I found out today that the Comedy Store in Sydney has closed down. This is a real shame as I have had some great nights at the venue including one that I posted on here. I went to the open mic night on quite a few occasions and saw a mate debut there - Alan Gernon. I created the prop for a topical Shark hunt joke.

‘Comedy’ on TV in this country leaves me cold on the whole so it was always a welcome treat to see some live stand. I did notice that the place was always half empty. It was a pretty nice set up even if the bar was a bit small. Too bad.

I recently blogged on the plethora of social networks. In recent weeks, there has been lots of chat about the threat that FriendFeed poses to the Twitter community and many high profile bloggers have moved from Tweeting to FriendFeed.

I feel that FriendFeed represents a big threat to Twitter.

I found out today about the launch of a new network; ’YouAre’ from Spain. I applied for beta access today. 

This is a micro-blogging platform with aspects of LinkedIN, del.icio.us and others combined with a secret sauce, which hasn’t been revealed as yet. Screenshots available here.  

I am keen to trial the new service and will cover it here. I have been told that my access will come through in a few weeks.

The beauty and irony of the social networking is that I found out about YouAre on FriendFeed via Duncan Riley’s post. That would be like the Sun newspaper in Britain running a story on the launch of the Today newspaper and suggesting I check it out or me placing a classified ad in the window of my local newsagents suggesting that passers by check out the newsagency down the road. 

Consolidation in this space is inevitable. We’ve seen it in most industry sectors, take the ERP market in recent years. Most industries mature before they consolidate but the social networking sector will get there much more quickly surely.

The issue of monetization is one spanner in the works still.

Duncan Riley asks; What’s happened to the blogroll?

I have also noticed that bloggers are dropping their blogroll.

Here are my thoughts on why this might be:

1. The blogroll has been superceded by Twitter and FriendFeed as the easiest and most information rich method of tracking and associating oneself with others that are active, interesting and influential in social media
2. Blogrolls were removed because they made it too easy for PR firms and marketers to identify bloggers and networks of bloggers. This means that those that want to influence bloggers actually have to participate. The blogroll in this context is the equivalent of an organisation publicising its top tier media list.
3. Blogrolls are simply too hard to maintain.
4. Blogrolls drive traffic away from people’s blogs.

I’d say that number 1 seems to be the most likely but it’s interesting that this trend has just occurred.

There doesn’t seem to have been an anti-blogroll conspiracy, as such.

There have been a few cases (that we know about) of social networks going wrong and high profile service providers have been found out for stepping over the line when it comes to privacy, Facebook’s Beacon being the most high profile example.

Now it’s my turn to experience a social networking glitch…

Plaxo (Pulse) is telling me I’ve done things that I haven’t done. It’s giving me credit for the content creation of my connections.

For example:

I see that I recently uploaded some pics from a trip to Paris. 

Weird!

I haven’t been to Paris since ‘97 but my colleague Ed got back two weeks ago.

I was also surprised to see that I had added a couple of notes to Facebook in the last few days. The first was a link to an NYT article and the second a post on the LaGrange Point blog (see below).

The funny thing is: It’s not my blog. It’s not my article.  

You can see what’s happening here:

Plaxo is BETA so maybe they are due the benefit of the doubt.

The network seems to be gaining traction with a professional audience. There is a gap here - Facebook falls short and is poorly positioned for business users.  These discrepancies only relate to Facebook notes and updates, so maybe it’s a Facebook problem. I have no idea.

The bad news is that glitches like this and the resulting coverage can un-do months of good work in  minutes and hours resulting in serious reputational damage to emergent brands.  

Anyone else experiencing this? 

For the two connections that I reference in this post - thanks. I hope you don’t object to the reference.

Here

Digital PR is still considered by many in the industry to be a novelty and by some, even a fad but most smart people realise that what’s peripheral for the majority of clients/organisations and specialised today will become mainstream and core in the relatively near future.

My agency has digital champions within a Practice but one of the primary objectives for the digital team is to upskill and help educate every single consultant within the organisation.

To that end, I wonder what skills PRs should acquire to get ahead. Having an understanding of the implications and impact of digital and social media is the first step but what technical skills will the PR of the Future require?

There are a couple of reasons why agencies will want to have these skills available in-house:  

1. Revenue and Relationships: Retain as much of the budget and contact as possible rather than involve third party Web developers and designers.

2. Advertising agencies: The fact that advertising agencies have the creative and delivery skills in house is, for me, their strongest argument when it comes to the issue of PR versus Ad Agency for digital communications strategy/execution.

3. Ability to execute = credibility. Related to the point above, I guess. A search optimised press release doesn’t require technical know-how but simple projects like a Facebook Page or Social Media Release do.

We are likely to see a rash of PR agencies acquiring or teaming up with firms that can provide the creative and technical execution.

I feel that there is a big opportunity for forward looking PRs here but where should they invest their time? HTML would be essential as a base, I guess, along with Flash. CSS and SQL would also figure. What do you think? What would you advise?  

This post by Stephen Ward for Read Write Web provides an overview of the ten most marketable Web development skills.

I am in the process of teaching myself Photoshop - using a combination of a Dummies Guide book and a lot of trial and error. It’s going well and I am quite pleased with the creation below, which is an interpretation of an original water colour that caught my eye in Melbourne last week.

What skills will the PR of the Future require?