Wikipedia

When I googled “wiki,” the first relevant response, ironically, directs me to Wikipedia’s article about wikis. Wikipedia, banned by professors and scholars everywhere, is in fact the most well known wiki.

A wiki is an online source that allows anyone to publish his or her own information about any topic. According to Wikipedia, the term wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for “fast” and is an acronym for “What I Know Is.”

The first known wiki was published in 1995 on the Web site WikiWikiWeb. Wikis quickly expanded into the business world. Companies recognized their abilities to quickly communicate among employees. They utilized this ease and replaced the intranet with wikis. Since then, wiki has made its mark in the technological world. In 2007, it was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

They are incredibly convenient and have endless information all at one location in the vast universe of cyberspace. Anyone can contribute information, resulting in a more comprehensive encyclopedia entry.

However, this is the primary Achilles heel of the wiki. If anyone can anonymously publish information, how do you know if it is accurate?

Wikipedia came across this problem in 2005. In May of 2005, Brian Chase posted erroneous information about his colleague journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. Chase accused Seigenthaler of involvement in the assassinations of both President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The post remained on Wikipedia for four months until it was discovered.

This false entry is also known as “trolling” or the intentional vandalism of the site. Wikipedia approaches false posting with the attitude that incorrect information is easier to delete than it is to deter. Misleading information is the chief reason why professors ask their students to use sources other than Wikipedia. Yet, with such an accessible Web site, is this fair? Wikipedia is the one-stop shop for any and all information.

All credibility is not lost though. Public relations practitioners are employing wikis to communicate with one another and gauge opinions. The New PR/Wiki Web site is one such site. PR professionals blog and communicate with one another via this site.

However, new technology has made the “anonymous” posts not so anonymous anymore. Identifying IP addresses has shed light on PR practitioners contributing information on wikis that either benefit their own organization or slur another.

Wikis are a fascinating concept. They can potentially offer so much useful information. With the growth in popularity of private wikis, the possibilities of this expanding technology are endless. Supervising the accuracy of posts is the obstacle preventing the breakthrough of the wiki.

Question: If the most extensive information I could find about wikis was on Wikipedia, how much should you trust this article?

For more information, visit:

http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.ph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/15/wikipedia-editiing-publishing-tech-security-cx_ag_0815wiki.html

By: Allison Key

Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

If you’re like me, Google is the first Web site you visit when you have a question or need to do some research. Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines (such as Google) via search results. The earlier a site appears in the search results, or the higher it ranks, the more likely searchers are to visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of searches, including image searches, local searches, and industry-specific searches.

How to Optimize your Web site

Optimizing a Web site involves editing the content and HTML coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. In other words, it makes the Web site easier to find through a search engine. Sometimes a site’s structure, or the relationship between its content, must be altered too. If you’re interested in doing this to your own Web site and a lot more tech-savvy than I am, here are complete instructions on how to optimize your Web site. (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm)

Why is SEO important?

As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. It has become a very important tool for companies because consumers are relying more on Web sites to find trusted information. Chevy, in order to save money on advertisements, has recently cut back on television commercials and has focused more on its Web site. Chevy made use of SEO to increase traffic to their Web site. When people put in the key word “car” into a Google search, Chevy ensured through SEO that they would be one of the first sites listed. This allowed Chevy to lure customers who are not loyal to one specific car brand. SEO is a great way for companies to increase traffic to Web sites and can potentially save a lot of money on advertisements.

What does SEO mean to Public Relations Professionals?

It is very important for public relations professionals to make use of SEO for their clients. The internet has become into a huge medium for finding information and researching a product. Getting your client’s Web site to be the first site listed in a Google search can help your client achieve a numbers of goals and will prove your value as a public relation practitioner.

