It's quite inspiring to note that Tony Blair's forward-looking UK government has a full time Minister for eCommerce and Competitiveness at the Department of Trade & Industry.

Here's his website.

Impressive.

(link courtesy Mike Magee and his valiant Inquirer staff)

The California State Legislators' Assembly Banking Committee recently voted down a proposal increase the protections for personal financial information. In response, an angry privacy advocacy group bought access to all of the Committee members social security numbers (for $26) and published the first four digits online.

The legislators response? To get themselves all frothed up over "inappropriate" lobbying and call for a clamp down on this type of behaviour which, in the words of the Committee chair: "borders on extortion".

I'd say they've kind of missed the point here.

(tip o' the hat to Christian Gerard for the link)

(original link via Gawker and Tom Murphy)

Lizzie Grubman (remember her?) has a brand new gig, teaching “How to succeed in Public Relations and Image Marketing” at NY’s Learning Annex.

Sounds like a terrific course. I swear to God I’m not making this up – check out the course info here.

Here are some actual samples from the program outline (quoted verbatim, with only a little added commentary):

Her "been there and done it" P.R. tips and strategies
(Shouldn’t that be her “been there, done the time, paid the minimum fine” tips and strategies?)

The essential skills and qualities of a top P.R. person
(I'm guessing one of these must be the ability to drive an SUV while tanked up on cosmo's?)

What P.R. firms are looking for when they recruit
(Surely everyone already knows this: Blonds. With big hair. Clean driving license not required. Next question...)

The importance of networking - and how to develop your own P.R. network
(Because you just never know who you might run into...)

Attention-getting ways to present yourself in writing and in person
(Here’s a great attention-getter: back your high-end SUV into a crowd of people. Hey! Did I get your attention yet?!)

The 101 things a P.R. pro does
(#1. Get loaded. #2 Drive like a bastard. #3 Lie. #4 Get off with an easy fine. #5 Shop for shoes)

Where the money is
(Still in Lizzie’s pocket, apparently)

All this for a mere US$49 - and you get five bucks off for enrolling online! Start your engines...

Still busy as heck, but had to just pop in to say this...

I got to speak today with a class of PR hopefuls at the Humber College School of Media Studies. Myself and a colleague tried to give the class a feel for what it's like working at a major international PR agency, and how they can go about getting themselves hired. Bright bunch, great questions.

One thing that I found a little disappointing (although perhaps not too surprising) was that when I asked the question, not one of the students had any idea what a weblog is, or why they should know.

We need to work harder on my side of the fence to get this stuff into the curriculum at PR schools - it's too important to the future of my business to be ignored.

There wasn't enough time for me to explain in sufficient detail, so I encouraged them all to go off and Google around to find out for themselves what blogging is all about, why it's going to be so important to their future, and why they should all start their own weblogs immediately.

There's a good chance, I hope, that some of them took my advice and may be reading this right now. If so - do yourselves a favour and go read some of these pieces instead:

To get you up to speed:

A brief history and introduction to weblogs.

A rather longer overview, with a different slant.

This recent PR Week piece (caveat: some of this is a little off, but it's still worth reading).

Some important blogs and bloggers for any PR type to know about (in no particular order):

Tom Murphy (Start here. Bookmark it. Check daily.)

Jeff Jarvis' wonderful BuzzMachine

Dan Gillmor's eJournal

Phil Gomes

Jim Romenesko

An ancient and venerable newspaper demonstrating that they get it (and how): The Guardian's Blog

Rick Bruner's MarketingFix

From my own archives...

High Tech PR for a Post Dot-Com World (old, but still valid, IMHO)

How not to mix PR and blogs

And finally, two of the most entertaining blogs you're ever going to come across. Just because.

Gawker - the 21st Century's Dorothy Parker.

Izzle Pfaff!

Once you've gone through some of this stuff, if you're interested, still confused, or keen to get started - call me. You all have my business card. I'd be happy to help you get set up.

Charlie is six today. Six! Lily turned four last week, and Ruairi reached six months on Wednesday.

June in this family is as busy as Christmas - and almost as expensive.

Happy birthdays, babies...

Stuff tablet PCs. Stuff miniaturisation. Stuff pocket-sized, squinty-impossible-to-read micro LCD screens.

Gotta get me one of these.

As Dr. Romano once said...

Busy as several unfeasibly large busy things tied up together into a great big busy bunch of business. More projects on the go than you could shake a stick at. More than you could shake an entire bundle of sticks at. Nay, more than you could shake a full face cord...well...you get the picture.

Haven't been this busy since I was catching bullets for itemus as things were falling apart all around them...

Much more to blog soon. Promise. Just dog tired right now and need to kip furiously and dream of bunnies.

