Saltire had an entertaining piece last week about the emerging practice of pitching blogs, discussing how a NY-based PR firm has started including some journalists’ blogs in their media lists in hope of raising groundswell buzz for their pitches among the blogging community.

Pitching print journalists who happen to also maintain blogs is nothing new, of course, but in this case, it seems the agency in question chose to actually direct their pitch to the blog as the chosen outlet for the journalist’s writing, as opposed to pitching the journalist in the hopes of gaining more traditional “ink”.

Interesting tactic, if perhaps a little blunt.

Seems like the foreseeable response of your average blogger to this kind of overt, direct attempt to shop a story would either be to simply ignore it or to spend more time publicly pondering the method of approach, the fact of the pitch, than the substance behind it.

This, not incidentally, is precisely what Steve MacLaughlin at Saltire did. Sure, he links to the original story being pitched (as the agency presumably hoped) but then proceeds to dissect the notion of the pitch (in none too flattering terms).

Steve says, amongst other things: "Methinks the public relations folks don't quite understand the whole blogging thing..."

Which is probably right, in the majority of cases. But maybe the individuals behind this particular pitch are an exception. Regardless of the initial response at Saltire and elsewhere, they certainly achieved the desired end of driving the story in question. And it should be pointed out that the story they were attempting to drive attention for happens to be an article all about blogs and blogging (Business 2.0’s “Blog Nation” piece), so directing the pitch to other blogs has a certain inevitable logic to it.

The story got more or less play at other places, not all of it exactly what the client may have had in mind. I'm sure we'll see more instances of this in coming months. I was interviewed about this whole idea back in the middle of last year by the Media Relations Insider newsletter. If I can find a copy or link to the resulting article, I'll post it.

Seems like this is probably the appropriate time to out myself as an openly flack blogger. I’m a PR guy who happens to blog. Or a blogger who happens to work in PR – depending on your POV. I’ve never tried to hide this, but it occurs to me that I’ve not often mentioned it in the main body of the blog (although I talk about it on the Archive/About Me page).

There’s scads of journalist bloggers out there already, including some of the longest-serving bloggers on the block. Seems only natural for PR folk to be blogging too.

The flack is the natural symbiotic complement to the hack ;-) Makes sense that both sides of the relationship should gravitate towards the same environment. Blogging is conversation, in kind of a Cluetrain sense. If lots of journalists are participating in the conversation through their blogs, it feels right for engaged flacks to participate too.

If markets are conversations, marketers need to be where the conversations are happening - or something like that. I'm well aware that I'm torturing the logic here, and some purist will no doubt write and tell me I've deliberately misinterpreted Cluetrain to my own ends - but I'm sure there's a nugget of sense lurking in this thought somewhere.

The question really is: am I the first of the flackbloggers, or are there more out there like me? Come out, come out wherever you are...

Not that I’ve ever used my blog for PR ends, as such. I’ve resisted the urge to comment on or promote client initiatives in these posts – just wouldn’t seem like the most authentic thing to do, although I could have that way wrong. If one of my clients has something I think a particular journalist might be interested in, I’m more likely to just send the reporter a direct note or simply call them up.

No, the purpose of this blog is not to be a pitch vehicle. Don't think it would even work terribly well if that was the intent - not unless I could find some way to guarantee that the specific reporters I'm interested in reaching were avidly reading everything I post. Yet I'm still here for the conversation in one way or another, I guess.

Either way, I can't believe I’m the only PR guy in blogdom. There must be other flackbloggers in the world. And should it be flackbloggers? Or blogflackers? Or floggers?

*heh* “Floggers” I like it. Goes nicely with the common perception of flacks – we're always trying to pitch something – always trying to "flog" our stories (not necessarily how we really work, of course, but you get the point).

So. I’m not blogging: I’m flogging. Nicely weaves in the subtext of what this job has sometimes devolved into – “flogging a dead horse”. And then there’s also the many people I've met in PR who really ought to be flogged. Ooooh I could have seconds of fun with this...

I’m a flogger - and proud of it!

OK, I said I wasn’t going to do this, but it’s too good to resist...

Dave Winer points to a sparkling newborn blog, set up by Fortune techcolumnist Peter Lewis and actually being hosted at the main Fortune.com site.

Bravo, Fortune, for demonstrating what appears to be genuinely clueful behaviour.

What I really like about this “old media” incursion into the blogverse is that it could so easily have taken a totally different tone and direction. It would have been way too easy (and just horribly disappointing) for Fortune to fall in with the obvious kneejerk – spill lots of ink/pixels over the big hairy questions du jour: “is blogging journalism?” “are blogs the new new media?”.

