It's almost 10 a.m. and I am back on the phone with AT&T. I was told that it might take 24 hours for my phone to be activated. :-(

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One benefit to living in Polk County, FL is that when something like the iPhone launch happens you can be sure to find 'smaller' lines here, compared to Orlando or Tampa. Across the US there were HUGE lines at Apple Stores, but for the most part AT&T Wireless stores fared a bit better. In my case, the Winter Haven AT&T store was the perfect location.

I arrived around 3:30 to find myself 13th in line. The first person in line arrived at 7 p.m. on Thursday, the second person said he showed up around 3 a.m. The one question on everybody's mind was, "How many phones do they have?" The other folks said that earlier in the day the manager had come out and said he couldn't tell them how many phones they had, but that everybody in line (at that time) would be getting one.

As scheduled the AT&T store closed at 4:30 for staff to prep. The manager came out again and reviewed the sales process and answered some basic questions about the phone. Once again he surveyed the line and said that everyone would be getting a phone.

The line slowly grew up until shortly before 5 p.m. That's when more people began to arrive. The store manager came out and handed out numbers to the first 30 people in line and said they would be allowing 10 people in at a time to purchase the phone.

By the time 6 p.m. rolled around the line was probably 40 people deep. With a slight amount of applause the store opened and the first 10 shoppers entered. As number 13 I was forced to wait outside for the next 15 minutes. During the time the manager manned the front door and fielded question from shoppers. He finally confessed that the store had a total of 60 phones. Of those, 40 were the 8GB model and 20 were the 4GB model.

I was let in the store around 6:20 and the played with the demo units while I waited for my number to be called. One thing to note is that the demo units are connected to the internet via wifi so they're very fast. Obviously the 'cellular' connection won't be as fast.

The selection of cases wasn't that impressive so I held off on purchasing one. Soon my number was called and I purchased my 8 GB unit and was on my way. As I walked out I showed the packaging to the rest of the folks in line.

Arriving home is when the fun began. I attempted to use the online registration system but received and error and was told to call AT&T. I called, waited 30 minutes and then was told they'd call me. Great. It's not 9:45 p.m. and still no call from AT&T.

I'll post an update when anything new happens.

In other coverage, Kyle Kennedy has a recap of some action in Lakeland, David checks in from Atlanta and Rex bailed in Nashville.

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On June 11th, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) launched the official PlayStation.Blog. I'm proud to say we had a little bit of a hand in the development of this new corporate blog.

The blog is based upon the WordPress platform and features a number of modifications. I handled the design and some of the project management while the team (Nick, Pete, Sean and Mike) from cnp_studio handled CSS, WordPress customization and other tweaks.

Response to the blog was been somewhat amazing with over 500 comments coming in the first 24 hours. Technorati rank went from non-existent to 8,364 in less than two weeks. Not bad.

As with any project of this nature, it's only the beginning. Look for more to come.

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With today's celebrity obsessed culture/media I have a new sure-fire crisis communication plan for corporations, yell, "Hey look, there's Paris Hilton!"

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This summer is full of a number of fun events all around the country. Here's a quick look at where I'll be:

July 10-11 - Houston, TX for a PRSA Seminar. I'm conducting a professional development seminar for the local PRSA chapter.

July 12-13 - Philadelphia, PA for BlogPhiladelphia - Annie and the gang from Philly are organizing a great event. They say they modeled it after BlogOrlando...and yike's they're doing a better job :-) I'll be leading the first session of the conference, perhaps an un-keynote.

July 18-22 - San Francisco, CA for work and then WordCamp over the weekend.

July 27-29 - Chicago, IL for BlogHer. One of the best events I go to each year. This year I know of a few other men going :-)

August 5-8 - Sarasota, FL for the FPRA Annual Conference. We live-blogged the event last year and will be doing the same this year.

August 9-11 - Seattle, WA for Gnomedex. Another one of my favorite events.

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Dan Blank has a humorous look at the lifecycle of an iPhone owner.

Day 1: Total Transcendence
Day 2: Cognitive Dissonance
Day 30: Panic
Day 90: Buyers Remorse
Day 365: The Cycle Begins Again

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I've been debating about getting EVDO service for some time now, but which one? While I am a Cingular/AT&T customer, their data network is sloooow. The obvious choice seems to be between Verizon and Sprint.

I asked some folks a while back and one of the main considerations was coverage. Well, in my area they are equal. Verizon and Sprint both have the major areas of Florida covered pretty well. I am a Mac user so that factors slightly into which card I might purchase, but I'm mostly concerned about speed and general ease of use.

