E-bay PR team, I salute you (but you're weird)

This blog is a big fan of the E-bay publicity machine. Every week they churn out yet another weird E-bay item story providing a valuable service to hacks with deadlines looming and pubs to patronise.

This week they have surpassed themselves in the bizarre stakes with news that someone is selling Potpourri clams on the site and have helpfully including several verses all about it, including the instructive lines:

There is nothing so refreshing
As a house that smells like clams,
Except, perhaps fresh compost,
Or Prostate-gland Exams,
(it goes on and on from here in a similar clam-inspired vein)

As usual, this has been picked up by blogs everywhere (if you can't beat them, join them, I say) and no doubt will soon be adorning those difficult to fill spaces on page 11 on every print publication on earth.

E-bay, I defy you to trump this one next week.

Playing the April fool

Yesterday saw the annual media sport of trying to fool the public into believing their April fool's stories. Efforts ranged from the inspired article claiming that Peter Mandelson was going to become the new chairman of the BBC (cue mass hysteria among many BBC staff) to a more commercial effort from BMW announcing new technology allowing your to cook your dinner as you drive home.

With the speed at which stories proliferate across the media, the game has become seeing how far your story can spread before it's revealed to be a joke. A clear winner in my eyes was the story about plucky Brit's schemes to create a chicken-powered nuclear bomb featured in The Times which they are still denying to this day. The story featured the memorable quote: 'It does seem like an April fool but it most certainly is not. The civil service does not do jokes.'

Given that they do actually do leaks, how about a rumour that former immigration minister Beverly Hughes will be appointed as the new BBC Director General?

P&G sends brand publishers in circles

When the big brands starting hearing about this whole internet thing, some bright spark explained that here might be a route to cut through the media and talk direct to the customer while saving vast amounts on expensive ad slots. So we saw the emergence of a series of branded consumer portals delivering news and content galore to their customers direct with the odd subtle or less subtle product plug along the way.

Annoyingly for the brands, consumers can be cynical and choosy in the competitive internet space and didn't go for the idea of their brand as their content provider and many of these sites simply ran out of budget and now live on in muted versions of the grand vision.

Interesting then that things are starting to come full circle and P&G is looking to invest further in their consumer sites after the success of their HomeMadeSimple portal with the launch of Healthexpressions.com, a healthcare portal. Also consider Coke's repeated content driven initiatives such as the move to Coke music downloads and there is food for thought for all big brands.

Certainly it's not going to start a brand content rush on the previous scale, but moving into the area of broadband and premium content is king, expect others to follow suit.

Statcounting the visitors

Now Google has honoured the site with a dash of PageRank green, I've decided it's about time to start seeing how many people are visiting the site, if anyone in fact is apart from me and the odd puzzled work colleague.

So, after a quick search, I've plumped for the stat counter below. Unfortunately, the powers that be at blogger.com don't seem to allow me to put the javascript into the site, so it's the html version only. The html version tells me very little and I'll have to content myself with a simple number rather than more juicy information on where people are visiting from.

Fortunately, this also comes with an invisible option, so if the stat stays at 1 for months at a time I can do the decent thing and hide my embarrassingly small visitor numbers from the world. Erm, not that the world would be watching in that case, but still...

Blogging my way into Google

The web is a big place, too big in fact. With all the billions of sites out there, just how do people find your site, or more importantly my site?

I've downloaded the Google toolbar and despite my efforts and writing the kind of (semi) regular content on all kinds of (semi) vital topics, the PageRank bar (indicates Google's rating of your site) has resolutely remained at zero despite submitting to Google several months ago. It's enough to parade my blog in front of Inktomi and get my valued readers from MSN, Freeserve and the like.

However, all that has changed on the latest Google rotation and a trace of green has appeared on the Google toolbar giving my blog a score of 3. So what's changed since then?

Well, I'd like to think that Google has finally come to its senses and recognised my efforts, but I think the guys at Blogorama have more to do it. The blog is now featured in their list of blogs and clearly that's good enough for all-powerful Google to get out the green paintbrush.

