Controlling the message in Media 2.0

I am very late to the story where Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Read an insightful commentary on it by Jeremy Wagstaff from the Wall Street Journal.

To me this underscores the level of command and control large companies try to exhert over the message of the day in the Media. A level which, in the face of Media 2.0, has been severely diminished

While orchestrated media campaigns can still be waged by PR companies driving the message for mainstream media outlets and A-list bloggers (with B and C list bloggers following the Techmeme cluster) the great long tail means that something worthy of discussion is still discussed and covered - it still gets ink - somewhere.

Take the launch of Peepel yesterday. The coverage was huge. It seemed like every blog was talking about it (with notable exception of Techcrunch - I think Michael has something against Aussies from Brisbane).

I know that Peepel is a startup and I assume like all startups they don't have a Microsoft level PR firm pulling the strings. Yet they still managed to get plenty of coverage. Coverage that mainstream media would have never provided.

With feed readers and new content discovery/delivery tools like Touchstone, that coverage is being heard by people who are interested. We can now each have our message heard by people who want to hear it.

The leveling of the playing field and the increased diversity of voices can only be a good thing for innovation, understanding and the human race in general.

Are you a Peepel Person?

The original genesis of the idea for Touchstone came about when I was working on Web-Based Enterprise software back in the day (you know... Those Web 1.0 days?). The issue very quickly became apparent to me that if you wanted to display an alert like Outlook routinely does from a web-based CRM or CMS system, you were in trouble. There was no convenient way to do it.

So the question arose in my mind... "How can you alert the user to stuff". Then other questions followed... "how do you build a unified alerting tool that worked for all applications - not just the ones I was making" and then "how do you keep the user in control of all this alerting without overburdening them with a rules engine".

The result is Touchstone. It's scope has expanded to handle news and content discovery and all sorts of other things, but at its heart, it is still a way to get messages from the web, to the user - on their own terms.

Enter Peepel (Disclosure: Peepel and Faraday share an investor). At its surface Peepel looks like the newest player in the Web office suite marketplace. What it actually is, is a realization that online environments need to be platforms. Just like Windows is a platform for other software on the client-side.

In the diverse coverage that it's getting today and over the next few weeks most blogs will probably focus on the office stuff. But I actually think the most interesting part is the environment that is being built out to support the applications themselves. Windowing, File Handling, Task Manager etc.

One of the pieces of that environment will be Notification. And notification is what Touchstone is all about.

"A document in your workspace has just been updated..."

"A spreedsheet you are monitoring has been updated..."

"Chris Saad has logged onto Peepel..."

Etc..

So I look forward to see Peepel grow into its own and establish a viable platform inside which a whole range of applications can live - and notify - for the user.

Check out Peepel!