Looks like someone at Fortune’s smart enough to have realized that these questions are, frankly, valueless. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider weblogs to be a “real” form of media or not. In effect, the question (as much as it was ever remotely pertinent) has already been answered anyway.

Blogito ergo sum.

As soon as the first person read the first blog posting, the medium existed as a real medium. It is what it is.

John Ellis in Fast Company was heading in the right direction with his oft-cited “All the News That’s Fit to Blog” piece:

“Major news organizations breathed a huge sigh of relief when dotcom mania came crashing down. That meant that the barriers to entry in their markets were reerected and that their (mostly) monopoly positions were resecured. Now the bloggers are at the gates, eating into the media's value-added proposition. It's no small threat, because the peer-to-peer technology that underlies it is what the military calls a "force multiplier.”

But this still assumes an OR logic to the whole thing which seems just plain wrong.

It’s not that blogs will kill print - that’s unsupportable alarmist sillybuggery. No disrespect to John at all - I think his conclusion was drawn for dramatic effect. But I don't think even he really believes that blogs will entirely cancel out old media. That’s in the same league as thinking that radio would kill print (or video killed the radio star, for that matter).

Blogging is just a game changer. I know it’s really not as simple as this, but I want to say something like: weblogs are to print media as TV is to radio. Just as the Web has already done, blogging spurs print publications to change their preconceptions, methods and means. It's about agility. Blogs send a wake up call, forcing both old and new ways of working to rapidly adapt. But it doesn't have to be “adapt or die.” Just adapt. Adapt and grow stronger, hopefully - at least adapt.

And yes – this counts equally for both worlds. As there's room for both, so too must both continue to change.

Blogs have had to rapidly evolve and adapt to get this far. Incidentally, much of the adaptation seems to have been unconsciously driven by observing how print journalism works and finding a relevant synthesis for online purposes. Blogging will continue to thrive and survive as a form of journalism as the number of strong, independent voices (and, incidentally, the number of established inkblot journalists and commentators) participating in the medium continues to increase.

Print journalism must also adapt, but it will continue to thrive and survive by being so very good at what it has always done – responding to the changing needs of a changing world.

I enjoy reading the WSJ, the Guardian and other “print” pubs on my Palm every day - easier to manage on the crowded subway. But I will still reach for the ink and paper versions of the same whenever I can. Similarly, I love the online versions of both Canada's national daily newspapers, but wouldn’t cancel my doorstep subscription copies for anything. Can’t see this changing any time soon.

So. Back to the point: the encouraging thing about Peter’s blog, is that he avoids getting into the “what’s all this blogging stuff anyway” commentary, and instead just leaps in with a clear and natural human voice commenting on things that matter to him.

It's not another pundit sounding off on "the blogging phenom", it's a real writer using the emerging means to his own ends.

One of his first posts is a sizzling rant about what he describes as the “reeking piece of legislative pork rind” that is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002.

It’s a good piece. You should go and read it. Really. It's a lot more interesting than the rest of what I have to say below. Go on. I don't mind. Off you go.

Full marks to Fortune for having the courage of their convictions. Sure, they probably got suitably lawyered up before letting Peter step up on the blog soapbox, but it’s still a worthy and clueful thing to be doing. A much healthier and more rational response to the blogging opportunity than that taken by certain well-respected tech columnists (beautifully satirized by Kevin Marks masquerading as John C. Mahler).

Tangential interruption: is a blog post that comments on the nature and practice of blogging a “metablog”, i.e. a blog about blogging?

Or, as so many blog posts are essentially a form of “meta” behaviour anyway (very often pointing to links and examples of whatever it is they’re commenting about), is blogging about the act of blogging actually a meta-meta-blog.

Whatever. I just know I never met a blog I didn’t like....

Bloglull

Enduring something of an enforced blog hiatus, alas. Cause: I’ve knacked the frigging Compaq yet again. Totally. The poor thing’s stonecold dead this time and has been for the last few days.

I’m not big on blogging from the office so, until I can get the Compaq’s power supply fixed or replaced, this blog’s going to be on sabbatical for at least a few days.

Got to try to fix the laptop before I head to San Francisco next week, so I can still email Sausage and she can still get online while I’m away...

Unrelated news:

I Love Me, vol. I is currently the #1 hit returned by Google in a search for “Hegelian Synthesis”, thanks to my snarky remarks about the Borg’s Charles Fitzgerald, below.

Wonder how long this will persist? I’m mildly entertained by the idea of struggling philosophy undergrads staggering into this site in search of enlightenment.