In the meantime, in a lame attempt to keep you mildly entertained, here's a recycled rant scraped out of the cruft at the bottom of my email inbox from earlier today.

A friend in the UK set me off on this particular rant by raising his concerns about the ugly trend towards polyphonic ring tones on cell phones.

This senseless misuse of engineering talent drives me nuts. Never in the field of human commerce was so much "feature bloat" crammed into such small devices by so many.

I wonder how many engineers and supporting techies are currently engaged around the world in the meaningless and entirely pointless pursuit of further "enriching" our phones and other gizmos? How many Ph.D.s are squandering their education on projects to squeeze hundreds of cheesy TV themes through a speaker the size of a dime?

My own little Nokia comes pre-loaded with a choice of 50 annoying ring tones, and there are thousands more available for download. Why? It's a phone: I want it to ring like a phone.

Apart from anything else, if my pocket suddenly starts playing the theme from Bewitched in the middle of a meeting, doesn't this brand my forehead with the word "pillock" more clearly than just about anything else I could do?

This strikes me as another example of Neil Postman's "Faustian bargain" as quoted by Stuart Jeffries in Tuesday's Guardian piece: "...for every advantage that a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage."

The advantage of feature-bloated polyphonic ring tone phones, presumably, is something to do with the ability to "personalize" our mobile "experience".

The disadvantage is that everyone else in the meeting will look at you with that special mixture of contempt, loathing, and pity that always accompanies the sudden realisation that one of your co-workers is a complete knob.

BTW, I had much more to say about this in my original draft - but Blogger ate my post. Sniffle.

I'm afraid I don't have the energy to recreate it, but trust me: it was awfully, awfully good.

I had this whole long diatribe worked up about the Faustian bargain of blogging.

Plenty of tortured logic, bad analogies, sloppy grammar, pompous ostentation - classic Michael stuff. Sadly all gone.

It all hinged on the tissue-thin conceit that successful blogging is a sort of selling.

If you can consistently write well about interesting stuff, exposing your soul to the world at large, you stand a good chance of pulling a solid stream of repeat readers (and we all love dem readers).

If it's selling, there has to be a product. The "product" here is your unique voice, your native intelligence, your opinions, your narrative, your ideas. All manifestations of the soul, you could say. When you blog, you're selling your soul. (I know, I know - groan at will...)

The flipside is that the act of opening even this tiny window into one's soul could be considered a risky proposition - for all sorts of sound and silly reasons. Imagine what would happen if the people you work with found out what you're really like. Gasp!

I know from some of my discussions at last week's Jupiter Biz Blogs conference that there are people out there - even active, veteran bloggers - who think this is a scary thing.

And there are already a number of scare stories of bloggers being fired or just feeling pressured into temporarily suspending their blog after a little too much soul exposure.

Somehow, in my first cut of this post, I managed to make a syllogistic leap from this last thought to conclude with some groovy ideas on the Faustian bargain we all make when we blog. But I’m arsed if I can remember what they were...

Drat.

Maybe someone else can pick up the thread for me…?

Close to 5 billion people in the world live on less than US$1,500 per year.

One in every five people in the developing world is chronically undernourished: 777 million individuals.

Anaemia affects 2 billion people globally. 52 per cent are pregnant, 39 per cent are children under five.

Fifty-five percent of the 12 million child deaths each year are related to malnutrition.

Nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population suffers from some form of malnutrition.

...after all that loveyness.

Home. Lots to blog. Lots.

Where to start? So much extraordinary stuff.

A few completely unstructured thoughts, plucked from my late night notes:

- The closing panel - Dave Winer, Tony Perkins (side by side!), Michael Gartenberg, Rebecca Lieb, Jason Shellen - moderated by the wonderful Kathleen Goodwin. Phew!

- Tony Perkins' moment of epiphany on the same panel

- The palpable chill descending over the whole room at TP's response to my "who owns the content" question...

- Earlier in the day the thoughtful, thought-provoking, and just plain right speech given by Christopher Lyndon (great coverage of this, and just about every other word uttered in the entire 48+ hours, over here)

- Last minute discussions with Doc, David, Kathleen and others about the need to push the conference format next time around. We talked about having a huge group blog or Wiki set up for all attendees to play with - like the IRC channel that spontaneously erupted early on Monday, but with added mojo. I think they should do a conference-in-the-round. Maybe even mike the entire audience for some of the sessions - give everyone a lav mike (and a handful of aspirin). Allow attendees to IM an anonymous host, and have the messages pop up on the big projection screen (moderated, of course).

