So there’s been one massive story in PR this week, which kind of leaves everything else looking a bit like iPadding (ba-boom-tish) but we’ve blogged about that already. And even if you haven’t heard about it – and really, if you haven’t, what the hell have you been doing – there’s nothing quite as warming as Stephen Fry on a fanciful roll. Anyway, in other things….

Superfoods = superscam?

New research revealed this week from Kansas State University’s very official sounding Cardiorespiratory Exercise says ingesting too many ‘superfoods’ could mean “an imbalance between antioxidants and pro-oxidants” according to Alastair Jamieson in the Telegraph. Now according to science, this is a bad thing. But, more importantly, this finding shakes our faith in the superfood as the holy grail of dietary crazes.

This may come as a shock to many; a good “superfood” story has been a mainstay in traditional mainstream media for at least the last six years. Whether we’re stuffing ourselves with cinnamon to ensure that we’re keeping wrinkles at bay, bingeing on broccoli to tame our surging blood pressure or drinking gallons of blueberry juice to ensure that we never forget all of the other nasty foods that we shouldn’t eating or drinking.

Even more confusing is the conjoining of people’s love of a good healthy eating fad with their love of lists. Surely there’s more to wild Alaskan salmon than a need to have it compete against the humble goji berry for sexiest super food of 2010.

Why dress up the varied health benefits of good food with flashy scientific claims? Well the obvious answer is that people are striving for a quick dietary fix to solve much larger problems.

If you’re stressed and not cooking proper meals on a regular basis, a handful of sugar snap peas every day isn’t going to be the catch all solution that you may expect. Much larger lifestyle changes have to be made. If demystifying the “superfood” tag helps us realise that it can only be a good thing.

Now do excuse us, we’re off to drink a litre of red wine to keep our smiles bright (but our lips all red and smudgy).

Bubble wrap Babylon

Confused.com received a nice spread of coverage following their identification of the most accident prone street in Britain. Somerville Road in Worcester, or “Accident Avenue”, was covered in bubblewrap to highlight the dangers of driving in hazardous wintry conditions. In a natty piece of planning, this photo stunt also co-incided with bubblewrap’s 50^th birthday.

Yes, we’re aware that this campaign seems to be inspired by some work that 118118  did a couple of years ago, but if something ain’t broke, why fix it?

Mum’s the word

Big props to the super savvy Justine Roberts, one of the co-founders of influential website and forum for mothers Mumsnet, who continues to be the go-to-girl for any media that wants a  “mother’s perspective”. Take a look at just this week, whether popping up to debate the appropriateness of GMTV’s piece on breastfeeding, discussing child protection with Channel 4’s anchors or reacting to increased paternity leave on Sky News, Justine has made sure that she always comments on the news stories that relate to her and Mumsnet’s target demographic, finding a new, refreshing take on the story.  

As Sarah Sands comments in the Evening Standard: “Mumsnet is not really a female co-operative but a political lobby group, and Justine Roberts is fast becoming the voice that represents this movement.”

Disclosure: Mumsnet is not a client of Porter Novelli’s, we’re just loving their work.

Cheap, cheerful and better?

The latest Which? survey pitted all the supermarket chains against each other, rating them on overall customer satisfaction. Luckily for Which? The survey threw up some surprises, the most notable being that budget chains Aldi and Lidl have made huge strides in the hearts and minds of the British public, coming joint third in the poll and finishing ahead of Sainsbury’s, Asda and, crucially, Tesco.

It’s a great story – topical, unexpected, supporting the underdog but, for us, the most pleasing part of the whole furore has to be The Sun’s genius headline “Every Lidl helps”. Whoever was responsible for that needs a raise right now.

We got as excited as everyone else about the Apple launch (see our post about the iPad hype). Despite our years of consumer technology industry knowledge we really thought the new gadget, when it was revealed, would be hailed as the saviour of everything from the newspaper industry to Pop Tarts. But, of course, we should really have known that the reaction would be a big ‘is that it?’ because that’s human nature.

Apple actually did nothing to fuel its own hype except announce a launch date. But then, it didn’t have to. It used inaccessibility and an enigmatic silence to get the rumour mill turning, which is an age-old PR trick for sought-after brands.

So the hype bubble grew to epic proportions, in the tech press anyway, and it became increasingly unlikely the new release could really live up to it, even if it DID have a camera, a USB port and a proper keyboard. The problem is, people don’t want to be told what to do and think and like to bring inflated claims down to size.

