Social media meetup

John Furrier, founder and CEO of PodTech.net, will speak at the next Third Thursday meetup on May 17 in Palo Alto. His topic: The Newsroom of the Future.

With the arrival of social media, both media companies and businesses are rethinking the way they manage news-gathering and distribution. But how do businesses manage that well-known mainstay -- the "pressroom" at industry events and conferences? Furrier will talk about how smart companies are reinventing the pressroom with state-of-the-art technologies, combined with social intelligence.

Third Thursday is a meetup for Bay Area PR and marketing folks who are interested in sharing and learning about the practical applications of social media in business. It's co-sponsored by the Social Media Club and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), and held on the third Thursday of the month.

Seating is limited at this event, and you have to be a member (or the guest of a member) to attend. If you're interested, please let me know ASAP and I'll add you as my guest.

Wrapping text in InDesign

In our last class on InDesign, a couple of you asked about wrapping text around a photo or graphic. This tutorial on Layers Magazine, called "Making Wraps Sing," explains it all to you.

Layers has more than 150 tutorials, including 10 tutorials on working with InDesign. Here's a link to the magazine's main directory page of tutorials: http://www.layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/

SJSU Technology & Emerging Media Club

If you'd like to get better at blogging and all things "new media," you might want to check out the new SJSU Technology & Emerging Media Club.

Organized by a group of JMC students who took Jour 163 - New Media in Journalism last semester, the club is open to all SJSU students...and their friends.

"There's a lot of interesting individuals on campus," said JMC student Andrew Venegas, one of the club's founders, "and we would like them all to be involved in this historic step towards new education using new techologies and media."

The next meeting is 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21, in Room 116 of the old Clark Library (now the Academic Success Center).

Here's the meeting agenda:

1. How to start a blog using the Blogger engine
2. What a tag is and how it can be used in a post
3. What an RSS feed is

You can also access a set of videos to practice or clarify the techniques discussed at the meeting, and join the club blog for updates and posts.

Since I believe this club could be very helpful to JMC students, as an added bonus I'm offering my students extra credit for participating in these meetings (5 pts./mtg., up to 15 points). Hope to see you there!

Use of linking in PR

In his blog Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel of Edelman PR notes how Apple is using blog-like linking techniques on the Hot News page of its web site.

The Hot News page has links to Apple product features and case studies on web pages within the Apple web site, as well as summaries of recent positive press coverage. But it also includes links to news stories that compare the Mac OS to Microsoft's new Vista operating system...at least the ones that prefer the Mac OS. Rubel notes this is an interesting use of blog-like links for PR purposes.