Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant

I’ve got bad earache in one ear. Unfortunately I’ve been deaf in the other one since the age of five. The doctor’s quite worried and therefore, so am I. So it’s lots of antiobiotics for me and a possible emergency visit to the Ear Nose and Froat hospital tomorrow. Meanwhile I took the opportunity, while holding my ear with one hand, to update the blog and set up a wiki with the other.

I’ve added some new feeds, something I’ve been planning on doing for a while. They’re all detailed on the Subscribe page but while we’re at it:

• Podcasts - is a new feed very like the PR, copywriting, journo and tech feeds in that it’s aggregated through Google Reader and squirted out here. I’d like to get my hands on more podcasts: PR Week seems to have loads but they don’t have a feed, and the PR Web site has lots of feeds covering everything it seems except PR, and their actual PR podcast is out of date and doesn’t have a feed either! So we currently have mostly the (excellent) Hobson and Holtz podcast but it would be nice to have more. Perhaps I should do one? I’ll need to be able to hear first.
• Officially -  is aggregated news items from Yahoo News and Google News covering PR, journalism, copwriting and tech. This is originally what I had in my blogroll before I started to tease out the actual PR/journo/copywriting/tech blogs which are represented by the topmost four feeds on my blog.
• Unofficially - is as above but aggregated from Google Blog Search, Digg, WordPress Tag Search, Blogcatalog, Bloglines, NewPR and Blogpulse – and therefore representing a largely ‘unofficial’ source of news being mostly from blog reactions. I just thought it would be nice to have two feeds that lump everything together as a ‘call-response’ kind of thing.

The main memory I will have of putting these together – aside from the painful lughole – is how looooong it took. It took me ages to get my head around Feedburner because sometimes new feeds just wouldn’t work, there seems to be an age of caching before it actually reacts to your changes, and I hate the ‘thisburner’ and ‘thatburner’ approach. For example, just to change the ‘A message from this feed’s publisher’ content took me several minutes before I remembered it’s hidden in the ‘Browserfriendly’ section, not the ‘Title/Description burner’ section. Google Reader is also horrendously slow, taking at least a minute to subscribe to each feed. And the WordPress widget section is also snail-like. All in all not a terribly satisfying session.

I also put together a Wiki. This was in response to Cyberjournalist.net’s initiative to set one up for journalists. I’m always on the lookout for good ideas to copy be inspired by, so I set one up for PR Blogs. It’s here, although I haven’t really done much to it yet. I realise that newer, trendier solutions such as Myspace or Facebook might do the job better but I wanted to do it just out of curiosity. I haven’t really publicised it or anything yet because I’m just playing around with it. Feel free to have a play, none of it is locked. I chose Wikispaces cos it gets good reviews, is easy to use, and has a feed. If people like it I might do something similar for copywriting (I imagine there are plenty of tech wikis out there…)

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