Of course Apple doesn’t mind either way; at least nearly everyone on the planet now knows about the iPad and whoever is in the market for “an oversized iPhone” will buy one. In the words of Ivana Trump, it is what it is.

Pic courtesy of Gizmodo.com.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly digital news post (originally posted at Clicking & Screaming).

If you think blogging is ‘safe’ by definition, think again. Over the last few years there have been countless instances of anonymous bloggers being outed, and bloggers being brought to account for their content on legal grounds. This week, a couple more bloggers have been tripped up, but it seems as though their treatment has been exceptionally harsh.

On Sunday, blogger “MelanieDawn” found herself featured – without her permission and including a photograph – in an Irish Mail on Sunday article which quoted her as saying that her workmates were sexist. Understandably, she’s not happy and claims that the Mail crossed its wires when unscrupulously lifting content and a photograph from her blog (now deleted in its entirety).

It’s an awful example of a newspaper destroying a reputation for no discernible reason, not to mention the massive can of worms that is stealing content from bloggers. However, it sounds like “Mel” made an error of judgement while posting somewhere along the line, and bloggers must bear this in mind. Thankfully, legal proceedings should be heading the Mail‘s way and a decent payout should soften the blow somewhat. Thanks to Chris Applegate for the tip.

I read about the second incident while doing my bloggy rounds this morning. Online Journalism Blog has been covering the story of an anonymous blogger – revealed by Rory Cellan-Jones, with permission, to be Leeds University graduate student Joseph Wiseman – whose site, Seismic Shock, has been at the centre of a storm this week.

The blog, “a voice for those dedicated to exposing and opposing modern anti-Jewish religious attitudes”, is highly critical of an Anglican vicar named Steven Sizer, and matters came to a head when West Yorkshire Police visited Wiseman and asked him to take down his blog. The most worrying thing, as Paul Bradshaw at OJB noted, is that the police – armed with nothing but a complaint – were willing to trace the offending IP and successfully request computer files from Wiseman’s university.

Nutshell version: you are not anonymous. Ever. (Almost.)

Labour kicking Twitter ass…or are they?

TechCrunch, the US version of which is now successfully unhacked, reported yesterday on Tweetminster‘s study of UK Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. Perhaps unsurpringly given David Cameron’s clueless and short-sighted use of the classic old Twitter/Twatter routine (copyright Rory McGrath and every other rubbish comedian on the planet) on Absolute Radio back in July 2009, the Conservatives lag behind Labour, which has amassed comfortably more tweets and more followers. Too busy mucking about on mydavidcameron.com, Dave?

However, the Conservatives have the edge in one aspect of Twitter: the almighty retweet. From TC:

The report finds that the Conservative Party’s tweets from its official Twitter account have greater reach in terms of how many times they are re-tweeted (another Twitter user reposting the original ‘tweet’), which is comparable to mainstream media, and concludes that “the next election (on Twitter at least) will be between the Conservative party machine and Labour’s grassroots activists.”

Science v Religion: Social Media Death Match

In entirely unrelated (until now) news from the worlds of science and religion, NASA and the Pope are trying to put their stamp on social media.

According to The Social, the deliciously-named TJ Creamer, a US astronaut and dairy product enthusiast, sent the first tweets from space on Friday. Disappointingly eschewing the “Greetings, Earthlings…” approach Clicking & Screaming might have adopted, @Astro_TJ instead opted for an address to the “Twitterverse” and invited questions. 6/10.

Meanwhile, God’s representative on earth, Pope Benedict XVI, has encouraged priests to embrace social media. According to Catholicism’s top man, priests should blog, tweet, use Facebook and “otherwise harness the power of online communications for the kingdom of God”. He delivered his address via his YouTube channel, naturally.

Admirable and sensible though it may be to recognise social media as a powerful set of marketing tools, I can’t be the only one who read about the Pope’s address and instantly thought of the “Catholicism WOW!” campaign from Dogma. Let’s see what the Buddy Christ says:

Thought so.

The internet in numbers

Some Royal Pingdom statistics on web use in 2009: 81% of email are spam (of a total 90 trillion), there are 274 million websites, 1.73 billion internet users and 126 million blogs, and 30 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each year. Ouch!

Speaking of which, you have too many Facebook friends for your brain to handle. Best get that sorted.