To learn more about Search Engine Optimization, visit the following site:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

By: Ellen Greenwell

“Broadcast Yourself” - YouTube

YouTube: it’s not only a Web site; it’s a social revolution. The video-sharing site, started in 2005, has exploded in popularity, with nearly 100 million videos watched daily. The site allows users to upload videos they have taken or watch videos other people have uploaded. From politics to the downright silly, YouTube has become a household name for Internet users.

We’ve all seen the funny videos…now how does it actually work?

Basically, YouTube is what Georgia Tech students would call, “a video sharing network, operated by Macromedia’s downloadable plug-in, Adobe Flash Player, which displays high-quality, sometimes streaming, video.” In laymen’s terms, a user can download a plug-in and begin watching videos other people have recorded and uploaded to the Web site. Sometimes, users can even watch videos in real-time. I read somewhere that this year’s presidential election is being called “the most democratic election in American history.” I give YouTube the credit. They partnered with CNN during the 2008 Presidential Primaries and urged Americans to upload video questions for the potential presidential candidates. The candidates gave answers to selected questions in a televised (and YouTube-ed!) debate,. Through YouTube, the candidates were able to reach out to a wider audience and Americans were able to directly take part in the election process.

Okay, I’m sick of politics…how does YouTube help me, the regular guy?

YouTube has definitely made celebrities out of Joe-Schmoes. We’ve all been there: first, you get an e-mail from a friend with a YouTube link. You follow it, watch Charlie bite his brother’s finger and decide you’ve got to pass it along to your family and a few of your friends. Ah ha! We’ve just witnessed the birth of a viral video, an Internet video clip that becomes widely popular (unusually so for kids in middle school) through word-of-mouth. Athens, Ga. even has its own YouTube celebrity, the vulgar homeless “Rack ‘Em Willie.” His video is an inspiration to all: one day homeless…the next…YouTube sensation.

How can I contribute to the YouTube community?


Think you’ve got the dance moves that rival J. Lo’s? Aspiring to become a country singer and want record executives to see your stuff? Just have a crazy talent that grosses everyone out? Well, sounds like the YouTube coummity is for you.

Anyone on the Internet can watch videos, but YouTube only allows its users to upload videos for others to watch. To do this, you must first create an account with the Web site. Uploading videos from there is as easy as confirming your e-mail address, selecting a video you’ve already uploaded to your computer and clicking “upload” to add the video to YouTube. From there, you can add tags to your videos so your friends can find them and create a profile by uploading more videos to your account. Just be sure, however, your video does not contain inappropriate or copyrighted content, or it will be removed from the Web site.

Besides uploading, you can also comment on and rate other people’s videos as a member of the YouTube community. By creating a profile, or “channel,” other YouTube members can see information about you, like how long you’ve been a YouTube member and how many videos you’ve watched or add you as a friend. YouTube even suggests videos you may like and gives you the option of adding these videos to a “QuickList” for later viewing.

Here’s to hoping you become the next viral video sensation like this guy. Happy uploading!

By: Kelcie Chambers

Social Bookmarking

What is social bookmarking?

Technically speaking, social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy ( or “folksonomy” as its sometimes referred to in certain techie circles) of Web sites that have been bookmarked by internet users, with the help of metadata, so they can store, organize, search and share URLs.

Now for all those people who don’t spend all their free time reading CNET, social bookmarking is really just tool to put all your favorite Web pages in one place so you can tell your friends and professional colleagues what they should be looking at when they’re online. For example, say you are a student studying public relations (a stretch, I know). You can use a social bookmarking system to put all of your favorite blog posts about your future profession in one place so your parents know they’re not wasting their money on tuition.

How does social bookmarking work?

A social bookmarking system allows internet users to save their favorite links they want to remember or share with others. These links can then be organized by “tagging” them, which forms collections of bookmarks divided into categories so other people can find them. Imagine, again as a public relations student, you are doing research on the latest trends in PR practice, but you happen to also be a bit ADD. You can put all the sites you find about “blogging” in one place with the tag as something like “blogging” (mind-blowing, I know) and all the other ones about “celebrity gossip” tagged as “guilty pleasure” in another place.

