What about a global public relations language? The XPRL project needs a boost and we can all give our contribution!

Xprl stands for ‘extensible mark up public relations language‘ and for two years has been the focus of an international grass roots project based in London operating also in the US and in Italy, initially supported by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management -the umbrella organization of 65 national public relations professional associations representing some 160 thousand professionals…. The aim of this project is to promote the work of the group in providing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant scheme to optimise software for PR practice. This will allow public relations operations from any country in the world to use resources and communicate globally without the need to re-input the information.The benefits, as with any other xml based computer language, would be enormous for practice (up to 30% lower costs for both operators and suppliers or receivers and as much as 30% more time available for practitioners to ‘think’ rather than to cut and paste). But, as more PR activity goes online, the major benefit for the profession is to finally give public relations all over the world, one, very much needed communication platform without having added hardware cost bespoke nor expensive modification to new and legacy software!

This project, following a meeting held in London last Thursday of the grass roots group which includes amongst others David Phillips, Mike Ferland, Mike Granatt, Toni Muzi Falconi, Mark Adams, is now being beefed up by a 250 thousand dollars matching fund challenge sponsor to accelerate the development of the XPRL initiative. The issue now, amongst others, is to rally the global public relations community and, most importantly, the thought and economic leaders of this community to support, both in applying its first applications and suggesting extensions, as well as in providing the necessary funds (www.xprl.org is a non profit), so that this project may accelerate and bring its benefits to all as soon as possible.

7 Replies to “What about a global public relations language? The XPRL project needs a boost and we can all give our contribution!

  1. Nicola, Markus is correct. The xprl project is definitely a grass root project and certaainly it has not intention of develping a top-down approach…and this in no way out of political correctness but simply because a top down approach would never work….unless we had microsoft or someone like that behind the project…but in this case they probably wouldn’t need us….

  2. @Nicola: If I’m not completely mistaken XPRL.org startet as a grass-roots project, but due to the special requirements of developing a mark-up language like XPRL it was necessary do give that project some structure. I’m not sure if I understand your top-down vs. grass-roots notion correctly. Who would the “top” be in this case? It certainly isn’t some idea that gets imposed on the PR industry by Global Alliance or XPRL.org or anybody else. On the other hand, judging from the slow progress of the XPRL progress there doesn’t seem to be much wide-spread demand for it among PR practitioners.
    I don’t even think that a lot of PR people have even heard about XPRL, yet, not to mention it’s implications (to be honest, it’s quite new for me, too, and I always considered myself to be well-informed about the technical side of PR, especially Online-PR).
    Compare it with web design: There wasn’t a grass-roots movement for the development of XML, but today you’ll hardly find a web designer complain about it’s development.
    I’m quite sure the same will happen here: As soon as XPRL has been developed and been built into efficient, well-working applications and tools it will be accepted in the industry and nobody will ask if it was grass-roots or top-down. Obviously a growing number of PR people feel the need for tools, that are appropriate for a changing world of communication – just think of New Media Release or the Web 2.0 you mentioned or Social Media etc.
    If we don’t want to chew what we get fed, it’s up to us (early adopters) tomake it a grass-roots thing 😉

  3. @Markus. There is also another consideration to do: are we shure that what Xprl guys are thinking as a top-down approach is already developing as a grass-root effort? I do not have any particular suggestion in this moment, but there are great discussions about the lifecycle of information in the Web. Expecially among people discussing about web 2.0.

  4. @Nicola: As far as I’ve understood the XPRL project circulation tracking is just one of more than 50 schemas, so there seems a lot more to it than can be seen today. You’re right that most bloggers don’t give a damn about press releases or other corp-speak disseminations, but they certainly will be observant of corporate blogs and the like. I guess XPRL functionality can and will be extended to other communication channels, and if it isn’t provisioned in the current XPRL specs it will be up to us PR practitioners to see to it.

  5. As I can read, Xprl is intented to track the circulation of messages addressed at traditional media: how did newspapers publish my press release? did they copy and paste or dare to interpret it? and so on…
    What about the consumer generated media? they do not read press releases and cannot be influenced by the fact that their publishers depend economically on the same companies that they are mentioning in thei articles (Chomsky says that in a more elegant and documented way 🙂 ).
    A blogger will not publish a post about a product because he has received a press release: it is more likely that he will do it because the customer service was not able to solve his problem or trated his as an enemy (many companies do that).
    Xprl is useless in this case, because it assumes that information circulates in a sort of paradise, in wich you can controll every passage.

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