Jean-Remy von Matt, who runs the German ad agency Jung von Matt, has fallen foul of the bloggers. Von Matt was the man in charge of creating the Du bist Deutschland campaign by the German government which is designed to make Germans feel good about their country again. The campaign has been heavily attacked by German bloggers. “What on earth gives every computer owner the right to exude his opinion, unasked for? … and most bloggers really just exude,” he wrote in an e-mail to staff. Not surprisinly, the e-mail found its way onto the web…which made the bloggers even crosser.

There is an interesting lesson in this for ad agencies. They are used to having a platform which is very one way. They get to spend millions of pounds putting across a simple, and often deliberately misleading, message. Nobody gets to debate or question the message (certainly not traditional media, which depends on the millions spent by men such as Von Matt). Yet now anyone putting out a misleading ad is lilkely to be shot down in flames. It will certainly do more harm than good.

Advertisers will need to get used to just being part of the conversation. Or else end up looking as dated and out-of-touch as Von Matt.

This is an obvious scam that took me a little by surprise when it arrived in my email box It’s an email purporting to be from Bruce K Misamore formally Chief Financial Officer of Yukos, the oil company persecuted by the Russian state. He is sending me his blessings and offering me to join him in a business opportunity. Normally, it would have taken me less than a second to see through this as a variation on the Nigerian 401 scam. But this was different. I’ve met Bruce Misamore a few times in the past in my capacity as a journalist. I suppose it took me 10 seconds to realise that it could not possibly be him. I don’t think that a serious businessman would gush:

“What a blessed people we are to be part of 2006. Congratulations! May this New Year bring fulfillment of all our desires and eternal joy.Amen!! Happy New Year!!!”

It’s the dark side of the internet. Your identity can be stolen so easily by someone who merely registers an email address or website in your name. On there other side, there have been one or two emails recently that I almost deleted without reading, only to realise at the last moment that they were from readers contacting me out of the blue. You have to be so careful these days.

Here in London, there will be big celebrations this year for the Chinese New Year on Saturday. Perhaps it’s a little early to review our predictions for the Year of the Flaming Dog, but one of them seems to be coming true with a vengence. As I recall, it was prediction number 3 - that people will bitch more and more about Google. They are certainly bitching about it now, and with some justification for the company whose declared aim is to “do no evil.”

Still, I would argue that Google’s capitulation in China has to be weighed against its stand against washington to protect its users data. On the evil front, that means Google is neutral for 2006 by my reckoning - but that won’t stop the bitching.

Podcasting is really hot at the moment, and articles about it are springing up all over. There’s even a new magazine dedicated to the subject. It will be interesting to see whether people are prepared to pay for information on this free medium.

And our own Storynory Podcast for children has been featured in this article in Publishers’ Weekly. The article outlines our ambitions to make riches out of Storynory, while keeping the audio free. Let’s hope it has a fairy tale ending.

Torin Douglas, the BBC’s media correspondent, has a good round-up of British podcasting by the BBC and newspapers such as the Guardian and the Telegraph His report on Radio 4’s Today Programme has clips from the Tony Blair Sun podcast, the David Cameron Telegraph Podcast, and the Ricky Gervais Guardian Podcast which has had 2 million downloads todate (I wonder what the bandwidth cost was?).

Torin’s BBC radio report is here. What’s missing is a single reference to an independent podcast So next time, Torin, have a listen to our own Storynory, please.

Those hard working folk at Lewis PR had the perfect excuse to gaze out of the window at the end of last week.Their offices on the 22nd floor of Millbank Tower overlook the Thames at the very spot where a whale became stranded. Within minutes, the Lewis team had created a Whale Watch Blog.Herman Melville would have been proud of their efforts. They detailed the unfolding tragedy, including the final hours in the life of their hero, as he was hauled up onto a barge (lots of optimistic posts), and then the increasingly bleak reports of the whale’s health, and then final reports of his demise.

The whale blog was a nifty PR move by the firm. The world’s media was hungry for coverage, and Lewis have appeared on Sky News and given interviews to newspaper reporters.  It’s a perfect example of how “citizen journalism” can find its way into the mainstream media.

Technorati Tags: London, whale, blogs, PR

Is it just me who thinks there is something odd about the Million Dollar Homepage story? Congratulations to Alex Tew, the founder of the homepage, not least for his talent for self-publicity. But why on earth would anyone actually want to own space on it? After all, it is hard to imagine that anyone is going to make the rather ugly looking page that has resulted their homepage. Indeed, in a few weeks it is hard to believe anyone at all will ever look at it - even the obscure shopping chanels on Sky have some nice looking girls on them, and Tew’s page doesn’t even have that. Somebody has been fooled….and perhaps it is the media that has covered the story so enthusiasticly.

