Just a quick note to mention that I'll be speaking at the Social Media 2007 conference in Chicago this week.

My topic: How To Pod-ergize Your PR! I'll be presenting on Friday afternoon.

I spoke at this event in Atlanta in January, and can say that for any organization interested in getting into blogging and/or podcasting it should be quite useful. I'll try to do a blog post or podcast episode based on new ideas from the conference once I get back.

USATODAY has relaunched its website in the form of a social media community. It is not only sporting a more Web 2.0 look, but the site is chock full of community features that push it far beyond what I've seen other major publications doing online.

There is voting on every article in the style of digg, driving story lists based on popularity. The more votes, the higher a story rises. In addition, readers can comment on every story -- something washingtonpost.com rolled out late last year -- and each reader gets a personal page that aggregates his or her comments, a personal blog and other community-based features.

The newspaper explains in a post of its own:

I just wanted to let you all know I'll be speaking at the Social Media 2007 conference in Atlanta on January 31st.

My presentation is titled POD-ERGIZE YOUR PR!. Here's a link to the agenda and a short excerpt from the write-up on my talk:

Clearly, podcasting lives on the cutting edge of new media technology. Far more than just a vehicle for listening to music, it is as powerful a tool for public relations as has come by in a long time and can be used to complement and energize any PR program.

But how?

I've been trying to think of what to say about TIME's choice of "You" -- as in Web 2.0/social media -- as its Person of the Year.

The magazine wrote:

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

Press releases have made great strides over past few years. The search engine optimized (SEO) release, for example, has become quite a big deal.

Now, Talking Communications with Farrell Kramer takes a look at the social media press release.

My guest in Episode 15 -- The Social Media Release is Todd Defren, Principal at SHIFT Communications and a pioneer in the social media press release.

Social bookmarking is an important phenomenon for all communicators using the Web to get their messages out.

No doubt, most readers of FKCBlog are at least passingly familiar with this phenomenon. (Psst. There's a link to add this post to del.icio.us at the bottom.) But exactly what is social bookmarking and how can it be useful?

To answer this, there's a nice post I just came across at the blog Read/WriteWeb:

The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to answer that question.