If you manage a PR agency team responsible for constant engagement and follow-ups with journalists and bloggers, you will definitely want to watch out for Highrise – a shared contact manager that, according to creators 37signals, “helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next… …Highrise helps you collaborate on people. You can use it alone or with your co-workers. You can think of it as a company-wide, web-based, shared address book with a few twists.”

Brilliant!

While this concept is not exactly ground-breaking, the problem is - past attempts at building this (either professionally or in-house) has never won much favour. Execution is everything, and, in this case, 37signals has the right track record to get us excited over this productivity and collaboration tool.

The company blog offers a preview of Highrise; and you can sign up here for upcoming product news.

This is going to be good.

Update: Highrise is finally released. Go straight to the tour here. For quick insights into some potential user-issues, have a look at the comments following the blog post announcing its launch. But despite concerns on issues over the limited-features and upgrade cost, this is well worth considering.

Back after three busy weeks crammed with a business expedition to Saigon (Vietnam), ‘New Media’ training sessions for clients and colleagues, and church projects. And on every one of those 21 days, I’ve been bugged with a typical Blogger’s dilemma – I’m too busy to blog, but should I still do it? Should I keep my (online) world in the know? Should I chronicle this part of life’s journey?

My silence over the past weeks has more than answered this question for myself, but here’s an excellent insight by wallydownundy into one of the most common (and comical) pickles that we bloggers sometimes find ourselves in.

Vietnam Venture
The natives prefer the tradition name, “Saigon”, to the modern “Ho Chi Minh City”. And do so I. Behind the two names you’ll find a city that is rich with tradition, yet not lacking for modern economic growth opportunities. Vietnam is drawing FDIs at quite an unmatched pace today, and I see great opportunities in Saigon because it has a winning compromise of China’s characteristic massive size, Singapore’s manageability and a disproportionately large young and literate population. Like all emerging markets, the marketing communications industry is still in its infancy, but business is flowing in, and it’s certainly primed for growth. Just recently, Grey Global Group announced its joint venture in Vietnam and I expect many more communications companies to follow in 2007.

‘New Media’ Training
Most encouragingly, after ‘New Media’ training sessions and discussions these days, there are fewer occurrences of the classic questions – the almost inevitable, “So… how do we ‘target’ the bloggers?” or “Can we start uploading our TV ads on YouTube?”

I think we’re getting somewhere.

Web 2.0 Highlights
The Digital Ethnography workgroup at Kansas State University posted an absolutely fantastic video that summarises the entire Web 2.0 phenomenon in less than 5 minutes. It’s titled “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” and the clip has already been doing its rounds in Cyberspace, but certainly still worth bookmarking.

The launch of Yahoo Pipes brings us one step closer to automating the arduous process of monitoring news online. On the back of this announcement, Ben, my Scoopasia.com partner-in-crime, wrote a pretty useful piece on something that we’ve always been lamenting – the lack of automation in (PR) Work.

In its now-trademark SMNR style, Shift Communications has launched a Social Media Newsroom template. To rival this, one can almost expect Edelman to come up with an ‘Omnibus’ to complement its StoryCrafter tool!

It’s good to be back in the world of 2.0.