• Europeans have rushed to grab a virtual home in cyberspace, says the BBC. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for new .eu domain name since it became available to the public on Friday, according to the BBC News report. It says that the new .eu domain name will become second only to .com in terms of importance and the volume of traffic that the best .eu domains are likely to attract. Applications have already been coming in at…

    Full story: EU domain takes off
  • Catching up with email unread since last Wednesday (having been away), I start with one from Eric Eggertson which helps me get up to speed with the extraordinary tale of the nobodies. And what a tale! Starting from a rude personal assault on Allan Jenkins in an article by David Murray, it has quickly led to the birth of a new organization, a blog, a podcast and even an online store. This is the same David Murray, incidentally, who rapped…

    Full story: Extraordinary nobodies
  • Adding to the calendar of events I’ll be speaking at during 2006 are two more I’ve agreed to take part in: Podcastday 2006, the first international podcast conference in Germany, takes place in Cologne on 24 May. One of the lead organizers is Nicole Simon so expect some pre-event podcasts. Wearing my For Immediate Release hat, I’ll be part of a panel addressing the topic of “corporate communication: new ways with podcasts and blogs.” My fellow panelists are Sven Dörrenbächer…

    Full story: Spreading the word in Germany and Sweden
  • Headline findings from the 2005/2006 Communication ROI Study from employee benefits and HR consulting firm WatsonWyatt: Companies that communicate effectively have a 19.4 percent higher market premium than companies that do not. Shareholder returns for organizations with the most effective communication were over 57 percent higher over the last five years (2000-2004) than were returns for firms with less effective communication. The 2005/2006 study found evidence that communication effectiveness is a leading indicator of financial performance. Firms that communicate effectively…

    Full story: The real value of communication
  • Spam dunk

    While there might be no easy way to combat blog spam in terms of the sheer volume of stuff that comes your way, now and again a spammer/bot does something blindingly obvious: This was in my comment moderation queue this morning as my WordPress installation is set to put any comment or trackback in that queue if it contains more than one hyperlink. This one qualified! So I manually marked it as spam. What I want to know is why…

    Full story: Spam dunk