We’ve just launched a new website for Contently Managed, a  public relations company with it’s finger well and truly on the pulse of all things social media; podcasting, blogs, twitter, virals…as well as all the traditional routes that still exist to get your message across.

Powered by WordPress and loaded with a full arsenal of social media plugins, it’s well worth checking out.  There’s some pretty great content on there too – our particular favourite is the Saving “Defying Gravity” post where Craig from Contently Managed rattles of an imaginary PR campaign that would save the cancelled television show.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been tracking Rupert Murdoch’s various outbursts on Google (calling them “kleptomaniacs” and “parasites” for indexing their content in it’s Google News pages), attacks on the BBC (“thieves”) and general outbursts about the internet in general. Top of the heap, and possibly the most controversial is making loyal site visitors pay for content that was previously available free.  His methodology for doing this is a bit mixed up though as he knows he needs search engines.

How do I know he needs them? Because the process for blocking ANY website from being indexed by Google takes just one line of code but News Corp haven’t done it yet.  It is fairly imminent though.

Newscorp content to be exclusive to Bing?

To spice things up a bit, the rumour doing the rounds is that News Corp are about to make Bing the only search engine that indexes News Corp’s content.

That’s right…unless you use Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you won’t find any content in Google that’s come from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and almost 2000 other titles across the USA alone.  That is a lot of content and presents Microsoft with a great marketing opportunity along with some extra oomph to their search engine market share.

It won’t change the game overnight, but if News Corp can convince other publishers to come with them, it could present a real problem for Google.

My personal opinion is that any alliance between News Corp and Microsoft is doomed to failure.  Whilst I’d love to see a Murdoch/Gates “riches to rags” descent on the scale of Randolph and Mortimer Duke in Trading Places, that will never happen.  What I do think  is that both of these companies, by trying to swim against the tide of everything that the internet now stands for, are about to get their noses bloodied.

Given the increasingly negative noise around Microsoft (overpriced, underperforming and downright shoddy operating systems…it’s taken them how many versions to get even close to OSX?) and let’s not rant on about the negative impact and damage that News Corp causes, is it just wishful thinking when I wonder if they are lining themselves up for a bit of a fall?

News Corp’s last major attempt at assessing where the internet is heading and spending money accordingly was their acquisition of Myspace in 2005 for $580 million.     How bad has that proven to be? His timing could not have been worse.   Check out this fairly indepth recent interview (Content on Youtube not blocked by SKY btw!)  Has he learned anything this time round?

I think not.  What do you think?

During a disgustingly wet Sunday afternoon I decided to have a fiddle about with Bing.  Some pretty interesting features on there and especially liked looking at the Glasgow web design office on Bing’s new mapping application although it’s not a patch on the functionality and general coolness you get when checking out the entrance to 1103 Argyle Street on Google Street View.

There are few companies out there that can even contemplate tilting at the Google windmill but with an estimated $100 million marketing budget lined up for Bing, Microsoft are gearing up to give it a good shot.  If they can keep up the quality advertising, who knows what might happen.  I watched this advert and the only thing that made me NOT want to give Bing a good shot was the last two words of the commercial…”From Microsoft”.

Here’s a tip Microsoft marketing dudes…if you want your product to be REALLY successful, try keeping Microsoft’s name out of it.  Nobody cares who made it, they just care what it does…