Which one then, Sprint or Verizon?

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As a companion piece to my 'Jaded View of PR and the Blogosphere' here is something about journalists. Once again the caveat that I've been working with traditional media for a number of years on how they can adapt to the world of social media. Also, the vast number of journalists I work for are great people doing great work. It's just a few that spoil it for everybody else.

Generally when you get a group of journalists together on a panel the topic of blogs will come up. One of the often used responses about the blogosphere is, "Blogs are often inaccurate." Each time a journalist says that I will usually respond, "Really, can you give me a specific recent example." Guess what their response is?

Some journalists say that blogs don't check facts or are mostly opinion and as such not real news. It's ironic that when they make those statements it's often based upon generalities and opinion. In a sense, when some journalists speak about blogs they're committing the same sins they say bloggers commit.

Recently, Social Media Club Atlanta held a panel discussion featuring a number of traditional media folk. To say there were some tensions would be an understatement.

Amber Rhea a local Atlanta blogger e-mailed me after the session and conveyed a story similar to one I've experienced. A traditional journalist on a panel will say, "What you do is more......" Just insert your own ending there: 'entertainment', 'fun', 'opinion', 'of a dairy'. In Amber's case her response was, "What 'I' do? Have you ever read my blog? Do you even know what 'I' do?" Hmm, a journalist making a statement without looking at the original source material.

I write a hyperlocal blog and it's a mixture of news, links and opinion. In the year and a half I have run the blog I've only posted incorrect information once and it was more of a writing slip-up than a huge gaffe. I quickly updated the post and pointed out the correction. When a journalist says that blogs are often inaccurate I say, "Really have you looked at my blog or other hyperlocal blogs?"

Making general statements about blogs being this or that infuriates me. Likewise, most newspaper folks will bristle when somebody makes a similar blanket statement such as, "All newspapers have a liberal bias."

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I've been working with social media for almost four years. The majority of the time my work involves either pr practitioners or journalists. While I enjoy what I do and the interactions I have, in this time I have become a bit jaded with certain aspects of PR and media's view of blogging.

Today, Steve Rubel talks about the era of PR as participation and not pitching. I agree with this. It's about relationships and interactions. It's about knowing the people you're talking to and knowing what you're talking about. Two commodities that seem to be lacking in many interactions online.

Now on to my jaded view. A few weeks ago when Phil Gomes and I were on a panel at Media Relations Summit, he made a statement that I've been repeating quite a bit recently:

If you're a PR professional and you complain about blogs being inaccurate or wrong...and you're not doing anything to fix it, then you don't have the right to complain.

This topic came up again at the Airports Council International-North America's marketing and communications conference I spoke at on Monday. A few communicators complained about blogs in general. I asked if they had made any attempt to correct the information. They hadn't.

The other issue is blogger relations, or building relationships with blogs. Many PR folks act like it's something completely foreign to them, they have no idea how to do it. I always say, it's the same tactics and strategies they've used with building relationships with reporters/media. Unfortunately, for too many folks the extent of their relationship is looking up a name in Bacons.

To drive home this point I use this anecdote:

What you're saying is that you can't find sources and build relationships with them? So if you moved to a new town and started work for a new company, would you go to your boss and say, "Wow, I don't know any of the media here or have any idea what trade publications cover our industry. It's going to be impossible for me to build relationships and get your information out there."

The issue with blogger relations is finding the right blogs. Well if you're part of the community all you have to do is ask. If I was new to the triathlon scene, I would find somebody I knew that was a triathlete and say, "Hey what web sites, magazines, etc do you read?" Then I'd start from there.

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I'm still working on part two of my CVB post, but for now here is a tidbit I've been sharing with CVBs and other travel and tourism folks. In fact I talked about it on Monday to a group of airport communicators. Benet Wilson from Aviation Week also blogged about it.

Every day is a FAM Tour

For some background, many convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), attractions, airports, etc. rely upon familiarization tours or FAM tours to promote their locations. FAM tours are designed for journalists. CVBs bring in travel journalists/writers and then wine and dine them while showing off the best that their location has to offer. Their hope of course is that the journalists will then write positive stories about their destinations.

There is one problem with that.

Today every visitor can be a journalist in some way. People are constantly blogging about their travel experiences. The good and the bad. Those posts might only be read by a few friends and relatives at first, but eventually they begin to appear in the all-important Google results. That's when the fun begins. Benet talks about a recent example:

In the past, complaints like this were either never seen, or if they were, they were tossed aside, with the thought that one person's opinion didn't make much of a difference. But TravelGolf.com specifically targets this community, and I suspect it's a large one.

