Mother nature came trick ‘o treating in the San Francisco Bay area this evening. We just had a magnitude 5.6 earthquake, which is considered moderate. It was centered about 9 miles northeast of San Jose, and we felt it here in San Mateo county. Normally, we don’t feel earthquakes in the house, but this one seemed to last for several seconds. Happily, everything seems fine and there are no early reports of fires, injuries or damage.

The quake is posted on the USGS site, listed as ID 40204628. If you’re in the Bay area, and you felt it, you can report your experience to help build the community intensity map. You’ll find the links right on the USGS site. 324 reports are already filed — less than 30 minutes after it happened. You can do this whether you are visiting or a resident.

Freaky.

Analyst surveys often seem to quantify the obvious. That seemed to be the case recently, when Forrester revealed that most of its analysts don’t like using walled-garden AR portals on vendor websites. Not surprising — few people like to register for content. That’s why we have things like BugMeNot and Anonymous Cowards.

Yet, a debate of sorts rose up around this point among some of the AR bloggers. Anonymous AR bloggers at the ARmadgeddon blog took issue with the Forrester thumbs-down on AR portals, and cited agreement from a Hill & Knowlton AR expert. They believe access to privileged vendor content justifies access hassles.

Aren’t AR portals a bit retro? We’re well into the Web 2.0 and UGC window, and it has implications for AR just as it does for everything else. Some AR pro’s — like Catherine Helzerman and Skip MacAskill — are willing to experiment in Second Life while they keep the conventional paradigm running. Many more are turning onto blogging. Meanwhile, fundamental changes are already beginning to appear out in the mainstream — in press rooms, websites, collaboration environments.

So here’s what I would do instead of investing in a legacy walled-garden AR portal. Start-ups, multinationals — doesn’t matter.

First, collaborate with my media relations colleagues. Focus on making sure the online press room is properly designed and always freshly stocked with content. The idea is to create a high-value reference resource with documents, audio, video, photos, contact information, blog links, archives, targeted search, email alerts, and feeds. For help with priorities, check out TEKgroup International’s free annual study on what journalists want in a corporate press room. (Caveat: high tech represents less than 15% of respondents this year.)

Next, collaborate with my corporate web teams to make sure company websites and site maps support the way that analysts perform online research. Embed supplemental content, links, keywords, titles, tags, share widgets, and feed opt-ins right on the very product and services pages where analysts are likely to land. Use SEO techniques to optimize content visibility within the corporate websites and beyond — in search engines, bookmarking sites, aggregation sites. Informal testing with hand-picked analysts can really help.

Last step: start looking at Web 2.0-style collaboration tools for sharing my proprietary content with analysts on the fly. Shared spreadsheets, wikis, chatrooms, videoconferencing - the list of choices is awesome. A good place to start looking is the Office 2.0 Conference website.

Conversations about industry analyst influence often swirl around how analyst visibility in the media does — or does not — count. That’s an important conversation. Yet, focusing on the value of clips might make you miss what might be the most important change taking place: analysts adopting media as a bona fide content distribution channel.

Media has always been an important strut in the analyst machinery. Media visibility generates street cred and prospects. Behind the scenes, media alliances can be crucial in research panels and speaker placements.

This is different. This is firms breaking down the traditional visible distinctions between “media” and “analyst” content. For them, media is not a tacked-on, opportunistic publicity tool; it’s a strategic content distribution channel. I went back and forth on some of the pro’s and con’s with Freeform Dynamics’ Dale Vile a few months ago.

In the latest Valley View Ventures newsletter, Fred Abbott offers another take on this discussion. Here’s an excerpt, courtesy of Fred:

Packaging to Fit a New Distribution Channel

Media visibility is one part of a new analysis delivery model. Embracing the media to distribute their insights requires analysts to rethink how they package those insights. An increasingly influential group of successful IT analysts disaggregate deliverables so that the information will flow through various value-added distribution channels without disintegrating in the process. Conceptually, this is like how small retailers learned to display and package their deliverables so that they could be shipped and arrive safely in their satisfied customers’ hands.

Packaging of IT analysis has gone through metamorphoses before. In the early eighties, Gartner revolutionized the IT market research business by introducing short research notes (450 words) to compete against competitors’ multi-page research reports. Until that point, brief reports were considered too short to convey valuable information. Today IT industry analysts gifted at communicating insight in the context of short vignettes, wrapped with business perspective, are breaking new ground in how to communicate with a broader and better informed audience.

In the B2B spaces, it’s early days. Analyst best practices — and even what’s at stake — aren’t all that clear. Yet.

Meanwhile, analyst relations people need to keep an eye on this. It further complicates decisions around that gray, mushy overlap area in media-analyst Venn diagrams. Reclassifying analysts probably won’t help. Rethinking output categories and metrics might.

Four high-profile bloggers have recently become vCard-carrying members of the ICT industry analyst community. First, it was Daniel Taylor returning to the analyst ranks at Yankee Group. Next, David Tebbut joined Freeform Dynamics. Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang joined Forrester Research and Matthew Aslett joined The 451 Group. And just in time for Oktoberfest, too.

I’ve always believed that the collective reputation of “the analysts” depends on the quality of the people filling the jobs. If so, prospects for the analysts are looking pretty good.