My first reaction when I read Frank Shaw’s post this morning about leaving Waggener Edstrom Worldwide for a VP position at Microsoft was one of – talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

For those of you not familiar with either of those name Waggener Edstrom is the main public relations firm used by Microsoft for the majority of its dealings with the real world. Frank Shaw was the agency’s point man for anything Microsoft related.

Well it appears according to Frank’s post that as of August he’ll be moving to Microsoft as their new Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications, and yes he’s pretty happy about the move.

So I’m changing stride here at work as well, moving from an agency I love to a client I love, and will be joining Microsoft as Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communication at the end of August. And yes, I know this is called “burying the lead.”

Congrats Frank.

Waggener Edstrom’s head of their Microsoft account has a new job is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter is without any doubt the current darling of the Internet with number of users sitting at around the 6 million mark and growing. The numbers of course depend on who you listen to but that doesn’t change the fact that it looks like Twitter is here to stay. As with all services there will always be people who will love nothing better than to slice and dice any kind of data sets that can be derived from analyzing usage and traffic.

In the case of Twitter there is a big interest from PR companies such as Waggener Edstrom who monitors Twitter on behalf of its various client, but especially Microsoft. As result of this targeted need the folks at Waggener Edstrom have developed a piece of software called twendz which they use to monitor and analyze the Twittersphere.

What makes this really interesting though is that they are making the same tool they use available to everyone for free. The idea behind twendz as told to Mary Jo Foley by a company spokesperson

“Twendz marries twitter search with real-time sentiment analysis. twendz is able to effectively generalize the attitudes and feelings about a particular topic, product or brand as the conversation happens. So, for example, the latest top trend on twitter is about the new iPod Shuffle. twendz is able to tell you how people are feeling about the new iPod, and it can summarize those feelings and attitudes for you over time.”

Source: Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet

Now this could be kind of interesting to play around with .. definitely something to bookmark.

You to can be a Twitter trends analyst is a post from: The Inquisitr