Golf is an important tourism tool for the Miami region. And if Tim McDonald says MIA is "hell," some of his readers may read that and decide to move their golf outing to somewhere like Tucson, which also happens to have an airport that's easier to navigate.

The question then is: Why don't you treat every visitor like you treat a journalist on a FAM tour?

The long-term impact of a positive/negative blog post is probably greater than a one-time column in a local paper talking about a 'Weekend Trip to X'.

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The newspaper in my area published an article today about how local blogs are impacting a CSX development project.

Readers of this blog may find the story familiar. I wrote a post on how the CSX story developed in cooperation between bloggers and traditional journalists.

I've posted my thoughts on the article over at my hyperlocal blog: Empirical Polk.

Of course the story does feature a picture of me 'blogging'. That's what's always funny about stories like this. The photographer shows up and says, "I'm supposed to get some shots of you blogging......so blog."

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I am in Tucson, AZ at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort for the Airports Council International - North America conference. This is the view out the front door :-) Here's the view from my room.

I speak tomorrow afternoon to a group of airport communicators. The opening keynote is being led by USAirways CEO, Doug Parker. Maybe I should tell Doug about my recent USAirways experience :-)

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Last week I received the good news that one of my photos was going to be used in the print edition of BusinessWeek. They needed a photo of Randall Stephenson, the new CEO of AT&T.

I took a few photos of Randall last year at the Mplanet conference in Orlando. BW ended up using one of those in their June 18th issue, page 42 to be exact.

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Last week I was conducting a training session for a group of journalists from across the U.S. During the course of the session we talked about how blogs allow journalists to create their own brand and build loyalty among their readership.

One of the blogs we looked at as an example was Pop Candy by Whitney Matheson from USAToday. Whitney's blog is a great mixture of her personality and reporting.

I threw the question out there to the audience, "Do you think that Whitney needs USAToday anymore?" Most of the journalists in the audience didn't think so.

What do you think?

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Via John Moore, I learn that Andy Sernovitz, former CEO of WOMMA, now has a blog: Damn, I Wish I'd Though of That!

Subscribed.

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After the travel nightmare I'd been through the past few days, receiving this e-mail was a welcome pleasure:

Great. The plane will be ready for you!

In the build-up to launch, DayJet and their PR firm have included local bloggers in their program. Since I run a hyperlocal blog in one of the test markets I was invited to a jet preview this week. I am also a potential customer since I travel quite a bit in Florida.

I had intended to check things out early yesterday morning. However, after my flight from DC was cancelled by USAirways on Tuesday, things were out of whack. A delayed flight back on Wednesday messed up my schedule even more. The DayJet folks said no problem, "The plane will be ready for you." Nice service.

With travel for the day behind me, I headed to Lakeland Linder Airport around 6pm to take a look. I snapped a bunch of shots of the exterior and interior of the plane before we took off. You can check out the entire photoset here. As you can see from the photos it's a very small jet. No including the pilots, it seats only three. That's the core of the air taxi concept.

Rather than chartering an entire plane, which I could never afford, you charter a single seat. The planes will operate between DayPorts. The first five DayPorts are in Florida. They include: Lakeland, Gainesville, Pensacola, Boca Raton and Tallahassee. The DayPorts are cities that aren't normally served by commercial airlines, or if they are the costs and travel times are somewhat out of whack. DayJet's flight costs are based on the window of flexibility you provide DayJet. The maximum window is 5.5 hours.

For example if I say, "I need to fly from Lakeland to Tallahassee tomorrow at 10am" then that's not flexible. As such I would pay the highest rate for the seat. However, if I say, "I need to be in Tallahassee tomorrow morning." and build in a maximum of 5.5 hours into my schedule then I pay the lowest fare.

How much are we talking? DayJet staff has told me the rate variation for the Lakeland to Tallahassee flight is projected to be between $290 and $800 per leg depending on the flexibility. For a round-trip to Tallahassee that would be just under $600.00 if I am flexible with my departure/arrival times. It might be a bit pricey, but everything is relative and the X factor is time.

Currently a trip to Tallahassee takes me about 5 hours via car, so round trip that's 10 hours in a car. With DayJet the flight is a little over an hour. Compare a little over two hours with ten. If I can 'work/bill' for any of that saved time then the jet has almost paid for itself. That's big the allure of 'corporate jet' travel, by saving time (and billing for it) that is normally lost at the airport, you make up for the price difference.

Let's look at travel costs. I bill clients for mileage. Roundtrip to Tally is 590 miles or at $.48 cents per mile that's $283.20. Throw in an overnight stay and a meal or two and you might get close to the cost of the fare.

