It’s now officially 2010, and while many PR firms and companies are doing a great job; there are far too many companies that don’t. These firms don’t qualify for a post on the Bad Pitch Blog; but for one, or all, of the following reasons they suck at PR.

So please, I implore you, don’t suck at PR. With so many talented individuals in the arena and simple steps not to such, there’s really no reason to suck at PR.

Here are 3 ways not to suck at PR and to get bloggers to pay attention to what you are pitching.

1. Get Em-bed with the bloggers: No not in bed with them Embed, as in embeddable video. We aren’t print and big part of that is that we can deliver timely media rich content to our readers. Most often this is in the form of videos which are easily embedded in posts.

Many companies have great demo videos that I would love to share with my readers, but I can’t because you don’t offer an option to embed it. Why is immaterial, with YouTube available there is no logical reason not to let me share your video on my site. Don’t kid yourself that the video is worth visiting your site to watch — if it’s that good embedding it will drive even more customers. A second alternative is to let me download and embed it on my own, but again, no sense in doing this when you can create a corporate YouTube account or handle it yourself.

2. Image Not Found: Again, nothing is more frustrating to me personally than locked down or flash only product pages and images. If you are pitching a product I need to be able to easily share that image with my readers. This may be a screenshot or picture of your product; whatever it is make it easy for me to share.

3.Press Pages aren’t just for looks: Have a press page, even if that means a single page with one with a product shot, one embeddable product demo and an email address for more details. If you can’t do this, how do you expect to answer questions and more importantly for you complaints that press may be covering. On a side note, right or wrong, I judge the companies I cover and those I shop at based on whether they have a press page.

Bonus Round – Focused Concise Pitches: Press releases are great, they represent a carefully crafted product pitch; what’s better is a pitch that has a concise focused pitch to my readers.

Follow these 4 steps and soon, you too, won’t suck at PR.

image via smlp.co.uk on Flickr

Finished product in use

Even though I love using my HP Mini 1000 to blog on the go and my Tablet works out well at home, I’ve longed for a nice widescreen monitor and full size keyboard. Since we live in a small one bedroom apartment, adding a desk to our dining room/library/reading room was out of the question and so was setting up shop in full force on the dining room table.

Rather than purchase an Anthro eNook or an Ikea knock off I decided to turn our kitchen table into an office that had a zero footprint when we wanted to have people over for dinner and thus the “Wall Mounted Office” was born.

I purchased a wall mount from Telehook Articulating Mount for $45 from ProVantage (which ships extremely fast) a 19 inch widescreen Acer monitor and a Microsoft keyboard and mouse for a total cost of under $200 excluding the laptop I already had.

You can checkout the slideshow below and head to the Flickr page to learn more about each step.

Feel free to ask questions or share your thoughts in the comments.

I found this hilarious instructional video on male hugging at Asylum a new website for men. If you ever wonder how to handle a hug form another dude, then this videe should provide a multitude of pointers in order to avoid embarrassing lingering and head injuries.

I’ve compiled a group of links which helped me set up my tablet PC to get the best experience.

You  can find the entire bunch at del.icio.us under my tag of tabletPC.

If you are looking for a set of links about getting started with your tablet, check out the primer tag.

There are loads of other tags to break down the links, I think you’ll find this collection helpful for learning about your new tablet.

Charles Stricklin the man with the plan behind the WordPress podcast had started a project called Podcast Planning which seems to have been victim to overbooking of time and is currently in a lul still has good information to process if you plan to start a podcast. I have been toying with the idea of producing a podcast for the last 6 months or so but I am still trying to find the void that needs filled

The article covers a multitude of topics which should be required reading for anyone attending college.

Key Points

• Differing types of loans and their specifics.
• I have these loans, what do I do? consolidation etc.
• What to do if you can’t afford your payments?
• What to do if you CAN afford to make your payments?
• More points on private loans.

This is an amazing resource and should get you up to speed on what you need to start doing. Remember financial advice doesn’t always work out the same for everyone, but you cannot simply ignore education debt.

Start making a plan, start making payments, start making sacrifices, stop accumulating debt.

A Rough Guide to Repaying Student Loans – Get Rich Slowly

Ramit writes:

Don’t bother with Fastweb.com. It’s online so there are 2358234 billion people using it, and nobody wins anything from it. Also, don’t ever pay to enter a scholarship.

What I found were a few keys to getting scholarships: Nobody applies, so you have a good chance if you just apply; write a really good essay and have lots of people proofread it (I’m happy to help if you want); know that you can control how good your recommendations are by giving them material and making it easier for them; and interviewing well (more on that once you get the interviews, which I’m sure you will).

Ramit’s best advice is to apply for all the relevant scholarships because even the small dollar ones add up. He recommends many useful resources as well as a game plan for getting started. Getting started Ramit argues is the most important aspect and I agree. In school I applied to 5 or 6 scholarships and walked away with two. If I could go back I would have multiplied that number by 10 to greatly decrease the amount of money I borrowed.

