Palm is in a bad way. The only person that I know personally who bought a Pre regrets he did so and tweeted yesterday about how 'crap' the device was. But respect where it is due, yesterday's handling of their forthcoming financial results was handled sensibly to try and control market explanations. It is also interesting to see how internal communications were also written with an eye to an external audiences. 

This was the scary (if a little attention-seeking) result of research done by Tempero. But help is here if you want to know more as they have published an e-book.

One of the defining moments for me was picking up an early copy of Wired magazine called The Digital Citizen which talked about how the Internet and digital economy was affecting the average person. The cover art was a Norman Rockwell painting of a man standing up in a town hall meeting representing the 'everyman' of society.  Looking at the corporate shot of Apple's bland looking COO Tim Cook beaming out of reports from his presentation at Goldman Sachs conference, I was reminded of that Norman Rockwell painting. Like the Jon Katz article which marked the age of the the netizen, Cook's proclaimation that Apple was a 'mobile device company' heralds the fact that we are all mobile now. Notebooks and laptops are the norm, more and more of use have 3G dongles and smartphones with a tremendous amount of computing power.

The Guardian today reports on the criticism that the business select committee had of the broadband tax aspects of the Digital Britain plan and other reports in the blogosphere highlight how the government is trying to weasel its Digital Economy Bill through determined public opposition. The Digital Britain initiative is rapidly becoming a 21st century version of the Thatcher-era poll tax - government in spite of the people, rather than for the people. From the perspective of the PR industry, it poses a future challenge to introducing new digital streams of revenue; breaking down trust in digital media brands, restricting consumers access to next generation services and using techniques such as broadband throttling to adversely affect their online experience.

If you were a child of the 80s like me, one of the seminal moments of this decade was Back To The Future which was to product placement what Led Zepplin were to drum solos. You were introduced to brands like Calvin Klein underwear, JVC camcorders, Aiwa personal stereos and the DeLorean motor-car. Being a music addict at the time, I lusted after Aiwa's personal stereo range which were proto-iPods in terms of their product design coolness. Unfortunately Aiwa imploded as part of the Sony keiretsu and was last seen on cheap DVD | TV combos sold in ASDA - a terrible fate for a formerly great electronics brand.

My car-obsessed friends wanted a DeLorean motor car (preferably with an aftermarket flux capacitor installed); DeLorean had a slightly more glamorous fall from grace involving bankruptcy, suitcases of money and cocaine - if it wasn't true, you couldn't have made it up. One of them recently bought an old Audi Quattro because it had a digital dashboard that reminded him of 'the Back To The Future car'. Unlike Aiwa, the DeLorean brand is rising from the dead. The relaunched DeLorean Motor Company (backed by casino owner Steve Wynn) has relaunched itself with the aid of social media. Feel free to take a look here to see how they are using Facebook, Twitter and free wallpaper downloads to reignite interest in the brand.  

Social Media Today has an article on how banks are using social media information to assess the creditworthiness of consumers, whilst they won't like it that was less of an issue than the anecdote attributed to an AVG spokesperson Roger Thompson who described how his credit card company used social media information for security questions. If the bank can do this, so can professional criminal organisations. It redefines what 'security' and authentication means, and is a potential reputation timebomb for consumer-orientated financial institutions. If this breaks expect to see the likes of Verisign and other authentication technology providers trying to ride the crisis coverage gravy-train.

A number of years ago, tech PRs may remember the Everywhere Girl meme that The Inquirer made famous. The same stock photography picture of a female student in a beanie hat graced ads by Dell and Gateway at the same time and has been continued to be used in numerous marketing campaigns throughout the world - which bloggers take great joy in exposing.  As part of its new policy to allow in members from black and minority ethic groups, the BNP had a profile page of a new black member. Unfortunately for them the photograph that they used was of Oscar Grant, an African American shot by police on the San Francisco BART system. The picture can be seen on the Wikipedia page, was originally released by the family after the shooting is copyrighted and unlicensed. This was discovered by the Lancaster Unity blog and is now making its way around the Labour-blogosphere.

Adland has an interesting report about spam which is being seeded on forums by an agency based in Sweden apparently on behalf of Samsung. Initially this was dismissed as actions of a rogue agency that had gone beyond their remit. Some of this content has been seeded into the forums of UK technology publication ComputerActive from IP addresses based in Seoul, South Korea making the reports harder to dismiss as the practices of a single rogue agency with evidence of an 'international campaign' online. This possibility was given more credence by evidence unearthed by ComputerActive, which showed that the Seoul IP addresses had also provided spam content to Korean forums. One point that ComputerActive haven't pointed out is that this type of spamming known as astro-turfing has been illegal in the UK since the end of May 2008 under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations as an implementation of the European Union's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. It is legal for companies to comment on forums, but they need to be transparent about their identity, and if they are an agency, who they represent.

No it isn't a typo, but a reference to the leading position that Chanel is taking in going into online shopping. It was inevitable, people like Net-a-Porter have shown the way and online is much cheaper than trying to build out a retail presence to address the markets that really matter. People like Louis Vuitton are having to close lots of stores in established market and yet consumers in China and other developing Asian markets are hungry for luxury goods. 

This is likely to mean a more digitised approach to luxury PR beyond the smattering of blogger relations that currently goes on. 

Those of you on Twitter over the weekend could not have failed to have noticed the Easyjet FAIL meme. Easyjet canceled a flight to Barcelona. Unfortunately it was a flight that PROs and journalists were using to get out to the Mobile World Congress. So you have a highly networked, teched up bunch of complaining passengers hitting social media like it was going out of style. Here is a quick search that I ran on Twitter this morning to give you a flavour of the complaints. 

Changes in legislation around the world and technology have tilted power in favour reputation management experts and away from bloggers and journalists - even as technology has made publishing ever easier. This may get upset with legislation likely to enter the Icelandic parliament next week, setting up the country as a safe journalist haven: protecting source information, freedom-of-speech and protection of libel-toursim laws elsewhere. Expect global news organisations to move their head office here in the future. 

There was so much to write about today: Google Buzz, the MySpace management reshuffle and the BBC forcing journalists to use social media. However the story that had the most resonance for me was the failed Yahoo! Search press day. Yahoo! was trying to prove that it was innovative and still a player in the search arena in a set of presentations that were eerily thin, not unlike Frank Shaw's response on *** Brass' critique of Microsoft innovation last week.  The moral of the story is that innovation is as innovation does and PR cannot 'create' a perception of innovation from nothing.

My colleague Ian Glover sent me a link to a Belgian agency who have put their website on strike for a week. They are part of a collection of agencies who have got together to protest at overly long pitch lists and endless rounds of a pitching process in a creative way. The open letter is in multiple segments and hosted in a similar way to a web ring. It is an issue that the UK PR industry suffers from in silence or the occasional snarky letter to PR Week. Enjoy.

Wadds pulled together a coherent organisation of the facts against automating the acquisition of Twitter followers, but would you do it if a client asked for it?

 I caught up with a couple of posts over the weekend that I wanted to share with you. First up Jessica Gottlieb was curious about what PR agencies do for their clients and the role that they play. Gottlieb is a US-based mother who blogs and is frequently targeted by a number of brands. What is obvious from this post is that transparency either isn't happening or failing.

Advertising agencies and PR agencies frequently talk about storytelling, but I really like the way this anonymous Silicon Valley engineer applies an analytical rigor to the whys and wherefores of storytelling.