I took the opportunity to pop into Micro Amvika on Tottenham Court Road last week after a meeting to check out some netbooks. So far, I’ve avoided splashing out on account of trying to save some money to move house, but a delay to the house move has got me getting itchy gadget fingers again.

In a market that was initially dominated by Asus, Samsung now seems to be king when it comes to netbooks - at least in terms of reviews, if not sales. The NC10 was the model that put Samsung on the map, picking up a fist full of awards and star reviews, including Best Netbook of 2008 by Trusted Reviews. Samsung has since updated the range with the NC120 and the N310.

But, like most netbooks, the price has inched up with each new release. The N310, for example, costs £376 - hardly the idea of a netbook, which was originally inspired by the One Laptop Per Child project.

This week, though, a solution has appeared in the guise of a £150 netbook from Acer, spotted by Tom Royal, Deputy Editor at Computeractive.

tomroyal @theredrocket Acer Aspire One - getting old now, so being sold off for £150. Planning to Ubuntu it. http://snipurl.com/kpl1e

The Acer One itself is a nifty little machine. OK, it’s a bit old now and battery life isn’t fantastic, but for email, web and a bit of twitter on the move - and less than £150 - it’s everything a netbook should be. Click below to get your order in…

Acer Aspire One A150-Aw Netbook, Linpus Linux Lite version, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 120GB HD (Seashell White)

Opera today took a stab at taking on Google, IE and Firefox in the browser wars by releasing Opera Unite, billed as a “Web server on the Web browser”. Basically, it’s a evolution of the cloud computing concept, where your web browser becomes a doorway into services hosted on your PC. Starting off, you can share files/photos, access your music remotely, host a chat room, host websites and let people put post-it notes on your “fridge” - a twitter-like bulletin board.

Taking a quick tour this morning, I was quite impressed. Despite being in beta with a couple of niggles, it looks like a genuine step forward in browser (reading tweets, many people compared it to Google Wave). Within minutes, I’d managed to set up an account, create a chat room and invite a few people to check it out via Twitter.

I had a couple of comments via Twitter from people who were worried from a security point of view, which seems like a valid concern. Opera Unite allows you to set security parameters, such as passwords for your chat room or decide which files you want to make available (in a way not dissimilar to Limewire and other P2P software), but it will, no doubt, become the attention of hackers and people will also let their guard down.

That said, Unite got the thumbs up from Robin Wauters at TechCrunch:

We’ll take a deeper dive in Opera Unite real soon, but I’m impressed with what it looks like on the surface. This is a really good idea at its core, and I encourage you to read Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng’s blog post on the subject for more background and an idea of where Opera is heading with the concept.

On Twitter, geniusboywonder made a good point: “Wonder how #Opera #Unite will change the #torrent #file-share & #peer-to-peer world?”

What struck me about the release was its timing: the day that the much-anticipated Digital Britain report is published. Putting aside the security factor for one moment, this has a massive impact on file sharing, piracy, net neutrality and child safety. I’m not expecting much from the report when it’s published in a couple of hours, just some platitudes and maybe a bit of guff about 2Mb connections, but it would be nice if the likes of the people at Opera were consulted (maybe they were, for all I know) to collaborate on what is possible and how it’s likely to change the way we use the web.

Thanks to Suraj Kika for pointing Opera Unite out to me this morning.

Hearing last week that PCW magazine is sadly winding up is another stark reminder that the technology publishing and PR industries are fundamentally changing. There were rumours going around saying that the excellent Guardian Technology supplement on Thursday might also be going the same way. Pick up any of the B2B IT mags these days - I’ll resist naming names - and you’re struck by how thin they are.

The ‘problem’, of course, is the internet. With the exception of a few firm favourites, I stopped reading print magazines a couple of years ago, getting most of my content via a set of RSS feeds through Netvibes. In the last year or so, this is become supplemented by Twitter. It’s the same story for most people working in the IT industry, who get most of their content from blogs, forums and news sites.

So, fewer readers > less advertising > editorial layoffs > dead publications. I predict that by the end of 2011 there won’t be a single top tier B2B IT mag in print (a small handful of consumer and vertical sector publications may survive in print for a while longer). Sobering times for the editors and journalists, many of whom are now reinventing themselves as PR people, online editors and blog writers, or just hanging on the best they can.

Amongst other things, I hope this will means that we’ll see greater clarity in the definition of blogs, which, I believe, can be split into three categories: 

1. Media (e.g. Treehugger)
2. Personal (e.g. this one) 
3. Business (e.g. The Google Blog)

Each has different rules for engagement, quality of editorial and, of course, number of readers. At the moment, it’s a problem when people mix the three up, so you get bloggers like Blogger Dad complaining about the way that PR people deal with them. This will get clearer over time.

