del.icio.us tags 10.27.07

Politics

Mashable pulled together 30+ resources (online) for U.S. Politics after getting the suggestion to do so from one of their readers. It's not exhaustive, but there are a few good things in there.

Marketing

BL Ochman at Marketing Profs gives a fellow PR hack a pat on the back for their blogger outreach effort. It's not tough, folks. She liked the pitch because 1) the writer reads her blog, he follows her on Twitter, he made reference to a post she had written on bad blogger outreach, he gave her information in an easy to understand way (bullet points, plenty of white space, "organized and brief," giving her the content in the email versus making her look for it), he was funny, he was timely and he told her she could cut and paste his email into a blog post.

Books

Our local DC PBS station, WETA, has launched a new book blog, Author Author, featuring author interviews and book reviews.

Search

LivePlasma aims to help you to identify new music and movies based on your current interests. Of course, Amazon has been doing this for years, but not with pretty graphics. My favorite movie of all time is Badlands by Terrance Malick, which, according to LivePlasma, means I should also like movies by Sofia and Francis Ford Coppola (I do), Francois Ozon (sure), Robert Altman (hell yeah), Antonioni (for the most part), Renoir (okay), Polanski (yep), Welles (uh huh), Ford (I'm not making the connection -- stunning landscapes?), Fellini (sure), Visconti (I don't believe I have had the pleasure), Sydney Pollack (ehhh) and Yasujiro Ozu (not familiar).

The one that started it all -- Badlands.

Digital Influence

For all of us who are desperate to point out that social media actually has a purpose beyond keeping geeks busy and indoors, there are quite a few folks posting in the past couple of days about the role that it has played in the fires in Southern California -- like this post from Fast Company, which cites the value of Twitter and Google Maps for residents in communicating information about the location of the fires and resources for evacuees.

Health

HealthSquare.com is HealthCentral.com's "prescription drug destination." They are targeting consumers, but are health care providers reading? Pharmas will inevitably want to know. If the advertising folks can prove they are, they'll be in good shape. And provide information for the 50+ set on your advertising page. This is one industry where growing old makes you more attractive to marketers (comes via 901am).

Social Networks

Friendster apparently still has lots of friends in Asia and, while they are a smaller group, social network users in Latin America stay on longer (there's a bad t-shirt in there somewhere). Research from ComScore says that social networking is already twice as big outside of the U.S. and growing fast (posted to Mashable).