I join Scoble in my pleasure at reading that Apple has been forced to pay $700,000 to bloggers to fund their legal defence fees. It’s nice to see a bully get a bloody nose.

Edelman has been smart and admitted that it’s paying for two more Wal-Mart Propaganda blogs.

Here at Exbiblio I read a motto on one engineer’s wall, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off”. This is so true of transparent blogging.

Well done Edelman for facing up to this particular writing on the wall. That’s knocked a few years off your sentence in the Bloggers’ Re-education Camp.

Very nice of someone to write a blog about how you can travel across the USA and always park overnight in a Wal-Mart car park for free - nice for Wal-Mart that is.

I started thinking about all the other amazing things there are to see in this vast country of ours. And then I started thinking about how Wal-Mart — one in every town, practically — lets you park overnight for free.

Pity it reads just like typical PR rubbish. Hold on a minute, it is PR rubbish! It turns out that this idea was cooked up by the Edelman agency - the same Edelman whose boss writes a blog, and that hired a slew of PR bloggers.

Interesting to hear the take on this in the For Imediate Release Podcast. It gives an impression of the confusion this debacle has sowed in the PR World. Presenter Shel Holtz rightly expresses sorrow and regret that Edelman should cock-up like this, then co-presenter Neville Hobson reports on how nice it was to meet Richard Edelman at a blogger meet-up in London last week. Presumably Neville recorded his piece before this news broke.

Edelman reminds me of running journalism courses in various parts of the world. The students nod and say lots of intelligent things in the discussion, but when they go out and do their stuff, they come back with material that does the opposite of all that we talked about. This is exactly what Edelman does in the blogosphere.

On Monday I told Neville Hobson about my involvement in the Exbiblio blog. It was late in the evening, and he took a glance at it, said it looked interesting, and that he would return to it in the morning. Rather embarrassingly, three of my posts had vanished by the morning. This was particularly awkward, as I had told the world that I had a free hand to write as I saw fit. I am glad to say that they are back now. The key post is about an extremely sensitive subject concerning the founder.

I think this tale could have been interpreted in either a positive or a negative light, depending on whether you think it was terrible that the posts were taken down, or great that they were put back. It’s clear to anyone who reads the blog that there as been some misunderstanding and 24 hours of deciding what to do - a classic PR muddle. However, Martin King has done much to put things right by explaining what happened.

Neville has very generously seen the story in the best light possible, and my thanks are due to him. I do hope that other companies will take note of what Neville says about the best way to communicate difficult news in the modern media. What he says is very true, but hard to undertake.

The Exbiblio Blog has gone live.

As I have mentioned, Exbiblio is a Seattle based start-up. I’m co-blogging with staffer Adam Behringer, and am giving the outside view.

I hope that my opening salvo of posts reveal what an unusual project this is.

Exbiblio asked for openness, and I’ve goen for broke, being frank and I hope provacative in the right way.

Apologies for the long period of silence. We haven’t been on holiday. Nor have we given up blogging. Quite the opposite. In fact, Blog Relations is just getting over the shock of having a client that is employing us more or less full time right now, and, hopefully, at least part-time over the coming months.

When Matthew and I set up Blog Relations about a year ago, we had visions of a flood of British businesses signing us up to chart their progress and help cultivate their online reputation in the blogosphere. We soon realised that that we were sadly mistaken - apart from anything, the openness that the concept implied was completely alien to British business managers. We decided that our future lay as a podcast publishing company, hence Storynory for kids. We’ve had some nice small jobs on the consulting side, for which we are grateful, but all the promising meetings and discussions for longer term business relationships came to nothing. There’s even been a couple of juicy jobs that we thought were in the bag, but somehow weren’t.

When I received a call on my mobile from somebody called Martin in Seattle, I had just an inkling that his idea of us writing for him from London was so crazy, that he must be serious. When the unasked-for advance arrived in our bank account, before we had even done any work, it became apparent that this guy was of an entirely different breed from les autres. At least, it shut up my friends who told me that the mysterious American was far too good to be true, and that he must be a lunatic, time-waster, fraudster, etc.

My trip to see his company, Exbiblio, in Seattle, was a fabulous week in which I was made to feel like a long lost friend, rather than a outside ‘consultant’ for want of a better word. I was met at the airport by this modest dotcom multi-millionaire in his anything but flashy VW, and immediately taken out to a fabulous sushi restaurant for a long evening of wide-ranging conversation.

