alenart's comments

Old news is so exciting! (And, yes, two days in this day and age is an eternity as far as the news cycle is concerned)

http://www.ea.com/news/simcity-update-straight-answers-from-...

Disrupting the airline industry takes a lot of cash. It's going to take more than some pie-in-the-sky cabin concept.

Let's get realistic about what the industry really needs in order to make flying an enjoyable experience. It's no coincidence that the new American Airlines logo looks like Greyhound's. =p

As a PR practitioner, I feel like I can dispense some advice here. Here are some thoughts after reading these:

-Your thing likely does not require a press release so skip the articles that try to teach you the 'perfect' press release. Reporters, in my experience, don't give much of a rat's bum about them.

It's business execs who think a press release is the end-all, be-all for media relations and that miraculously, reporters will see your press release somewhere and your phones will be ringing off the hook. In my relatively short (5+ years) PR career, the number of times that has happened is exactly 0.

Instead, focus on crafting a perfect 2-3 paragraph pitch and fine-tuning a list of reporters who cover your thing. The most important thing when crafting this perfect pitch is editing, in case you couldn't tell that that was a recurring theme in the better articles.

-Some of these posts are really good and some are totally bogus. Don't take any advice from the ones that are from people whose method has a name. Your product is unique and so should your approach to announcing it to the press; don't apply some cookie-cutter formula.

Also, eschew the ones that recommend you subscribe to an expensive media contacts database like Burrells or Cision. Those things cost upward of $1,000/year and contain information that, with some reasonable Googling skills, you can find online gratis. Yes, they'll make your life easier but if you're a startup you're likely better off dropping the cash elsewhere.

-One thing none of these seem to address is: you got Johnny Cakes from ZOMGTechBlog to agree to speak to you or your spokesperson about your widget. Now what? How do you make sure you don't stick your foot in your mouth?

-IMHO these are the better ones: Cheat Sheet, DailyNewArticle.com, Top Story PR, PRtini (for as much as I hate the name), Jason Baptiste's, VentureBeat and PRDaily.

Hope that helps!

As a non-technical person who decided to give this book a whirl, two things come to mind as I approach chapter 7 of the book: 1-it requires understanding of some basic algebraic concepts (as evidenced by the author's 11-year old struggles with if statements; I'd bet she struggled with greater or equal than, etc. concepts as well) and 2-the chapter quizzes are a little misleading and occasionally address concepts not taught in the current or any prior chapter.

Out of all the fits and starts I've had with programming in my pseudo-code nerd existence this is probably the most helpful programming book I've ever read and would recommend to kids above age 13 and adults wanting to learn Python.

Amazing story, from beginning to end - the bucolic DPRK countryside hides such dark mysteries.