Most social bookmarking sites also enable browsing other bookmarks with similar tags so you can see what other people like you found while they were aimlessly surfing the ‘net. However, if you don’t want people to know you were reading about Paris Hilton’s latest scandal or Madge’s workout regimen but still don’t want to forget that juicy site’s URL, social bookmarking systems also lets you mark some bookmarks as private.

When did all this “tagging” and “bookmarking” begin?

The first true social bookmarking site was started in April 1996 (think back to the good ole days of the Spice Girls and the Macarena) with the launch of itList. Within the next three years, a whole batch of SM sites cropped up including BackFlip, Blink, Clip2, Click Marks, and HotLinks. However, these sites died a sudden under the “dot-com bubble burst” due to a lack of revenue-generating opportunities. (This was clearly before the days of Google’s Adwords…)

So, what can SB do for me?

There are many advantages to using a social bookmarking site. For one, SBs searches find sites that have been classified by living, breathing humans, not just webcrawlers like most search engines. This means that the stuff you find under a certain tag actually relates to what you’re searching for, instead of just searching for the number of times a word or phrase is mentioned on a certain Web site. Think about what happens when you Google “guilty pleasure” without the safe search mode turned on... things could get very naked, very quickly.

And, social bookmarking systems can also rank sites based on the number of times other people have bookmarked it. Meaning: like-minded people saving sites that can actually help you find the info you want instead of a search engine ranking sites based on their interconnectivity.

Professors and even corporate big-wigs have started using SB to tell the little people like students and middle management what they should be thinking and talking about.

Ok, it can’t be all that great or else I would have heard about it sooner…

There are some downsides that the minds behind SB can’t really fix. First of all, because of the variety of different terminologies and vocabulary of the English language (and not to mention new slang terms that are created by the thousands everyday), there is no standard set of keywords. A hip-hop artist fan could tag an article about managing your finances “cheddar,” and a suburban father could tag the same article “fiscal responsibility.” The SB system wouldn’t be able to relate the two to people who don’t what either tag means (i.e. me). You say “potato,” and I say “what is cheddar?!?”

Also, there are a lot of dummies out there who can use a SB site but can’t spell to save their life and end up tagging an article about killer strawberry daiquiris as “daccury recipe.”

Recently, due to the intense internet competition, SB sites have become the latest battleground for spammers and unethical corporations who try to up their site’s traffic for search engine optimization. The more a site is submitted or bookmarked, the better chance it has of being found. So for that company who sells male enhancement pills over the internet, SB provides just another way for them to annoy us.

What are some SB sites I could try? (a.k.a. the easiest ones to use)

Probably the most popular social bookmarking site available today is delicious (formally known as del.icio.us). According to their website, delicious is ‘da bomb because:

“With an emphasis on the power of the community, delicious greatly improves how
people discover, remember, manage and share on the internet. “


The many features of delicious are what attract it to so many people. These include:
1. A simple interface that is easy to use
2. A human-readable URL scheme
3. The cutesy domain name (I know I want to click on something called Delicious)
4. RSS feeds that provided syndication
5. The fact that it’s FREE.


Another popular site for SB newbies is StumbleUpon. This service lets users bookmark Web sites, photo and videos as they are viewing them with a special downloadable toolbar. When you find a site that you like (such as that one about ScarJo’s secret wedding), you just click on the “Stumble!” button and the service adds it to your personal profile. You can then give it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” depending on your opinion of the quality of the gossip….er…information. Also, you can search for sites that other “stumblers” have found and the service only shows you the ones they have given a “thumbs up.” StumbleUpon, therefore, forms a collaborative opinion on website quality by logging each user’s “thumb” rating. It’s like Robert Ebert’s guide to the internet.

