Wow. This sent shivers up my spine. Live streams of Hurricane Gustav. You can hear news reports on the radio in the background and there’s the odd bit of commentary from time to time. As they say over on the Ustream blog – hope everyone is OK. The live web is most certainly upon us.

[via @noodlepie]

The idea is to offer a platform for PRs and journalists. PRs seed stories and releases, and journalists can pick up the stories they like and use Pitchspace to organise the material for that story. The system also ranks PRs (and, I assume, journalists!) according to the relationships they build up with journalists, so the more they work together the more contact details they get, and so on.

PR is definitely broken as is, so it’s good to get the debate going as to what the solution is. So get involved if you care about such things, which I suspect a lot of people don’t. They’re just excited about the prospect of all this ubiquitous invisible connected technology stuff.

PS – I think the wrong URL is used in the podcast – it’s space not base, so don’t fall into the ‘rant about not having a live website when you’re featured on the Guardian and wasting an opportunity’ trap I fell into this morning. But then again a bit more info on the site would be nice, but they are probably still very much in protective phase I imagine.

One to keep an eye on.

Done just after the final whistle, still with lots of stuff going on in the background, I love seeing free web tools used in a wider variety of applications like this. The gap between consumers and producers really is getting pretty tight now (actually it’s pretty non existent in some places) and the use of Qik here makes perfect sense – to get video reports that capture the atmosphere of the match out super quick as possible for next to nothing. Bring it on.

Oh and while we’re at it, Qik (now with iPhone 3G support)should talk to SpinVox (now with social networks support) and enable on-the-fly video transcripts to be converted and posted alongside videos. That way, it’s text and video heaven, complete with SEO loveliness and the potential for comments, quoting, jump links to different video sections and all sorts of other nice open access stuff and maybe even the dirty word – ads.

Iain has also just posted about MacHeist too. Loads of rather useful looking apps for just $49.

So, as by means of a bit of a catch up – here’s some stuff I’ve been doing and thinking.

1. Bite won the Facebook pitch. I’m on the team and am delighted to be working with the guys at Facebook. Especially when you read stuff like this. PR Week said it was “arguably the most sought-after retainer of the year” and that “Tech PR insiders agree that this was one of the most competitive pitches in recent memory”. Enough said. Very chuffed. Hugely excited.

2. We bought a car, our first (nearly) new one. One a bit like this. After polling my mates and colleagues before buying it, I already know that some people hate it. I liked it and then I drove it – just plain fun and reminded me of my 1972 VW Beetle that’s still waiting for me in a garage back home.

3. I met with Lloyd and talked about the Social Media Cafe he’s currently planning. Nice cup of tea and a pleasure to have a chat about something so completely logical.

4. I’ve been watching a lot of TED talks. Can’t get enough of people talking about stuff they are so incredibly passionate about. Here’s a directory of them all.

5. I’ve discovered MarsEdit via Chris Green. Looks like it’s going to be very, very useful indeed to write this blog (need all the help I can get right now as I’m struggling a bit to find my inner-blog-strength).

6. I’ve still been enjoying the constant feed of amusing cat photos from Esaba. This is where I found my Facebook profile pic that seems to get a lot of comment. There’s a little widget you can add to iGoogle that generates a new pic with every refresh. (see example below)

7. I’ve saved another 100 links or so to del.icio.us since my last post. All manner of stuff in there. I just can’t get enough of del.icio.us and am finding it increasingly hard to see how people who spend a lot of time on the web can manage without it. If I ever have to use a PC/Mac that isn’t one of mine I feel very, very wrong.

8. I’ve been drafting a monster post about “being digital”. One day I look at it and think it’s shite and another I can’t stop writing it. Hmmmmm, we’ll see.

9. I went to my Grandma’s funeral. Nothing more to be said on that other than this.

10. Sam at Glide told me about journa-list.com – a really useful site that allows you to track what different national and BBC journos are writing about and track their output as feeds. Much time saved. Nice simple tool that needs to be expanded upon.

Also, I’ve found ImageWell an incredibly useful little app to do quick image manipulation such as changing sizes and turning TIFFS into JPEGS for the blog. Download it here (Mac only PC peeps. Sorry).