WebProNews

The Future Of Online PR

In the olden days, PR professionals might have gotten an hour or more of face time in which to sweet talk someone over a meal.  Now, they occasionally make pitches in 140 characters.  So you can imagine how the information shared during a conference session titled "Online PR: Where to Next?" could prove quite useful to a lot of people.

Twitter "Tweets From Strangers" Problem Persists

The good news, in terms of Twitter's performance and reliability, is that the fail whale hasn't made an appearance today.  The bad is that random people's tweets are showing up in the timelines of non-followers, and employees may not have much of an idea why.

PBS Adds NewsHour Channel To YouTube

PBS has partnered with YouTube to create a channel for its long running nightly NewsHour program. The YouTube Blog offers more details. "The PBS NewsHour channel on YouTube  will host nightly reports from the NewsHour television broadcast, posted the same night the broadcast airs on PBS."

Google Finds Moms to Be Search Pros

Google recently partnered with BabyCenter on a joint research study looking at how moms use search. Google says they arrived at four truths about moms and search:

PayPal Wants You To Regift Fruitcakes For Charity

For the second year, PayPal is running the Regift the Fruitcake campaign, an effort to raise money for charity through the sharing of a virtual fruitcake. The slogan is, "By giving the gift no one wants, you're giving the gift that everyone needs." PayPal is asking people to participate by logging onto the site to create a fruitcake on behalf of a featured charity (there are 25 of them), make a donation to a charity using a PayPal account, and using Facebook Connect to regift the fruitcake to friends.

Can You "Rank" in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?

Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in. This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.

Murdoch's War with the Aggregators

Rupert Murdoch spoke last week at the FTC's journalism and the Internet workshop and again slammed news aggregators and search engines:

YouTube Cofounder Discusses Site's Future

As big and popular as it is, YouTube could probably engage cruise control (in terms of feature releases, design updates, and so forth) and stay in front of the video-sharing competition for at least a couple of years.  Cofounder Chad Hurley was interviewed onstage at LeWeb '09, and that isn't at all what he has in mind, however.

Showtime For Real-Time With Google

Real-time search is, appropriately enough, going to become quite visible very soon.  Google announced today that it's rolling out real-time features, and the comprehensiveness of this effort is almost unprecedented as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all onboard. Google's list of partners doesn't stop there; FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Jaiku are also cooperating.  Plus, standard blogs, news sites, and other Google properties (like YouTube) are contributing to the stream of information that'll become available following a standard search.

Twittering As a Full-Time Job

Update: Pizza Hut announced today that its former "Twintern" now has the official title of "Tweetologist," and now holds a full-time position. From the announcement: