It’s been a full 13 days since my last blog post, although Chris and Simon kindly kept things going in my absence.

A round-up of statistics, analysis and research that I spotted this week.

The latest white paper from Daryl Willcox makes interesting reading for public relations professionals.

McDonald’s has launched a new advertising campaign, centred on a member of the public’s experiences behind the scenes with the fast food giant. The campaign points to a website which demonstrates real transparency.

Ask.com and digital marketing agency Profero are behind a misguided offline and online campaign that’s aiming to encourage UK search users to stop using Google.

TalkTalk’s upgrade to my broadband service and help when my router wouldn’t connect left much to be desired. Google to the rescue…

Last week’s PR Week magazine (UK) features an article about Jimmy Wales, head honcho at Wikipedia, threatening to ban PR agencies and paid PR professionals from editing Wikipedia if they continue to edit entries about clients.

The vast majority of comments posted on this site have been in the general spirit and values that most blogs hold. However I think it’s about time I posted about how I interpret these values and how I’ll apply them to posts, comments and trackbacks here.

One of the best set of predictions for 2007 I’ve seen is over at Read/Write Web. They highlight that the growth of RSS will be one of the big stories next year.

Guardian Online carries an interesting story today about the launch of a new brand management product from Creston – a product clearly positioned as a defensive tool against blogs.

This week’s Marketing Week magazine (UK) carries a double page spread about blogging in marketing. There’s some interesting discussion about trust in blogs and their use as a marketing tool.

CIPR president Tony Bradley has blogged about the strengthening up the institute’s ability to deal with members who flout the rules, as well as mentioning the CIPR’s social media consultation document.

Just arrived back from Delivering the New PR in London today – an excellent conference on using social media tools in public relations.

Spotted an interesting discussion about a recent report by Nielson Netratings, which included some insight into awareness of some new-ish technologies or tools like RSS, IPTV, VOD or wikis.

Last week’s Marketing Week magazine marked a moment of truth for me about how the marketing and PR professions each view social media.

I’ve always tried to keep an eye on my blog traffic statistics, but a deeper look into the three tools I’ve been using threw up a bit of a surprise.

So David Brain has had an unexpected opportunity to chat face to face with Colin Farrington, CIPR director-general. And the conversation has thrown up a challenge – what does the UK social media community want CIPR to do to promote these new communications channels?

The discussion around the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and the thoughts of Director-General Colin Farrington on social media continues.

Matthew Stibbe at the Bad Language blog has a great post about seven types of bad writing that many of will see every day.

It’s been interesting to watch how marketing and PR professionals have adopted social media as a tool for communicating. PR professionals seem to have adopted social media much quicker than their marketing counterparts, but that could now be changing.

I’ve just joined the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). I paid my dues a few weeks back and a thick membership pack arrived on my doorstep on Friday.

A post today on Duct Tape Marketing reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague a few days ago about personal branding. We were talking about why I had a website and why I took the time to create it and blog regularly on it.

The world in which marketing and PR people operate is changing. And it’s not just slow incremental change. It’s a fundamental shift that will affect how we all operate.

A fortnight or so ago I got a brand new Nikon D50 digital SLR from the Jessops store in Bluewater. Returning from a week-long holiday today I was gutted to find that of 326 images I’d taken with the new kit, 151 were corrupted and can’t be read.

Inspired by 37signals and Matt Weston I’ve been thinking again about my site – how it’s structured, what it looks like and what it actually says.