On which note, here’s my one and only Hegel joke and a borrowed clerihew (from Brian Leftow):

How many Hegelians does it take to change a light bulb?
None-the bulb is just at one dialectical pole between 'bright' and 'dark'--it will eventually synthesize these into a faint enough glow to see by...

"G.W.F. Hegel
Is less nutritious than a bagel.
A bagel has just one hole in the dough -
Hegel's all holes, wherever you go."

And finally, sage words from the Philosophy Department of the College of Charleston, South Carolina.

In their handouts for the first lecture in Philosophy 101 “A Brief Introduction to the Nature and Methods of Philosophy”:

"I. Why philosophy is unlike any other discipline:
A. It's breath"

Clearly, a course designed for those with philosophical aspirations.

Not a retreat, just Hegelian synthesis…

Much jubilation through the blogvines today, with the news that Microsoft has canned its infamous Hailstorm initiative.

The New York Times piece, in particular, has some choice quotes: "There was incredible customer resistance," said a Microsoft .Net consultant, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified” and “…after nine months of intense effort the company was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.” No, really?

Hailstorm failed to gain support for one simple reason: the 'Net selects against centralization.

The bullshit rhetoric of the original Hailstorm announcement included this masterpiece of MSFT doublespeak: “HailStorm is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information”

What a crock. Hailstorm was never going to be user centric, it was Microsoft-centric. Just another attempt by the Borg to seize absolute control over the ‘Net.

But the ‘Net. Cannot. Be centralized. That would totally defeat the design, the point, the purpose and the potential of the thing.

If Hailstorm had succeeded, if Microsoft had pulled together widespread support for this thing and ended up with a single humungous central store of user profile data, rack-mounted in some “secure” Redmond facility, all you’d have would be:

1) the first single point of failure in the history of the ‘Net, and;
2) one great big honeypot to attract hackers the world over.

The quiet death of Hailstorm is a moment for hope, proving that no one was easily fooled as to Redmond’s real intentions. As Salon’s Scott Rosenberg said at the time of the original announcement, Hailstorm’s real raison d'être was to “put all your data in one convenient place -- and leave Bill Gates with the keys.”

A scary proposition, indeed. As their behaviour with Hotmail has clearly demonstrated, Microsoft has a unique and interesting definition of the words “privacy” and “personal”. First, they open up Hotmail accounts to become a spam-for-all playground; then, after allowing your account to bloat out with all those “mortgage rate alert” and “herbal viagra” messages, practically guaranteeing you’ll always be running right up against the 2MB inbox limit, they start auto-purging your personal email for failure to comply with their account size limits.

Microsoft: One degree of separation between our methods and the Mob.

What right thinking person would entrust their detailed personal profile information to any company with such a loose grip on the concept of online privacy?

So Hailstorm is dead. Good thing. Yet as we’re all now switching to gleefully discussing Hailstorm in the past tense – Hailstorm R.I.P. – perhaps we should not be so easily fooled. My bet is that this bad boy’s just going underground for a few months. I’d fully expect it to resurface in the not-too-distant future, rebranded and snuck in under cover of some new Microsoft altruism – another of Bill’s big shiny gifts to the free world.

Perhaps the combined impact of the antitrust conviction and the sweeping moral cleansing wrought by Enronitis, will lead them to get it right next time around. Dave Winer’s Scripting News piece hints at the key behaviour modification they need to make first:

"Microsoft can still become the statesman of our industry, the evangelist of developers, the enabler of markets. They can have the lion's share of the growth, they just have to give up on the concept of control. It's just an illusion anyway, they don't actually have any control, and as soon as their strategy reflects this, we can all get productive at building the next layer of the Internet, including Microsoft.”

Final thought on this: as a proud card-carrying flack I have to confess a certain delight in the nebulous spin attempted by Microsoft’s Charles Fitzgerald defending this ignominious defeat: “We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace.”

Launch a braindead product idea, then try to figure out where it fits within the “reality of the marketplace”. Yet another case where a little Marketing Aforethought could have saved them months of grief.

I love Fitzgerald's suggestion that stupid product ideas never die, they just undergo “Hegelian synthesis”. Riiight. Have to remember that one…

deep breath...pausing to rethink

normal service will be resumed as soon as I've had a stern word with myself...

Still a weird thing to do to a keyboard, if you ask me

OK...this time I kind of have to admit that Dvorak's very nearly funny, if you route around the unpleasant misogyny masquerading as sarcasm towards the end.

Some of the responses, though, are better. Like this one.

Blog me Århus

There's a better joke in there somewhere, but I've too heavy a foodover to manage it.