Ironically, in the online world, many of the same problems exist for PR practitioners with clients/superiors still questioning why they can’t completely control the message. Exasperated calls of “can’t you just get them (the editor) to print a retraction?” when a press release isn’t printed verbatim are now replaced by “can’t you just get the blogger to take it down, they’re just wrong about that?” Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on your point of view - this means a completely different set of rules of engagement. Ones which those in the journalism industry could be most well placed to exploit in the age of online PR.

 

 

There’s no shortage of debate about social networking from a consumer perspective, but corporate social networking often gets ignored. Whether it’s internal communications, B2B communications/online PR or simply employees networking, the corporate picture often makes way for amusing viral games or YouTube when it comes to online attention.

So, I was pleased to have the opportunity today to attend the Corporate Social Networking Event, organised by Six Degrees. Unfortunately, I could only attend the morning sessions, but this seemed to be the summary of what I learned, based on my notes and looking back at the Twitter stream.

1. Suraj Kika from CMS company Jadu opened proceedings and said that it was the end of the “document web” and we’re now in the “social web” 


2. Niall Cook, author of Enterprise 2.0, spoke about digital natives and said that corporates need to watch out what happens when then they enter workforce in a management capacity. He also said that a culture of command & control couldn’t survive


3. Robert Johnson from COI said (tongue firmly in cheek) that the difference between social networking and corporate social networking is that you replace all your friends with people that are useful to you


4. He also talked about how corporate social networking can help employees seek out information for themselves and discuss what’s on their minds with peers. It reminded me a great deal of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the self actualisation aim. At times the event had a very HR feel, probably due to quite a few internal comms people in the audience.


5. When talking about the fear organisations have to allow staff to use social media, Dirk Single, co-founder of Cow, came up with a good analogy and said that social media in the workplace is a bit like email ten years ago. He described a company he worked for at the time when you had to go down to the IT department to receive emails which were printed off because companies were frightened of staff spending all day emailing friends or talking directly to clients


6. He also said that so called ‘cyber slackers’ (people using social networking sites at work) are the most productive members of the workforce, according to some research from Ohio University, which I dug out from his blog


7. Euan Semple, formerly director of knowledge management at the BBC, said that part of the problem businesses have is in the use of the word “social”, which implies staff aren’t working


8. Sonia Carter, head of online internal communications at AXA, explained how she managed to crack social networking for internal communications in a “traditionally risk averse” organisation


9. Part of her success was attributed to bribing/ignoring the HR and IT departments and reverse engineering corporate approval, but did confess that she got rapped over the knuckles for doing so. That said, 6 week roll out and £4k budget makes for good potential ROI


10. Soundbite of the day went to Lee Bryant, CEO of Headshift, who was talking about Enterprise 2.0 in the recession and said: “Trust is cheaper than control”


11. The runner up in the soundbite competition went to Thijs Sprangers from Krem, who spoke about how to get employees to engage in social networking, citing a LinkedIn case study: “Fish where the fish are”

In fact, overall throughout the morning, the issue of trust kept coming up with speakers urging companies to give up the mentality of controlling communications and trusting their staff a little more. Of course, this is a lot easier said than done, especially if it involves convincing a risk-averse CEO. But, at the end of the day, staff are online ambassadors these days whether companies like it or not. It may be that we’ve taken our first steps to understanding what this means for online PR and corporate communications, but sessions like today’s gave some clues to what it might look like.

There’s a great piece of linkbait advice for social media consultants and PRs on Mashable today, highlighting 25 top applications for managing multiple Twitter accounts. Just about every PR agency has now cottoned on to offering a Twitter management service, so these tools will no doubt be invaluable.

At my agency we have a pretty stringent IT policy, which means that downloading third party apps is a no no (an annoying but sensible policy), so the web-based apps such as Twittbot and Splitweet look pretty useful. I currently either login manually via the web or use the Netvibes twitter widget (although it’s pretty slow for more than a couple of accounts).

I do think people should be careful with these types of applications, however. They all require that you give up your Twitter password. You might think this is a relatively low risk for your personal account, I think it’s a bit risky if you’re tweeting on behalf of a company. Sure, the services above and the others highlighted are probably fine. Probably. But you’ve got to have confidence in the service you’re using. The likes of Tweetdeck have a strong track record, while I’ve been using Netvibes for years.

It’s one of the reasons why one of my clients (blatant plug alert) Jadu developed a Twitter application for its customers (a mix of local authorities, businesses and universities) as it saw an opportunity for communications managers who want to tweet (safely) on behalf of their organisations.  Since it’s built in to the content management system, the users intrinsically trust the technology.

As the number of Twitter scams continues to rise (the twitter porn names scam springs to mind for making unsuspecting people give up their personal details), along with the number of Twitter apps, the issue of trust becomes even more relevant.