Dave Taylor

I’m still amazed at this situation. Edelman PR, one of the premier public relations agencies in the world and a company that not only hired sharp blogger Steve Rubel but prides itself on really understanding the new world of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere, screwed up royally, and no-one seems to be particularly upset.
The situation: […]

I was recently searching for “sprint broadband” and “Mac OS X” and noticed a very interesting problem: the matches I got from both Google and Yahoo! were incorrect because the matching pages included “Mac OS X” in the editorial and were also matching on “sprint broadband,” but ephemerally: they were advertising or sponsor information and […]

Wondering how large companies can tap into the popularity of social media, Web 2.0, and other contemporary trends in the online world? Well, they could just pay $50,000 and set up a commercial MySpace account (no kidding, that’s the base fee for a fancy professional profile) or they could actually be inspired and tap into […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Looks like Yahoo! hasn’t been watching the news… or reading its own news.yahoo.com site. It shoulda known about the Dell recall on batteries. A Dell laptop burst into flames at the Yahoo! Mission College Campus in Santa Clara.
A Yahoo! spokesperson confirmed to Red Herring that a Dell notebook burst into flames […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
It’s no “secret” that Hewlett-Packard is under investigation for the way it used pretexting and other underhanded methods to carry out an investigation into media leaks from its Board of Directors. In a story that’s bound to be a hit on The Daily Show tonight, H.P. is co-sponsor of an award […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
The bad news is that the Commerce Department has lost 1,137 laptops. The good news is that these losses took place in the five-year span between now and 2001. More good news is that it believes no information has been used from any of these laptops. Of these losses, 672 were […]

Alice Hill of RealTechNews writes:
While the word processing world is battling it out over templates and clip art, commercial versus open source, a little known dark horse word processor called Dark Room is bringing back the simplicity of the early word processing workhorses in all their green text-on-black screen glory.

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
The TSA today said the personal data of 1,195 former employees may have been exposed as one of their contractors mailed the data to the wrong addresses. Admittedly, not the same as sending it to say, a spammer in Nigeria, but still.

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Following in the footsteps of Chevrolet and its poor Nova sales in Latin America (Nova means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish), Microsoft has given the country of Latvia some yuks with the name Vista. It can either mean ‘fowl,’ or it can have the slang meaning of a ‘frumpy woman’ in […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
The word, of course, is starting. But according to The Independent, insurers are starting to pay for loss of things like your collection of music downloads, downloaded games or other software, or ringtones.

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Use Yahoo! Messenger with Voice and you can now conference in 499 of your friends, thanks to a deal Yahoo! has made with Vapps Inc.
The service, called ConFreeCall, will be available for download through Yahoo! Messenger with Voice service, allowing friends or families to hold free conference calls to complement Yahoo!’s […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
This is interesting. I don’t even throw out anything even remotely financially related without shredding it. Yet Chase mistakenly threw out computer tapes with the info of 2.6 million customers. Granted it was in a locked box, and it’s not the same as me throwing out my statement with my whole […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
We wrote about it earlier, and it’s here. Amazon.com’s video download service is called Unbox, and you can reach it here or through the front page of Amazon’s site. And hey, if you go to this page, you’ll see the screenshots from the earlier article are right on (except for missing […]

Alice Hill of RealTechNews writes:
We are starting to chafe from all the hype we must endure before every Apple announcement. But this one caught my eye. It seems that Apple recently filed a patent for what looks like round two of the Apple Cube. The Cube, as you recall, was marveled over but soon gave […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
You may recall my earlier post about the hack into AT&T’s computer systems. Well, that was just half the story. In fact, the information gleaned from the computer system was used to try sending phishing emails to those customers to get even more information.

As bloggers and blogging have raised visibility in the media landscape, and as us bloggers have become thought and opinion leaders, to a greater or lesser extent, it should be no surprise that we’re smack-dab in the middle of the radar screen for Public Relations firms and individual companies seeking to gain “buzz” or visibility […]

There’s a school of thought in the blogosphere that suggests once a Weblog article is written and published for the world to see, it’s done, cast in stone, and never to be touched or modified again. You can produce more recent updates or corrections, but there’s a sense that the “historical archive” is more important […]

It’s been a long, strange and disturbing decade since six-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey was found, beaten and murdered, in the basement of her parents’ upscale Boulder, Colorado home. The court of public opinion, through books, innumerable magazine articles, and even documentary movies convinced many that the parents were to blame, even though a […]

I’m always on the lookout for stories about bloggers who get into trouble with official government agencies, because I think that the freewheeling and fairly tolerant blogging community is one that’s hard to understand when you’re a government official. It’s kind of like “command and control” meets “out of control”.
When we add MySpace to the […]

I’ve spent a few weeks thinking about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, the premise of his popular new book and his suggested implications for business in the future. Finally, a few days ago I read Lee Gomes’ terrific column in the Wall Street Journal where he debunks some of Anderson’s statistical analysis, which really helped […]