TechWag

: Image via CrunchBase

There are a lot of great things going on this week that have nothing to do with FriendFeed, so for everyone who is just about fed up with tracking the hoopla over the changes with FriendFeed, here is some news to work with.

Steve Hodson, the cranky old fart is working on rebranding and reimaging his personal brand, which is really cool. What makes this interesting is that he is taking his old brand and trying to recast it in a different light. There are going to be lessons here for people who want to know how to rebrand in the social sphere. As Steve puts it:

This is a start of a new journey for me and I hope it is one that my readers will take with me and as much as I might be terrified about this next stage of my growth I am also excited. There are a lot of things that have to be put in place before I turn out the lights on the WinExtra blog and light up my new home so I won’t give exact dates of the change. I will however as I progress through this get a better idea of progress and at some point I will be able to give you a firm date. Source: WinExtra

The AP has gone on a tirade over the use, non use, aggregation, and otherwise of their media materials. While this is interesting from someone’s viewpoint, there is something here for just about everyone. There are going to be things to do, and things to not do that we can all learn from this one. In many ways it looks like the AP has broken out the Nuclear option here, there will be no survivors. What is problematic is exactly who is the AP going to go after, and what is it they really hope to accomplish in the longer run. The bread and butter news papers are being supplanted and replaced by the internet, few if any web sites can truly afford to pay, twitter is a better breaking news service than anything out there, and most everyone is going somewhere else. Few would see the AP as an internet newspaper of choice, not when someone can get legal AP content in hundreds of different venues across the internet.

Scoble is right back in the mix with another PR Rant right here (so much for private, right on one of the top read/linked blogs in the world), with some interesting follow up from Shel. Seems like we go through this process every six seven months now, in that PR folks are just as busy trying to figure out what to do, when we are dealing with people, products, and the theory of “General Relativity in Internet Popularity” that we are all dealing with. It seems like at times we have a detente, then go right for the nuclear exchange at times when the process gets subverted again. While there are right ways and wrong ways to make a PR pitch, everyone has their own way of wanting to be pitched for some new product, service, or shiny shiny, the probability of implosion increases the further away people get from their preferred communications method.

Just in the last three days there have been some really interesting things going on, one of them, Steve’s rebranding should be more than interesting to follow. We will keep on going on and on with PR work, but it is interesting to see the six month window being reaffirmed again, the AP thing though on the surface seems unusual, until you realize that they are tied to dying newspapers, and their very survival is at stake. Companies and people do interesting things when they feel threatened, so following the AP on this one is well worth watching.