This last week, back in London, I’ve been working fast and furiously on a blog design with Exbiblio’s Adam Behringer. The Instant Messages have been flying back and forth. Adam’s going to be relating the insider view on the Exbiblio blog - and I’m going to be the outsider. If, as might just be possible, the blog turns into a book about the story of a start-up, Blog Relation’s Matthew Lynn, will play a bigger part.

I’m looking forward to working with Adam, who has a keen eye for design, and who takes some great photographs (as well as being able to code just about anything).

It’s a brave and interesting idea to have an outside blogger with a sense of distance from the company (10 hours flying distance, in fact). Hopefully, I will see the big picture and make sure that the story unfolds in a way that comes alive to people who are not immersed in Exbiblio’s interesting ambitions and culture. It seems to be a company that has taken openness to heart, and I think it’s going to be a very full and frank account that should, if it works, strike a cord with people in business in all fields.

I will be dropping in on Exbiblio about once a month. I see it like watching a baby grow. If you are an adoring parent, watching every day, you don’t notice the fast rate of change so much. The grandparents who see the baby once a week or so, notice the changes much more sharply.

This is a fabulous opportunity to prove that the concept of an outside blogger has a lot to offer. I’ll let you know the blog URL when it goes ‘live.’

P.S. Now live at Blogs.Exbiblio.Com

It looks like I was one of many to receive the Nigerian 401 Scam from Bruce K Misamore (well, somebody pretending to be him actually). The real Misamore was formally the CFO of the Russian oil company, Yukos.

The latest letter in this vein is from “Larisa” who pretends to represent the jailed former boss of Yukos, Mikhael Khodorkovsky. It runs like this:

PRIVATE AND BRIEF,READ CAREFULLY.

Dear Friend,
I am Larisa Sosnitskaya
and I represent Mr. Mikhail Khordokovsky the former C.E.O of Yukos Oil
Company in Russia. I have a very sensitive and confidential brief from
this top (oligarch) to ask for your partnership in re-profiling funds
US$46 Million. I will give the details, but in
summary, the funds are
coming via Bank Menatep. This is a legitimate transaction.

You will be
paid 20% as your commission/compensation for your active efforts and
contribution to the success of this transaction.

You can catch more of
the story on This website below or you can watch more of CCN or BBC to
get more news about my boss.

http://www.mosnews.com/mn-
files/khodorkovsky.shtml
http://www.mbktrial.com/
http://news.bbc.co.
uk/1/hi/business/3213505.stm
http://www.themoscowtimes.
com/stories/2005/04/11/041.html
http://www.nndb.
com/people/633/000025558/

If you are interested, please do indicate by
providing me with your confidential telephone number, fax number and
email address and I will provide further details and instructions.
Please keep this confidential as we cannot afford more political
problems. Please do send me your response as soon as possible via my
personal email: larisasosnitss@netscape.net
look forward to hearing
from you.
Regards,
Larisa Sosnitskaya

Apple’s lawyer says that even a moron could distinguish the difference between the Beatle’s famous label, and Apple’s iTunes.

It’s not the most elegant or judicial way of putting it, but I agree.

I read that Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has banned his children from using Google or iPods. I would say that’s a pity. The one economic benefit of having kids is that they provide bald middle aged dads with free market research.

Firefox has the reputation of being the most web 2.0 browser, but my vote goes to Opera. Its RSS reader knocks the socks Firefox’s, and most dedicated readers. But Opera lost a march by charging for its full version, until about six months ago when it saw the light. Charging is not very Web 2.0.

When it comes to getting web hosting if you are just going to have a personal site then most budget web hosting may be all you need. If you’re going to need hosting for a site that sells things or is in some way monetized then decisions like Windows or Unix web hosting start to come into play.

Search Engine Watch has an article about optimising podcasts for search engines. It mentions something I hadn’t heard about, podscope, which uses speach recognition to listen to podcasts.

It makes a suggestion I don’t agree with - have a seperate feed for iTunes. Feedburner will make your feed fit iTunes or any podcatcher.

Search Engine Watch is an interesting site, so I thought I would give their podcast a try. About halfway through the second lengthy and noisy message from sponsors I gave up.

If - I mean when - Storynory matches up with a suitable sponsor that fits our brand - we will have a short message read by our narrator - “This story is brought to you by XXX - and a one sentence slogan.” It will be far more valuable because we will be “lending” some our our relationship with our listeners to the advertiser.

The first rule of advertising - don’t bore or piss off the audience. You are spending money to spoil your brand and the publisher’s product too.