We have some of the latest from PRblogs.org and some interesting links from out on the broader PR Web.

Sarah writes at PR ImPRessions – Nextel Truly Takes Care of Customers. A good example of customer service caring. Next step? Nextel might announce that they are waiving overages to customers in the 36330 and 36331 zip code areas. Or, they could just give them one free week of service for the week after the tornado.

Kristina offers up As You Like It – Product (RED) – Established for Sustainability about the $100M to raise $18M marketing tumble by Bono. Seems to me that the celebs should make up the $82M deficit from their own pockets and give it directly to the initiative in Africa.

Paull Young is still out on the road. See Young PR’s – Keen on a Cool Job with Social Media?. Here’s the kicker … in this post, he’s helping others get a job in Australia. A nice man, indeed.

Andrew Careaga shares his cool autographs. They are payback from employees he sent to the SNCR conference. higher ed marketing – My co-workers went to this conference in Vegas…

Gary Schlee, of Centennial College – Toronto, asks some important PR discipline questions. A Class Act – Topping up the PR grad: can we do it all? With limited time, limited courses, what do we include and what gets left to post-graduate on-the-job training. Also, check out their PoRtFOLIO project, too.

Michael Darragh, Ogilvy in Shanghai, China, brings us the Navigator – India, China lead strong growth in Internet users and interesting news of a new fragrance for technosexuals. It seems that Calvin Klein’s now spraying bloggers with … um, perfume.

Justin writes, at PR Thoughts, (about) Dovetail, a PR firm in Silicon Valley. Visit Dovetail PR.

Michael, a PR grad student at Royal Roads University, writes in Monkey Flip, about the age old question of seeking an alternative to blogs. So much to read. So little time. Also, he notes some frustration with PRblogs.org. I try to help.

Around PR blog world…

Jeremy Pepper, of Pop PR Jots! brings us The future is Video … Now. It highlights the growth of online video use in public relations and marketing. Also mentioned is Jeremy’s client video site, I Got Shotgun – Bringing you behind the scenes access to the action surrounding the biggest GM-sponsored sports, entertainment and popculture events. Auburn alumna Emily Melton is working with that project. Cool.

Eric Eggertson, a great writer and author of two must read blogs, comes to us with his Common Sense PR recap: Top Posts of Common Sense PR. Go check them out.

Todd Defren writes of the surreal “RSS feed comes to life” experience that is the SNCR Las Vegas conference. PR Squared: RSS Feed Made Real. Alas, I never get to go to these things.

Richard Bailey has a lovely recollection of a student success story. Fun to read. PR Studies: Great GNER moments

Elizabeth Albrycht is back to her bloggie goodness with CorporatePR: The Joys of Sephora. This new writing frenzy due to the recent happy and celebrated birth of lovely Baby Ellora! Congrats to Mom and Ellora.

And, last but definitely not least, we learn of the happy news that Steven Phenix has made a happy leap to new digs with ViaMetric. Read 10,000 Marshmallows – Marketing Accountability: How to eat 10,000 Marshmallows and ViaMetric – Meet the Team – branding, marketing, sales, market research, lead sales technology. Congratulations to Steven, a very nice guy.

I can’t help but see the visual of the Chubby Bunny game when I read that blog’s title. Chubby Bunny has been played at camps and also at Auburn University’s freshman orientation, Camp War Eagle. A fun game, although the adult in me fears – choking. So, ViaMetric’s “one marshmallow at a time” analogy is even more poignant.

And, if you’d like to see some mock-ups of the new Camp ASCCA • Easter Seals front page, check out that link. It is a work – still – in progress. Since WordPress has now settled in with a stable version, 2.1.2, I’m going to be upgrading all their blogs this weekend. See WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2. Not to worry, I haven’t upgraded those blogs recently as it always seems wise to wait until the bugs in new versions work their way out. The 2.1.1 scenario seems to prove that policy a wise one to follow.

In the past, I have written about Cornell.edu Redesign: Why it is a good blog and the student initiative of BuzzFlood :: Dartmouth Blog/CMS PR Tactic.

Andrew Careaga, of higher ed marketing, recently shared news from his university, the University of Missouri-Rolla, about a new “name change” blog. See the release: UMR News and Research: Weblog shares info about potential name change.

Last October, UMR Chancellor John F. Carney III proposed a discussion about changing the university’s name to one that better reflects its role as a technological research university.

“The University of Missouri-Rolla is unique among the four University of Missouri campuses because of our focus as a technological research university,” Carney said. “We believe a more distinctive name would afford UMR several advantages in recruiting students on a national level.”

I’m enjoying watching the conversations. It is new, yet they are already getting traffic.

The most exchanges, thus far, have taken place on a post about Alumni survey results: 70% (of respondents) favor name change. You can tell that the respondents feel ownership of “their” university. It is fun to read.

Go over and check it out. Thanks to Andrew for the tip, too. I love these kinds of blogs.

Related Links:

• Name change conversations – Missouri-Rolla
• Cornell University – cornell.edu Redesign
• BSU.EDU Relaunch
• collegewebeditor.com: web, marketing & PR in higher ed, Karine Joly – the keeper of all things higher ed web.

Widgets have arrived at PRblogs.org. This will add significant functionality and likely please existing and new users.

Fiddling with plugins, I’ve been able to get Widgets to work on PRblogs.org.

Pretty cool. Visit the example blog at widgets.prblogs.org to see how they look.

In the sidebar, you will see – from the top

• a text widget pointing to an image file,
• a text widget holding Constantin’s code to search for all PR blogs,
• the Google search widget,
• an RSS feed widget, and
• a del.icio.us feed widget.

Pretty nice, huh. Currently widgets only work on two themes – default and classic – but we’ll fix that over the coming week.

I’ll be going through and identifying themes that will work with widgets. All don’t, by the way, and it will likely take awhile for “all” to be made widget friendly. But, I’ll come back and identify the ones I find that work both with widgets and WordPress MU, the versions of WordPress we are running at PRblogs.org.

I’ll consider adding other widgets, if you wish to suggest them. I’m thinking that I’ll not put the PHP execute widget in as that is a security issue. But, there are others out there and I’m open to considering them, if you wish.

Update: Themes that work with widgets on PRblogs.org are now these…

• WordPress Classic
• WordPress Default
• whiteasmilk
• and more to come…

Thank you for your patience.

Robert

UPDATE: OK, as of 8:50 p.m. CDT, PRblogs.org is back up and running.

The reason for the outage? Well, let’s just call it “Server fall down. Go boom!”

But, the trusty band of 1,000,000 trained monkeys got on the job and the server is back up and running. Thanks to James Farmer, and his trained band of monkeys, for getting us back on track.

2nd UPDATE: OK, later on, the blogs at PRblogs.org are down again. We’re looking into it and hope to resolve it soon. My apologies to all for the inconvenience.

3rd UPDATE: PRblogs.org is back up and we are praying it will stay up and running. If you experience problems, either write to me or post a comment here. Thanks for your patience.