For more information on how cool social bookmarking is, you can visit the sites below. Maybe you can even add them to your own list of bookmarks!

7 Things You Should Know About: Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Social Bookmarking: Tools for Collaboration and Interaction
Social Media Survey
Links that are Worth Building

By: Allison Brill

Flickr

Social media is the new rage, and Flickr is an online outlet for photography fanatics. Launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application that allows its members to share and network through photos and videos. I love to take photos of my friends and family, so to me it seems like a great way to do all of my editing, organizing and sharing from one Web site.

I originally had no idea how to use Flickr or what it really was, but the Web site had a helpful tour to show me each step of the photo sharing process, and even gave examples of what I could do with each feature. There were also helpful screen-print graphics that illustrated examples of what I can do with my pictures.

There are five different ways to upload pictures to the Web site, including using the Flickr Uploadr or e-mailing them from a mobile camera phone, so anyone should be able to find a way that works for them.

Flickr partnered with Picnik to edit photos, reduce red-eye, crop, rotate, change colors, add special effects and more to any photo. The example on their Web site shows how a picture of a lamb can be edited to look like it is wearing a crown and confetti is flying around it.

Once you have edited your photos, you can organize them into Sets based on a certain theme or photo subject, for example, a favorite pet or vacation spot. You can combine similar Sets into Collections, such as “World Travels” or “2007,” for even better organization. Both Sets and Collections are created by using the Organizr, which allows you to perform common tasks on multiple photos. You can also share pictures in three different categories of groups: public, public (invite only) or private. Every group has a discussion board to talk to others within the group and a pool to share photos and videos. There are also many privacy controls that you can adjust so you control who sees your pictures and what pictures you see.

Other fun features include a map that you can use to see where photos were taken, and you can use your photos to make photobooks, calendars and more.

You can also keep in touch with friends and family on Flickr by adding people as contacts whether or not they have a Flickr account. That can be a really useful tool in public relations since it helps you build and maintain relationships. Flickr allows you to easily stay up to date with what other people are doing, and they can do the same for you.

By: Lauren Rohde

Technorati Offers New Strategies for Public Relations Practitioners

Blogs are the newest rage in the field of Public Relations. Companies and organizations are beginning to use this new form of communication to reach their publics in a quite different way than ever before, and there are thousands of new blogs created each day. The problem, however, is how does someone go about organizing all of these blogs?

This is the question that David Sifry asked himself in 2000. His solution? Technorati, the ultimate blog search engine. It currently tracks 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of tagged social media. Technorati is a place where bloggers can organize their favorite blogs, find new blogs, and share their own with people around the world. Technorati also tracks links and rates the relative relevance of blogs, videos and photos.

To fully understand what Technorati is all about, I decided to check it out myself. I found this site quite helpful. The headline tabs are useful to find popular topics quickly, and the search tool is also effective. Each blog has “tags” that are used for searching purposes and for finding related articles. Blogs are rated according to their relevance and popularity. However, when searching for simple topics such as, public relations, I found several top posts that did not seem relevant to what I was searching for.

I believe this search engine for the blogosphere can be an effective and helpful tool for PR practitioners. Technorati allows you to learn who is linking to your company’s blogs and what they’re saying by tracking conversations about your brand. By using the Technorati tags, you can create more exposure for your blog and generate more readers. By using Technorati, practitioners can perpetuate their strategies of furthering their company or brand.

A new approach that many companies are now taking is the use of blog advertisements, and Technorati is in the forefront of this new trend. Each page of the website has several advertisements for different companies. Advertising through social media outlets has recently become a popular trend in PR. This can be an effective tool for practitioners when trying to gain exposure for their company or organization.

PR practitioners should take advantage of what Technorati has to offer. Through creating blogs, or by making use of advertisement opportunities, companies and organizations can expand their resources and reach their publics in a new and innovated way.

Photo caption: Dave Sifry founded Technorati in 2000.

By: Samantha Riddle