Cause: the sparkly and bewitching Sausage treated me to birthday scoffery at Cafe Brussel last night (and this after she'd already spent most of Friday whipping up a bostin chicken curry for me then showering me with spiff prezzies).

Cafe Brussel was terrific - immaculate service, phenomenal food and a wine list that will blow your mind (and your wallet). Only place I've eaten that lists a $3000 bottle of wine - yikes! I think both Sausage and I got a sinking feeling looking through the menus and realising that we might have chosen somewhere a little over our heads. The fact that we were about the only people in the place not wearing Prada was probably a good clue. Yet with our combined karmas rolling sevens all night, we some how managed to slip through a wormhole in the menu and ended up stuffed to the giddlings for 150 bucks. *phew*

Meanwhile, back in blogville. Been getting a lot of Danish traffic in the last week or so. Followed the backlinks to this Jens Winther bloke. Left a comment on the site and got nice email in return. Now I'm told I'm responsible for Jens starting an English blog to parallel his Danish one. Nice to be held responsible for something when the post-binge guilts have me feeling mostly irresponsible right now.

Wish me luck, btw. I'm about to upgrade the Compaq to Office 2000. Last time I tried something like this I totalled the frigging thing and was offline for months. I used to know how to do this shit - back before the bloatware got too complex for mortal man to understand. Now I'm reduced to sprinkling holy water, crossing my fingers and closing my eyes every time I click on a setup.exe icon.

*deep breath* here goes...

pleazed but puzzled

Just notice I've been linked to by gtabloggers.com, a gangblog set up by and for bloggers in the Greater Toronto Area (hence GTA). Thanks for the link, of course, always love getting the traffic.

But then the idea of a gangblog that centres in a real space geography starts twisting my melon. Ankle deep into Weinberger's book, his argument about the fundamentally space-like spacelessness of the web is screwing with my mind.

Then I suddenly find myself in the middle of a local blog that takes the distanceless nature of a space that exists in no space and grounds it again in the reality of a specific locale.

I need more coffee...

I’m not yet deep enough in to SPLJ to be able to comment with any real usefulness on the substance of the argument. With two kids, four and two, who has time to read? I’m coming at this book in my own small pieces – a handful of pages at a time on the subway ride home or last thing at night.

But this is far from a bad thing. As it turns out – I need and want to read the book this way. Tom Peters on the jacket copy says it right: “This is a book to savor. Not to speed read.”

Walk, slowly, through a small set of paragraphs. Stop. Re-read. Pause to grok in fullness.

So I can’t enter the discussion on content and thesis yet. But one thing I can say, is that the writing is startlingly beautiful. When Weinberger blogs, he blogs like the rest of us – scrambly, scribbled stream of consciousness stuff. But when he writes, man does he write. There is an economy of structure, a light touch that would make Jane Austen proud. Diamond bright sentences stop me in my tracks:

“The facts of nature drop out of the Web.”
“Time like that can spoil you for the real world.”

Even when the language lists close to lyrical, the images still strike with surgical precision:

“We’re falling into email relationships that, stretching themselves over years, imperceptibly deepen, like furrows worn into a stone hallway by the traffic of slippers.”

For a warm Sunday hammock somewhere, I could immerse myself and draw deep draughts of David’s deliberation. Absent such leisure, I’m content to sample in small pieces, loosely joined. A book to savor, indeed.

Reaching out to that anal retentive stoner demographic

Like bad carbohydrates, I just love those junky "neat stuff" catalogues that come blown into the weekend papers or stuffed into the airline seat pocket. You know - the Sharper Image, Williams-Sonoma kinda things. Full of crap you never knew you had no use for - all available personalized with up to three initials!!!

Back in Blighty, the best bit (in fact the only good bit) of opening the credit card bills, was the prospect of spending a blissful half hour on the bog, sneering at the crud in the latest Innovations Catalogue.

Now I'm in Canada, of course, I get a whole new class of lifestyle marketing bollocks dropping on the doormat. But one entry in the latest one fair twists me melon. From the Spring/Summer 2002 Hedonics Catalogue ("Really Really Neat Stuff"™):


Hide keys and cash in plain sight
"Where would a wiseman hide a pebble?"
"On the beach."
"Stone Safe is ideal for hiding a spare set of keys by our house, in a garden or patio for those emergency situations...far more discretely than under the mat or in the planter. Made of concrete, the Stone Safe features a 4 oz airtight, watertight container that is perfect for storing spare keys or emergency cash. Use indoors for hiding your stash or valuables."


Er... Did I catch that right?

FWIW - this thing is published in Toronto. "Toronto the Good", as the guidebooks used to call it. Not some West Coast hippy haven - but dry, safe, presbyterian, MOR Toronto.

