Hot on the heels of a £1M deal with The Growth Fund - Finance South West, Wildfire Communications has launched a new directory for creative businesses and marketing agencies in Bristol, called "0117 Made In Bristol!"

Bristol-based Wildfire owns a portfolio of market-leading magazines and social-networking based online communities in niche markets, as well as producing magazines and online communities for external clients.

The E3 media group has strong involvement with this project, through Doug Templeton, founder of E3, who also founded Venue Publishing in 1980, before selling it to the Daily Mail group.

There certainly is a high demand for this sort of communication, something that we at Montage are experiencing in the PR industry too.

I will watch with interest how Wildfire will integrate the 250 page, annual directory format with an online offering. This promises to showcase some of the best creative talent from Aardman to Endemol.

I noticed today that there is a planned release of Facebook chat in a couple of weeks time.

See a demo below...



  I am not sure what the purpose of this is and I think that they are trying a little too hard at the moment!

My question would be what is wrong with our message boards or a personal message?

I think that the biggest criticism of Facebook at the moment is the useless and annoying applications and the spam of requests that we get. There is even a Facebook group petitioning against useless applications!
Don't get me wrong I like Facebook a lot, I recently made yet another journalist contact today at GWR because of it. (You can find me by clicking on the Facebook badge on the right of my blog.) I think that all the best communications ideas are simple, such as Twitter and text messaging on phones.

If Facebook do not stop tinkering I fear that Hannah's prediction may come true.....

It was interesting to read about the 50 most powerful bloggers in the world in this weeks Observer, but listening to Jeremy Vine last night, I think that he hit the nail on the head when it came to who has the real influence!

Admittedly blog sites like the Huffington Post are massively powerful (ranked no1 by the Observer), even to the extent that Rupert Murdoch and the likes of the New York Times have sat up and taken notice.

Ariana Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, saw the power of the blogosphere. Rather than follow the revolutionary / geek route of many bloggers, she used her wealth to recruit top notch journalists to guest blog and provide excellent content. She also used her millions to market the blog heavily. This is a successful formula for a blog, something that our own Kevin Coughlan discussed in his "News Hound" blog. It is claimed that big media did not take note of online media until the success of the Huffington Post, as a result, the Murdochs have waded in and bought the likes of MySpace.

However, I think that the article has missed a trick. It is not the blogger that has the power it is the readers who have the influence in the blogosphere.

What? I hear you say. Surely Guido Fawkes has more power than me! (He did cause the downfall of Peter Hain!) Well, in my opinion his commentary may be insightful and cause the "crital mass" of interest around a story, but it is what the readers do with it that has the real power.

When we like a story we might email links to friends about it, post the video on Facebook, link to a story using bookmark sites like Reddit and Delicious. Commentators and bloggers talk about it the story and link back to the original story. Typically later on, traditional print and broadcast journalists pick up on the story and provide comment and analysis until the story is firmly in our conscious and it becomes word of mouth.

Jeremy Vine hit on the concept in true journalistic manner when he was talking about his radio show at last night's Annual Dinner.  He said, "The stories do not belong to us; they belong to the listeners!"

Once a media outlet online, in print or broadcast ignores this fact, their power will ebb away.

I am aware that this is a complicated concept to convey in text but there are many tools to help display this power of the blogosphere on the web. My favourite is Digg.com's (popular news story blog site) Swarm tool. This shows in real time readers "swarming" around a story and increasing its influence in the blogosphere.  

Fascinating stuff, I think. For example, I noticed this Huffington Post story on there regarding USA's public being unaware of the Iraq casualties (currently 4,000).

The swarm tool highlighted that:

• The Huffington Post story broke at 11:44 on March 13th
• Digg bloggers got very annoyed and quickly 1076 people had "Dugg the story"
• Soon after this story appeared on the Washington Post.com
• This caused the story to appear on Reddit with 119 posts and a heated discussion!
  
• The story then appeared on MSNBC
• Then Technorati picked up the story from there.
  

And so on...! YOU are reading this story now on my blog and who knows you may be writing about it somewhere now....

 

"Mashup" you may ask? Matt your northern terminology is confusing us, I hear you say. Well this is basically the term used for tools or "widgets"  that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. You can many see other examples, down the site of our blogs. We love them as our readers spend lots of time playing with them and therefore more time reading our site!

As you may already know, Montage has its own Flickr site. This has proven to be very popular! We have 142 of our PR and brochure pictures on there ,from our talented array of photographers!

The site has achieved 2,925 views to date! The picture of Leah Summray (one of our lottery winners) has received 261 views and has been used in the Mirror, Sun, Star, Western Morning News and the Daily Mail to name but a few!

I found this "mashup" below that we think is a great way of showing off our snaps. Enjoy!