The Telegraph has launched a blog by one of the last independent reporters in Zimbabwe. Peta Thornycroft is a Zimbabwean, and her first blog entry describes queuing up for groceries in the world’s “fastest shrinking economy”. The man in front of her had to go back to his car to fetch more cash in a cardboard box.

The Telegraph’s blog style reminds me of the BBC’s “From our own Correspondent.” It gives down to earth insights into daily life. I’m sure that their foreign correspondents blogs will find niche followings. But I stick to my point that they would make a much bigger impact by plugging into that great network called the Blogosphere. I’m told that the paper has no policy against linking out to other sites or blogs, and even encourages it, but it doesn’t happen much.

Meanwhile Graham Holliday is enthusiasticly following up on remarks he made in our recent podcast. He’s interviewing journalist Sandeep Junnarkar about donation driven blog projects, and is looking for more examples for a feature he’s writing on the subject. Graham will also be experimenting with blogging all his background notes, interview tapes, and Mp3s to “fatten out” his journalism.

Following our recent scathing remarks on newspapers’ response to blogging, the Daily Telegraph has been in touch to point out that their foreign correspondents are actively blogging.

Credit where credit is due. I’ve been browsing through The Telegraph’s weblogs, and of course they are well written, as you would expect from professional writers. They give interesting insights into daily life in various countries. There isn’t enough space for all these nice touches in the paper. Travel is a theme that comes up - the terrible safety record of African airlines, the long, long queues at Charles de Gaulle Airport. A post that has attracted a few comments is about a mass murderer Joseph Kony, leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” plaguing Northern Uganda. (Monster at Large).

The Telegraph shows that blogs give extra space for wider expression by journalists. Indeed, their online editors have a weblog in which they express the view that blogs after 9/11 provided “more coverage”

But blogs are about much more than “more”. There is a big element that is missing from the Telegraph’s Weblogs. It’s interaction with other blogs. This is what makes blogs addictive and intriguing. It’s particularly powerful for blogs with an international viewpoint, because they bring together people from different countries. There should be an element of cruising the world’s weblogs and linking to them. Blogs will be very flattered to receive a link from the Telegraph, and will link back. Coversations will start. The Telegraph’s foreign weblogs will come alive.

Online websites run by businesses are very reluctant to link-out. It’s a big misunderstanding. The law of the web is that if you send people away to somewhere interesting, they will return to you to find more good destinations. (I paraphrase Dave Winer here). Google is the prime example.

On a technical point, it would be nice to aggregate all the Telegraph’s foreign correspondent blogs into one blog, so that we don’t have to keep on dipping in and out of various countries.

I look forward to the Telegraph’s weblogs becoming a global meeting point. When they start to twig about linking into the blogosphere, they might find that traffic to their weblogs starts to build month by month and that they have a major site on their hands - instead of the back end of the newspaper.

In our recent, Blog Relations Podcast (Hacks and Bloggers), Graham Holliday, aka Pieman, had some stimulating ideas about how newspapers can respond to blogs and the drift of readers to the internet. He’s also been outlining some of them on his blog at Noodlepie.

I agree with Graham that newspapers can harness the power of blogs, so that journalists can publish interview notes, MP3s, photographs, etc, and receive feedback - but I also think that it’s a big undertaking.

So yes, journalists should blog. But there are other ways that newspapers can try to arrest their the decline in readership. They should begin by asking why it is that they aren’t so popular anymore .

Travel is a great example. Yes, the internet is sucking away readers. But it’s probably more to do with the quality of the writing, and the soft relationship between travel editors and travel companies as discussed here recently.

American newspapers are pompous and take themselves far too seriously. They’ve lost all trace of the lively style that characterised their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

British papers regard their readers and freelancers as lunatics instead of a valuable source of feedback. They are also far too narrowly focused on domestic issues, and “abroad” doesn’t exist, unless there is a Brit there.

In general, the newspaper industry is short on creative thinking, largely because it’s populated by people who are confident that “they know what’s best.”

I’m not a huge fan of Britain’s Independent Newspaper, mainly for political reasons, but it is an example of a newspaper that has been trying to respond to these issues. Early on it declared that it would not accept travel freebies (I don’t know whether its stuck to that). It’s innovated with its front page, running highly opinionated stories - the sort that you often read on blogs. There is a seam of creativity running through it.

By all means adopt new technology. But also innovate with the old technology. Screen or paper, it doesn’t really matter. Be Creative. And stop regarding bloggers as freaks. Try and emulate some of their online success in print.

When I wrote recently about why the travel section of the newspaper is destined for the bin, I thought that some might suspect me of undue cynicism. But it turns out that Neil MacLean, who spent 17 years working for the travel pages of major newspaper, thinks I that I understated my case.