ReadWriteWeb

Here at ReadWriteWeb we get piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email. You'll notice that only a tiny percentage of those pitches result in write-ups here. How can you increase your chances of getting written about here or on other tech blogs? In this post we'll discuss five ways that companies often try and fail to get our attention and one way that almost always works.

We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about #32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked #6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search engine results too. Is this true?

Yahoo! announced this morning that the company will authenticate the identities of its 248 million users if they chose to login to OpenID supporting sites with their Yahoo! ID.

Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL's support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.

Is Amazon supporting Open Social? If they are, that would be big news. If they have decided not to, that would be big news too. We reported last night that Amazon was announcing support for the Google-led protocol, along with a number of other smaller announcements.

We've been on the phone and email with Amazon's PR department all day today. It's been a great example of the challenges any of these huge companies face in trying to be either Open or Social, much less both.

The long and short of it is this: Amazon has nothing to say; they told us they did, but they don't. If they do have anything to say they would like to say it through words put into my mouth. Thanks, Amazon. I don't think you've got much Openness to bring to my Social even if that is what you intend to do.

Here's the time-line.