Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been involved with PRSA’s Silicon Valley Chapter, and our big event of the year is “Media Predicts,” a lively dinner, networking opportunity and panel discussion of predictions for next year in technology. It’s on Wednesday, Dec. 2 at the Computer History Museum, and it draws 300 people and dozens of top tech PR agencies and corporate PR departments.

This year, we’ve added two new wrinkles — an opening stand-up comedy monologue by name-brand comic Will Durst, and a “Student Silent Auction” in which top PR students from San Jose State are auctioning themselves off [proceeds to their school's PR program] to be PR interns at agencies or companies.

As my title implies, I think this is turning into the top must-attend event in PR on the West Coast, assuming you have a business interest in technology [and these days, who doesn't?]. It’s a see-and-be-seen opportunity for the tech PR community, which is especially valuable in this Twittering/Facebooking/email world of impersonal communications.

Here’s the list of tech media speakers, followed by a list of the companies who have already signed up to sponsor this event and host tables. For more information, go to the PRSA Silicon Valley page or the registration page.

• Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal & Digits
• Brad Stone, New York Times & Bits Blog
• Byron Acohido, USA Today, LastWatchDog
• Connie Guglielmo, Bloomberg News
• Matt Marshall, VentureBeat & DEMO
• Om Malik, GigaOM
• Steven Levy, WIRED
• Jim Goldman, CNBC (moderator)
• Duffy Jennings, SFGate (emcee)

Sponsors so far:

Premier Event Sponsor:

• Yaho

Platinum:

• Microsoft
• SAP

Gold:

• Blanc & Otus
• Market Wire
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Trainer Communications
• Weber Shandwick

Bronze:

• Access Communications
• A&R Edelman
• Brunswick
• Dell
• Eastwick
• Fleishman-Hillard
• BusinessWire
• SanDisk
• Voce
• Waggener Edstrom

• Your press releases should contain a “keyword trifecta”: Your keyword search term should be in your headline and your first paragraph, and the keyword in your first paragraph should link to your web site. HT: Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire
• Be generous with your links — people often don’t want to include outside links because users may leave their site when they click on the link. But being generous makes you part of the conversation and is a win-win for everyone. HT: Debbie Weil
• Cowboy up! “Own your space and your authority” — meaning, be the communications expert and stand firm on what’s right and wrong in communications. HT: Skerik

And here’s the real bonus — a twit stream of tips and observations from the session — free!

Miller

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Hammerling

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways?

• Yes, social media and the Internet have transformed PR and are making mainstream media relations less important and multi-channel PR more important.
• It’s still about a) who you know, b) who trusts you and c) whether you have a good story.
• Reaching out to other influencers in addition to journalists has been a PR tactic since, as a friend used to say, God got her ears pierced. I recall writing PR plans in the 90s chock full of such tactics, only it didn’t involve using Twitter and Facebook, it involved snail mail and in-person events. Tools change, strategies are more permanent.

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

In other words: currently I am user #748461753 on Facebook, but come Friday night West Coast time, I will jump on Facebook and try to grab my vanity URL, so that my listing on Facebook (and hence the web) will be something like www.facebook.com/myvanityurl.

Why?

Because this will make my Facebook profile easier to search for on the web, and is part of the move toward the “semantic web” that is coming down the pike. The “semantic” web is all about getting richer and more useful information when you look for something on the web. For instance, in my case, I want people to find all my writing and services in one place when they search for me. That’s not what you get when you Google me — you get a page that has lots of my stuff, but a) not all of it and b) it’s interspersed with other results.

Anyway, back to Facebook. If you are a Facebook user, you should definitely plan on getting a vanity URL at your earliest convenience. One can assume that it will be pretty tough to get through to the FB servers in the minutes and hours immediately after 12:01 am ET, so plan on trying some time this weekend. You can read more about it on Facebook’s blog here or on these many news and blog posts.

Here’s a timely resource that may come in handy, especially if you use Facebook for your product or services: Adam Metz has posted a Facebook Vanity URL Action Plan.

For one thing, traditional print and electronic media are far from dead and buried. They may be on the decline, but they’re not gone yet and may still survive in some viable form or another.

For another, new media models are popping up all over the place, and while none has been a stratospheric business success yet, they are surviving and growing and figuring out how to make money.

As a media relations pro (and I assume you are), you need to stay on top of the media’s evolution and be able to talk and think knowledgeably about it. So, here’s a link to a Neiman Journalism Lab article called “Five newsrooms H.L. Mencken wouldn’t recognize.”

It’s a behind-the-scenes tour of the news operations of Talking Points Memo, Gawker Media, Daily Telegraph, Valley Independent Sentinel and the Seattle Spokesman-Review.

BTW, who was H.L. Mencken? Good question — here’s your answer.

And while we’re on the subject of media evolution, here’s an interview with the newly named “social media editor” of the NY Times, Jennifer Preston.

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

I don’t care much for Evite, but I don’t hate it. It’s an online system, it has some cool features that weren’t available pre-Internet, and it does what it’s supposed to do, which is invite people to an event and track who said yes and no.

But there are apparently many other, better online invitation sites out there, including Socializr. But until today, I had never heard about them, nor did I care. Online invitations are not a big part of my life.

I heard about the alternatives from an article I happened to be reading about Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Socializr and before that, Friendster. He, uh, feels very strongly about the evils of Evite and the superiority of his and other services.

But until today, I had never heard of them! No one invited me to an event using his service. There was little buzz in the wider world about these alternatives.

And this is the point: Abrams is spending a lot of time railing about Evite when he should be spending his time promoting the virtues of Socializr! That’s real PR. Yes, I finally heard about Socializr today and will check it out. But I still don’t know a lot about what makes it superior to Evite. That’s where Abrams is really missing an opportunity.

PR lesson: you may draw attention by picking a fight, but you don’t build a business that way. People want to know what you offer them to solve problems and make their lives better or easier, not just what you are NOT.

Bonus PR lesson: Great names rule! Evite is a great name. It tells you what it is, it’s like an e-invitation, it’s an Evite. What the hell is a “Socializr,” and did I spell it right? Simplify, dude, and come up with a better name!

Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the rounds, Domino’s responded with its own video apology, and they posted apologies on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Still, online communications pundits seem to believe that the company didn’t do enough, fast enough, to combat this incident and that the video and their response had “damaged” the brand.

You know a story like this is peaking when the New York Times weighs in, and so they did, saying,

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged.

The proof of brand damage? Found online, of course:

The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

An online survey? Is that a joke?

Two observations: Domino’s pizza is terrible: cheese and tomato sauce on cardboard. It’s hard to imagine that their brand’s “quality” image was materially harmed by a sophomoric (obviously) online video. And how many of Domino’s core customers are tracking the brand online? I didn’t do any man-on-the-street interviews, but I doubt that the “average” Domino’s customer cares what is being said about the company online.

Even as powerful as the online world can be at times, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the real world. My advice is to keep that in mind, and in perspective.