Surely, it's only a matter of time now before that elusive (and lucrative) Sunday Times column comes through.

Move over Britney and Madonna, there's a new PR queen in town

Debate has been raging about whether Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' was in fact a well/ill-chosen (delete according to today's whim) PR stunt. Ad Age recently featured an article from a PR firm praising it as a stunt saying 'It raises the bar for all of us' in a nice bit of PR for his agency who I've already forgotten the name of.

Despite an unlikely reported 200,000 complaints (that's some serious switchboard action), she has got her conveniently timed single to the no.1 slot, leaving us to wonder whether this is finally proof of the old PR adage that no publicity is bad publicity.

All this leaves me wondering just how long it will be until we start getting waves of publicity-desperate celebrity streakers?

What's that? Oh, yes... Jordan.

The publicity gravy train

Is it just me or does E-bay's publicity machine just keep rolling out the same story over and over again with no sign of media weariness? The dot com success story is in the press every other week for endless subtle twists on the 'someone sells something weird on E-bay' story. Great kudos for their PR agency and early to the pub for the hack in question (and good luck to them both).

One look today reveals Germans selling tanks online and a Bristol University student auctioning her virginity online (surely the Britney $7m bid a few years ago scooped this one?).

What next, cholesterol-reducing cholesterol?

Birthdays can be sobering times. Before you know it, you're the wrong side of 30 and looking down the barrel of belly expansion, high cholesterol and dodgy knees.

To counter the inevitable, I've started to take an interest in those little yoghurt things and Benecol spreads that all claim to lower my double-cream and red meat-fueled cholesterol levels, but now even my bread is chipping in with the goal of batting my poor health into the next 30 years through an attack on all fronts.

It all makes me wonder whether in the future even my cholesterol is going to start reducing my cholesterol levels?

Janet Jackson goes tits up

For once Wacko Jacko has found himself upstaged on the bad publicity front by his own sister, Janet. Her crime? The cardinal sin for our friends across the pond of exposing a breast.

For the nation that airbrushes out the infinitely corrupting nipple out of its quasi-porn men's lifestyle magazine segment, exposure on the TV holy grail superbowl slot has induced mass hysteria. For those of us this side of the pond, we can only wonder at the damage done to the youth by the tassled mammory gland and hope that the hideous image is soon erased by a daily diet of screen violence.

In fact, she has made internet history as the most searched-for name of all time, pipping the mighty Britney and even Paris Hilton's promotional video, according to the Search Engine Journal. Let's just be grateful she didn't display the full set or George W would have had to invade.

Virals of the season to you

OK, OK, so it's been a while since my last post and with Christmas coming up, it's probably going to be a while until my next one. What better way to sign off from the world of internet communications with a seasonal viral. And not just any seasonal viral. This one is so bad, that it's great. It just goes to show that some of the best virals are the ones with the least effort behind them and the humour is not that of the author but the perception of the recipient.

Here you go and don't forget to set your expectations to low. Really low.

And if you're really in the mood for festive idleness then play the Supa Snooper game and help a young boy achieve his dream of being an ace reporter.

What's your spam name?

You know how you can work out your porn name? There's many ways to do it, but my favourite is you take the name of your first pet followed by your mother's maiden name. This makes the stud Jeremy Dubois in my case (watch out ladies!).

Given the amount of spam anyone who's had an email address for more than 5 minutes gets, surely it is just a matter of time before the formula for calculating your spam name comes out. There's a guy who has collected a list of the names he's been spammed by from the delectable 'Lavonne Crowe' to the slightly distubring 'Domingo Mann' (www.anentropic.com/writing/spamnames/index.php).

But I've yet to find a good formula for the must for every netizen their own spam name. How about the name of your favourite site, plus that of the spotty kid in your class - Beeb Crawford. Not bad, but it's not quite there is it? Steve Bulmer could end up with Microsoft Gates and that's a scary thought. So, let's open it up to the floor. I think I'll have to stew on this one and blog again.

Bright ideas to jasonbenali@hotmail.com a.k.a. Beeb Crawford