Do you have any scholarship advice? If you could go back to your high school junior self, what would you tell yourself?

UPDATE 2: If Gmail fails to send your messages check out this fix.

Google just announced that they are rolling out IMAP support for Google’s Gmail service. The feature will be appearign in different accounts over the next several days. If you are currently using POP3 to get your gmail to a Windows Mobile client or even a desktop client IMAP is a huge improvement. IMAP allows the status to be updated between all of your viewing areas (more on IMAP v. POP3). This means that if you read an email on your Windows Mobile 6 device, when you login to gmail.com the mail will show as read, etc etc for the majority of the functions relating to mail management.

Google Provides a handy list of what Gmail actions correspond to actions on your mobile device.

Find the walkthrough after the Jump.

The first thing you need to do is enable IMAP in your Gmail settings. To do this click on Settings in the right hand corner of your Gmail account. Next Look for the tab that says “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” Click to enable IMAP and Save your settings. Now you can grab your windows mobile device start settign up a IMAP Connection for Gmail.

This guide will work for Windows Mobile 5(WM5) and Windows Mobile 6(WM6). The info should work for most clients but the screens and options menus may be different.

Checking Gmail by IMAP on WM6.

1. Open Messaging: Choose Menu->Tools->New Account

2. Choose Other (POP/IMAP) from the drop Down and pick Next.

3. Enter your full Gmail address.

4. Enter Your Name and your Gmail username and password. You need to use your full email address for the username.

5. Choose IMAP4 for the Account Type and name the Account whatever you would like, I chose ‘Gmail’.

6. Enter the IMAP and SMTP server information.

For Incoming use: imap.google.com:993
For Outgoing use: smtp.gmail.com:465
*If you have trouble sending mail you can also try using: smtp.gmail.com:587

This information is from Google’s Help Center.

7. Click Options so we can set the SSL and other options.

Choose your interval for checking the IMAP account. The more frequent this is the quicker your battery will drain. Choose your connection, for most this will be internet.

8. SSL and Days

You can choose to restrict Gmail to only show email form the past X days in order to save space.

You also need to check the SSL and authentication boxes as shown in the picture.

I don’t need to use separate settings for outgoing mail, though if you need to send mail through a different SMTP server here is where you would configure that. I may revisit this with more info soon.

9. More Options

Choose the rest of the options shown above for your own tastes and connection speeds.

10. Click Finish and enjoy Gmail on your Windows Mobile Phone.

Remember for this to work you need to turn on IMAP in your Gmail settings. I will be trying this out on a few other devices to make sure it works but you should be good to go if you follow the instructions. If you have any questions leave them in the comments.

Screenshots were taken using iLauncher from SBSH.

The Dumb Little Man blog has a nice posting on how to get out of a crabby mood. The list has some good ones on it and includes my sure fire way to beat a crabby mood.

6. Make Someone Else Happy. Who could you cheer up today? Who could you thank or compliment? Who could you send a quick handwritten note to? You can really have fun with this, so go ahead and do it!

Whenever I am in a crappy mood other than listening to some good music, buying flowers or a card for my wife helps me get back into a happier state.  Try it next time, it works!

via lifehacker

I recently figured out how to play DRM restricted rhapsody tracks by using the WMP 11 streaming to my Xbox 360. The solution is less than ideal because you need to download each track before it can be played on the Xbox 360. Check out the brief how to below.

1. First you need to be set up with a way to stream content to your Xbox 360(Microsoft).
2. Next you should have Rhapsody downloaded and installed.
3. Sign in to your Rhapsody account.
4. Click on the Tools Menu and Choose Preferences.
5. Click on “My Library”
6. Choose “Download Tracks to my Hard Drive”
7. Choose the file format, “WMA (Windows Media Audio)
8. Go ahead and save your settings, just a warning this will eat up Hard drive space on your streaming PC.
9. Find a song/album/playlist you want to be able to stream to the 360.
10. Right click the song(s) you want to download and stream, choose Download Track(s)
11. Now that the songs are downloaded to your computer in .WMA format open up Windows Media Player 11.
12. The default location for your downloaded files is My Documents\My Music\Rhapsody\youremail@domain.com
13. In Windows Media Player, Choose Add to Library and add the folder from step 12.
14. If you have already turned on File sharing you can now power up your xbox 360, hit the media tab and choose your computer. From there you have access to all the tracks you have downloaded.
15. You have to download the songs to the local hard drive for this to work!

A similar setup should work for Napster and Yahoo subscription services so long as you can download the DRM’d files to your streaming computer in .WMA format.

It is great to have access to all these tracks on the Xbox 360 without paying any more per month. It has always surprised me none of the subscription services has teamed up with Microsoft to offer this, though I am guessing it has something to do with bandwidth limitations.