I am having a very strange day. For the first time, the PR shoe is on the other foot and I’m trying to get PR and talking to reporters. Right now, I’m waiting on a callback from our local NBC news station. They’ve been calling us all day about showing up to do an interview in my living room tonight. They were in a big hurry to book it, but now we don’t even know if they’re going to show up.

Stay tuned. Whether I get covered is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, the fuss is about a press release I sent out about my new book, Where Have All The Emails Gone? The official press release went out yesterday and we’ve been gearing up to let you, our readers know about it this week.

In any case, the headline was “Is Osama bin Laden reading private White House email? New book shows it’s possible.” And that got NBC’s attention. But was it enough to get them to plop a camera in my living room tonight? Don’t know yet.

And, so now, the shoe’s on the other foot. Rather than calling each individual news person (which is how I like to be approached), we just blasted out the release to a list we bought. Now, I’m the one mailing to a list. Not exactly my idea of best-practice, but given my total lack of time, it’s what had to happen.

I’m beginning to understand a little more of the PR challenge. Our accumulated list is something like 99,000 people. If we were to try to figure out who on that list should get the release, it could take years to go through the whole thing. But one email takes a short time. Of course, now each individual editor has to deal with the PR UCE that comes flowing in. My email box is always filled to the brim with this crap.

And now, I’m doing it, too. So weird.

By the way, here’s the fulltext of the release, just for kicks. — David

Does Osama bin Laden know President Bush’s confidential travel itinery before Mr. Bush’s own staff does? Can Mahmoud Ahmadinejad read our war plans and strike first? If Vladimir Putin knows America’s secret foreign policy decisions, how badly could that hurt us?

Our new book, Where Have AllThe Emails Gone?, by our own David Gewirtz, shows how something as seemingly benign as White House email can have freaky national security consequences.

Apple’s been hit by a slew of iPhone-related lawsuits since its mobile phone launched this year, and that number increased with legal action filed by Klausner Technologies. According to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the Apple iPhone’s much-touted, well-implemented Visual Voicemail feature infringes on two existing Klausner Technologies’ patents. AT&T, which exclusively sells the iPhone, also was named in the suit.

The suit also names Comcast, Cablevision and Skype, companies that Klausner Technologies alleges have also violated the same patents as Apple and AT&T, but not because of the iPhone–it’s due to similar features those companies offer to their customers.

A new mobile market research project now measures and ranks mobile Web sites, trying to identify how well they perform for handheld device users.

Intended to be an ongoing weekly measure of mobile Web performance, the mobile Web performance index, from Keynote Competitive Research, uses a trio of metrics to evaluate 10 popular online destinations. The index doesn’t compare the wireless network metrics to wired broadband metrics, but it does show wide variance in how well the mobile sites perform.

SBSH Mobile Software announced a new iLauncher for Windows Mobile update to version 3.1. Introducing a lot of new changes, including: all new Floating Panels concept–getting your tabs content to float on top the Today screen, Thumb-Tabs mode optimized for thumbs navigation, Active Programs display and much more.

Handheld computers could help give a voice to the huge numbers of people that do not officially exist. The gadgets are being used to gather data about the estimated one billion people who live in shanty towns.

The Mobile Metrix project aims to determine how big these communities are and discover what their lives are like. The up-to-date data will be given to governments and aid workers to help fine tune projects trying to help these communities.

800PBX, provider of Virtual PBX and toll-free numbers, now offers a free courtesy service, SantaCalls, for this Christmas season. This innovative service will call children at the designated time and announce the customized parent’s message or one of the prerecorded Santa messages. The service will also capture the child’s wish and deliver them by email to his or her parent. The original recordings are also available online and can be optionally shared with the 800PBX community. For a limited time, the best recording gets a free gift and the first “Happy Christmas” call from Santa himself. Parents must register for the free service and provide the email address to deliver the recorded wish list. Santa will call at the designated time from “North Pole” and talk to your child and ask for his or her wishes.

Belkin’s new HDMI 2-to-1 Video Switch links two HD devices, such as your HD-DVD player and your videogame console, to your HDTV through a single HDMI or DVI connection so you can enjoy full 1080p video and audio. The HDMI 2-to-1 Switch is currently available in the US and Canada, with planned release in Europe, Asia, and Australia in March 2008.