Fnord!

Happy happy joy joy

*tiny jiggy dance steps*

My review copy of Small Pieces Loosely Joined arrived today (thank you, David), and I’m utterly hooked. Even though I had already read almost the entire text online as it was being written; the ink is still clearly mightier than the pixel.

Not deep enough in to provide any penetrating comment or feedback as yet, but I love the fact that four pages into the darn thing he’s already dropping palindromes and quoting Monty Python’s “Ann Elk” sketch. Perfect. This is after all a book about the Web which, as we all know, is a medium (place? thing? groupmind?) almost entirely composed of Python quotes and word games.

For the record, I already like it so much, I’ve even bought a copy. Actually two – both Chapters and Amazon emailed today to say it’s on its way. I’m getting Weinberger atom spam.

OK. Dodging off to finish reading Larry Weber now, before I permanently flip my Weinberger groupie bit.

More l8r.

Where does this crap come from?

Sometimes, you've just got to love spam. Especially when its the totally surreal, what the fjörk are they on about kind of spam. Like this piece that showed up in our home email account the other day, marked (but of course) High Priority:

>From: "diesel fuel injection" c8h@cmmail.com
>Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 9:35 AM
>Subject: Head & Rotor VE 03/26

> Dear Sir,
>
> we have been in the field of diesel fuel injection
> systems for quite a few years.(CHINA)

Great!

I'm puzzled by the "CHINA" reference, though. Am I to conclude that the pronoun in this case stands for the entire nation of China? I'm getting spammed by the whole People's Republic? Geezus. I must rock over there. “We, China, bring you Michael these urgent messages of diesel fuel injection...”

Or maybe the spammer is Cockney? “We’ve bin in the haddock game for cats, me ol’ China.”¹

Hmmm. It goes on:

> We tell you that we will update our VE h&r
> (hydraulic heads for the VE distributor pump) list in our
> homepages.

I'll alert the media.

>Thirty more models will be added.

At last. Thought for once I was actually in receipt of some spam that didn’t feature models. You’ll be nudge-nudging about your wankel rotary engine next...

>And the minimum order will be 6pcs a model.

Right. Supersized models. Greasy, six pieces at a time, finger-lickin’, family bucket models. From China. Struggling to contain my indifference...

>We quote them as follows:
> 3-cyl:USD:50/1pcs
> 4-cyl:USD:50/1pcs
> 5-cyl:USD:55/1pcs
> 6-cyl:USD:55/1pcs

OK – if that’s the best repartee these chicken-scoffing babes can come out with, my whelm is going to be severely undered over here.

> We can ship the following three models to you within 8~10 weeks. after
> we receive your payment.

Er...

> If you feel interested in our products,please advise the details about
> what you need,such model name,part number,quantity and so on.

Er.......

>We are always within your touch.

*phew* Oh, me too. Totally, baby.

> Looking forward to our favorable cooperation.

Likewise. No really. I’m so nearly excited.

This curious epistle is then suffixed with a string of digits, stretching for nearly two entire pages. Abridged version (if you want to read the full list, you can bugger off and get your own – this is my spam):

> 096400-0920
> 096400-0242
...
> 096540-0080
> (ZEXEL)
> 146400-8821
...
> 146404-2200
> 146430-1420
> (BOSCH)
> 1 468 333 320
> 1 468 333 323
...
> 2 468 334 050
> 2 468 335 022
> 1 468 335 345
> 1 468 336 480
> 1 468 336 614
> 1 468 336 626

OK. I’ve tried every single one of these damn numbers. Not ONE of the fuckers was answered by anyone who would admit to being a model, or anyone who knew how to get in touch with Zexel or Bosch, neither of which are particularly enticing names for models anyway. Bastards.

Ahh...but maybe they’re not phone numbers. Perhaps it’s some new PGP thingie, or DeCSS widget? Dammit - if only I owned a DVD player, I’d be fucken sorted right about now.

The message, btw, is signed by one “C.Hua Sales & purchasing director” – which seems like a regular push-me, pull-you job, if you ask me. Having the same bloke running both purchasing and sales is bound to go pear shaped, sooner or later. Clearly the Chinese have not been following the Enron saga closely enough.

I bet it’s all Weinberger’s doing. He’s the only one I know in China right now, and this kind of thing has his stamp all over it...

¹Simultaneous Cockney Translation:
“haddock” = “haddock & bloater” = motor
“cats” = “cats in cages” = ages
“china” = “china plate” = mate
Hence:
“We’ve been in the motor trade for ages, mate.”