the folks at LiveJournal:  "Finally, please be aware that write-in campaigns are never effective in swaying the opinion of the Abuse Team or LiveJournal administrators, or in focusing attention on a particular issue. A flood of requests concerning the same issue only serve to slow down the responses given to valid inquiries such as your request for policy clarification." Update: Anil Dash rightly pointed me to a subsequent official statement from LJ owners Six Apart where apologies are made, assurances that opinions of customers do matter and breast feeding is totally cool in theory.  Policy appears not to have changed yet, but read more about it on said users journal.

Well well well!  I suppose it is said that the blogosphere is about transparency, not responsiveness to customers!  How can a flood of emails not even focus attention on a particular issue?  That's harsh.  And really, if one breast gets the attention of LiveJournal admin better than thousands of customer emails - who's really got the problem here?

Thanks to the hard working investigative journalists at ValleyWag for the heads up on this story.

Nielson/NetRatings has issued a study showing that the top 10 social networking sites saw traffic grow 47% over the last year, with MySpace seeing the biggest growth (367% increase) and MSN Spaces (286%) seeing the biggest growth.  Hosted blogging systems were included in the study.

These numbers might even seem low in light of, for example, the recent study from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (and MySpace victims) finding that 61% of 13-to 17-year-olds have a personal profile on sites such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga.  The study continues with findings that 14% have actually met face-to-face with a person they had known only through the Internet (didn't MeetUp prove this was a difficult business model?)  30% have considered meeting someone they've only communicated with online (consideration being a rational process, not to be encouraged in children) 71% reported receiving messages online from someone they don't know (spam?).

Anecdotally, I'd guess that MySpace fear mongering has risen more than 367% in the last year and if 61% of kids really have MySpace et al. profiles then the spectre of electronic communication has posed a serious threat for well more than the last year.

Links: The Internet Stock Blog (original coverage) via Susan Mernit

Heather Green and Steven Baker's excellent blog at Business Week has two interesting posts available this morning both related to the nature and extent of Web 2.0 tools. 

The most recent is an intro to a new Business Week online segment called Web Smart.  The series of stories will highlight in text and a podcast a different company "that's using the Web to improve productivity, reach out to the public, rev up marketing, or streamline internal operations." 

It's true, the LA Police Department have started their first blog.  (Found via Ed Cone on eWeek.) They say they aim to have all 19 precincts blogging soon.  Typepad, moderated comments, using Feedburner but haven't put the new feed in their header tags for autodetection and capture of all subscribers (just like almost everyone else!) and no e-mail subscription to new posts - so easy with Feedburner and a good idea for a nontechnical audience as I'm sure this blog will have.

Reminds me of the NYPD podcast, now available in English and Spanish!  When that one first started you could almost picture some aging cops sidling up to a microphone, trying to take it very seriously but also not entirely clear what was going on.

All of this raises the question - if these new social media are about conversation, typically unfiltered - can a centralized, authority-based organization like a police department really make much of these tools?  If they can, is there any type of organization out there that just should not be blogging or podcasting?

CyberJournalist covers an announcement today about a Reuters move to provide financial support to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Global Voices Online in particular.  That's going to mean ongoing work by GV, more support for Russian and Arabic language bloggers and more trainings in places with little blog activity.  Pretty cool move by Reuters.  I've been told that many GV bloggers are aspiring MSM journalists, so we'll see how this plays out in terms of bloggyness.  Nonetheless, if you've never checked out Global Voices Online you really ought to.  It's a great example of blogging's international flavor and reach.  Glad to see it will be able to continue its work.  Nice also to see another example of old media/new media coming together.

The comment and conversation tracking tool CoComment has added a Firefox extension that automates the process of tracking comments on any blog that supports it.  Very nice.  I'm going to try using the darned thing again.  We'll see if the effort-to-impact ratio is worth it now.  Some people swear by it, I've found it mostly annoying - perhaps being automatic will change that.  Found via Amy Gahran and Easton Ellsworth.

Rich over at Basement.org has posted some sample comment spam he's been seeing lately that's all about the commenters being depressed.  There aren't even links to spam sites in many of the comments.  He says there needs to be a Cry for Help comment spam plug-in.  Make sense to me.  Anyone else see the recent spate of magical-gibberish comments without links? 

This might sound like a silly thing to post here about, but mark my words - this is going to get a write up in Wired by the end of this year ("Millions of depressed young people send anonymous messages into the conversation that is the blogosphere with a nihilistic apathy about context or purpose").  Or at least some print publication.  I think it warrants a Wired vocab-term...but what will it be called?  Sobspamming, emospamming, whinebots, poutposting? Poutposting.

Comment cries for help - could they be coming from distressed spam-bots who've grown human posting billions of comments that reference human emotion?  Or implant-laden marketers from the future sending us pleas for help in the only way they know how?  Or is it real spammers, sighing after work and no longer able to communicate in any other way?  Mysterious.

I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sphere.com for some time now and the first public version doesn't disappoint.  It's a new blog search engine that uses profiles, highlighted blogs and some interesting algorithms to make searching for blogs a changed experience.  There are downsides, but more on that in a minute.

Good support for RSS, results that look useful, multimedia options, AJAX, date and relevance variables.  The downsides are that there doesn't appear to be a FireFox plug-in yet, no support for tagging or other user applied metadata and a widget that only works with TypePad.  That it's not based entirely on inbound links and doesn't support tags means that the algorithm really takes a different approach.

Speed test and other links after the jump.

The Open Source Content Management System called Drupal announced today that it has released the newest version of its software, version 4.7.0.  Never heard of Drupal?  It's the CMS used by Tim Berners-Lee, This Week in Tech, Spread Firefox and The Onion.  And my contracted employers at Net Squared, where I like using it pretty well.  The newest version includes usability improvements, AJAX, better control over RSS feeds, an improved API and more.  Drupal is great for multi-blog sites that aggregate posts on the front page.  Lots of other functions there as well.