5 PR Sites I Don't Want You to Know About

Online PR.com

This website does exactly what I do: collect links to PR websites. The PR Hamster comes with a slightly more modern design but James Horton has been maintaining the site since 1997 and it ranks top 3 for the keyword "public relations" on Google, right next to Wikipedia! (at least from where I'm surfing). 

PR Channel Dashboard

Though out-of-date and obviously incomplete, the PR Channel's Dashboard is a simple and elegant solution for browsing a broad range of PR resources. Rather than linking to blogs or tools, PR Channel directs directly to specific posts which are sorted in a simple but effective interface. I know at least one little hamster that would sleep better if the site didn't have such a decent Google page rank too.

BeFrame PR Frame

This Firefox add-on gives you a toolbar full of PR resources. It contains lists of monitoring tools, PR awards and newswires and a built-in search bar for the social media monitoring service Social Mention. Most importantly: the bar updates itself automatically! This one offers some good value for PR pros and naturally scares the hamster a little bit.

However, I did notice that the automatic updates haven't been showing up for a while. Also, I found more PR Awards and made a super high-tech PR awards calendar out of it! Finally, installing a toolbar in your browser is a tad invasive. Nevertheless, I might still offer all the PR Hamster links as a bookmark package someday just to be safe...

PostRank

Not only are their lists of public relations blogs continuously updated according to a sophisticated 'PostRank', but you can filter individual blog posts according to their score, regardless of the blog they were published on. It's really quite a cool system. At the same time, it is also a rather confusing site, starting with the four sub-sites presented on the main home page, down to the system of rankings, lists and followers that takes a Phd in computer science to understand. The fact that there are different lists for "public relations" and "PR" doesn't help either. I doubt if this confusion is so great that people will bookmark PR Hamster instead however, so my main hope is that you never find out about this website. 

PR.AllTop.com

AllTop has a huge collection of PR blogs, making it a direct competitor to PR Hamster. I like to think that the short description with each link makes the PR Hamster a little more user friendly than most link portals. At AllTop however, they chose to display the last 5 post titles to help you assess a blog. This method works great: it is simple, informative and always up to date. I'm especially jealous of the "Most Popular Stories" widget at the top of the page.

I have been searching for a better way to display information about the links we offer for a while now. For example, we could add ratings, comments or tags. I haven't found the right solution yet I'm afraid. Until I do, I will have to rely on the story that a little kitten hamster is drowned every time someone visits pr.alltop.com!