To compare with commercial airlines, a round-trip ticket on Delta from Orlando to Tallahassee is anywhere from $390.00 to $450.00 depending on when you book. Of course with that you get all the fun of commercial air travel. A drive to the airport, security, delays, etc. For me the drive to Orlando airport is at least 45 minutes. Throw in security and the fact that you have to arrive at least 30-45 minutes prior and, well you know. With DayJet I drive less than twenty minutes to Lakeland Linder airport and then walk on a plane, with at most two other people.

When DayJet talks about their fares the usually make the comparison to business class fares, which for most flights are considerably higher than coach. For a run like Orlando to Tallahassee there are no business fares since you're flying on an RJ.

Will they make it? The market will obviously decide. I see them making the majority of their trips to-from Tallahassee in support of the legislature, lobbyists and other related government activity. Most of those folks have the budgets to cover the costs for flight costs.

DayJet plans to operate in the Florida market to prove their concept and iron out any bugs. From there they plan to expand across the Southeast, then on to the rest of the country.

Will I use it? I plan on it. I'll make a few trips and then re-evaluate the cost/benefit. The key is doing something constructive with the time you're saving by not messing around with commercial air travel and all the hassles.

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Well the plan was to fly back this evening to Orlando, but my flight was delayed, delayed, delayed and then canceled. Then it was scramble mode. Not a hotel in sight, unless I wanted to take a cab to Baltimore :-)

A shout-out on Twitter led to a number of folks all pitching in trying to find me a place to stay. Big thanks to all who helped out.

Phil Gomes who I spoke on a panel with today, was still in DC and offered a place to crash for the night. Thanks man! I really didn't want to sleep in Reagan National.

Hopefully my flight tomorrow will leave on time :-) And don't expect to hear from me too much tomorrow.

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I'm at the Media Relations Summit, but you wouldn't know it. I'm holed up in my hotel room sick and working :-( I had planned to attend most of today's sessions but that plan is scrapped.

I'm hoping to be well enough to attend the geek dinner this evening.

If I do make it to any sessions today, be on the look out for photos and posts.

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The relatives are in town, so that means a trip to Walt Disney World. While at the Magic Kingdom yesterday we also had the added bonus of a shuttle launch.

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The Orlando Sentinel has created a Twitter account and their first test/use will be for the scheduled launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis tomorrow night.

You can check out their Twitter account here: http://twitter.com/orlandosentinel

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Flight Blogger has the details on the roll out of the new Boeing 787 aka Dreamliner.

While I won't be in Seattle that day, here is the tidbit that interested me:

What if I'm not in Seattle on that day?

If you cannot attend the event at Qwest Field, the rollout will be carried live at 3:30 pm PDT, 6:30 pm EDT via satellite on DirecTV.

What channel will it be on?

DirecTV - channel 576.
DishNetwork - channel 9601.

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Shel Holtz furthers the discussion on ghost-blogging, or the act of writing blog posts for somebody else. I agree with Shel that for the most part it's not a good idea.

My problem is simple: Blogs aren’t just another business communication channel. In fact, blogs were created and popularized by people who were fed up with traditional business communication channels. They had had enough of fabricated quotes in press releases and speeches read by executives but written by professional speech writers. These people wanted authentic conversations with real human beings.

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CNN.com is teasing a redesign link on their home page. Currently it directs you to http://beta.cnn.com/. It's a big change, and I like it.

The primary navigation has moved from the side to the top (it was at the top before, I just remember the side for some reason) and the entire content area is now centered (rather than left-aligned). The entire look is cleaner and does reduce the amount of content on the home page.

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I've had a run of new hyku stickers and other gear made up. All of it features the logo variation I've played around with for a while.

Will it replace my regular logo? Who knows...that would entail redesigning my site and other materials as well, which is something I don't have the time for now. The logo/look is meant to be something out of the ordinary.

David has a photo of his Moleskine up, but he's holding it sideways. The logo is meant to be vertical.

If you would like some stickers e-mail me an address.

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I'll be in Washington D.C. this upcoming Sunday through Tuesday for Bulldog Reporter's Media Relations Summit. I'm part of a panel on Tuesday covering blogger relations. Joining me on the panel is some guy named Phil :-)

I arrive early Sunday morning and plan to bum around the touristy things most of the day. If you're arriving early as well let me know and perhaps we can meet-up.

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It's late Sunday night and I'm back from the Florida Keys. This little guy was outside our hotel room this morning, and as you can see, was a brilliant green.

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