- The extraordinary passion of almost everyone there...the feeling of participating in a pivotal event, an inflection point. There was a sense of breathless enthusiasm in the room. At some point, an audience member called out that what we had going was "a happening". Felt right (although see my "Love In" post below for a tiny bit of the flip side feeling).

- Getting to meet Neil McIntosh, Deputy Editor, Online at The Guardian - which has been for a long time and is still the finest newspaper in the known universe. Neil rocks. The Guardian ditto. All, IMHO, natch. He was also kind enough to answer my questions on the true story behind this rather *ahem* interesting approach to sports reporting from earlier this year.

- Getting to sit next to Bob Frankston at dinner on Monday night. Bob freaking Frankston, fercrissakes. I had dinner with Bob Frankston! I sound like a gushing preteen ninny, I know (damn - I feel like a gushing preteen ninny), but this guy, together with Dan Bricklin (who I also got to meet) is father to my entire career. Between them, Bob and Dan created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program - and the first business app I really got to know.

One of my earliest business computing experiences was working on an Apple IIe at Oxford Exhausts - an auto parts company where my Dad was production manager. I worked with Tony Guy, building a labour reporting and production control system in VisiCalc. This whet my appetite to get into the IT biz full time, and set me on the path to where I am now. Thanks, Dan & Bob.

Dinner with Bob was an intense experience. He has a very, very interesting mind - as you might imagine. One of those refreshingly challenging conversationalists who likes to work hard at the conversation, and expects you to do so too. Bob has some unusual, provocative, and inspiring ideas about the nature of evolution - tough to paraphrase in short form here, but basically: we're all digital, it is a Matrix, but that's OK 'cos we created it...

Dan also shot some splendid pics of the conference and dinner, including this one of the panel I was on:


(click through to Dan's site for the names and for his absolutely spot on comment about fellow panelist Beth Goza).

And then there's this one:


Which shows one hell of an interesting group. See if you can spot Doc (going for the mussels), Jason Shellen, Michael Gartenberg, Denise Howell, Rafat Ali, Vin Crosbie, Rebecca Blaw, Jeff Jarvis, and (in order) Dave Winer, Bob Frankston, me, and the back of David Weinberger's head - all of us squished in together with a bunch of other worthies, notables and like minds.

Oh crap. This is just turning into "your usual blogrolling ass-kissing huggyfest note". True. I'm a shameless name-blogger. What the hell.

Three more samples of fawning blog-dahling crap, then I'll shut up. Promise:

1. Got to chat, briefly, with Gawker.com's Elizabeth Spiers, who is as gorgeous as she is smart and can write like she's peeing Tiffany diamonds onto the page.

2. A lovely moment in the Sheraton bar before leaving - Martin Röll passed his tablet PC around for us all to autograph. Great bloke. Beautiful eyes.

3. Shared a cab back to Logan with Google/Blogger's Jason Shellen. Good to know my blogging tool of choice is in such safe hands. Jason's a level-headed, razor sharp guy. I liked him a lot. Not least for his suggestion I should rename my blog to "goodflack.com". Heh, I'm immensely flattered.

[I notice from his blog, btw, that he's now temporarily camped out at The Paramount in NY, which is where Sausage and I stayed for her 30th birthday (the perfect long weekend: Zeffirelli's Traviata at the Met + Sunday in the Met museum + dinner at The Grammercy Tavern + shopping at FAO Schwartz)]

That's all for now. I wrote a ton of other stuff while hanging around at Logan for my flight home last night - will clean up and post the coherent bits later.

One of the most interesting things Tony Perkins alluded to was in the middle of his Q&A session, and I'm not sure how many people picked it up in behind all the sizzling flame noise.

If I heard him correctly, I think he said that he can foresee a day, not too far in the future, when many of the key features associated with blogs will start to appear on "old media" online editions.

Imagine, for example, reading the New York Times online and being able to comment at the foot of a story, have access to a permalink, and for them to have trackbacks enabled. Cool.

Makes sense, too. This is an entirely feasible future.

It also helps put AlwaysOn in context. Is AlwaysOn a blog? I'd say no (and it doesn't really matter whether Tony did or didn't say it was, btw).

It's a publishing engine in a more traditional sense - a new variant of e-Zine, perhaps. And it does borrow heavily from the toolset and mindset evolved within the blogging community over the last few years.

So it's not a blog, but it genuinely is interesting. And - if we look at it as a magazine first and foremost, just one that happens to have plenty of blog-like features; it might even be fair to characterise it as revolutionary.

It's just such a shame that Tony insists on using such horrible marketingspeak in describing the business model - calling it a channel with appeal to advertisers and talking about "leveraging" the medium...

...you have to admit he has stones.

Takes considerable courage of one's convictions for a guy so widely pilloried and scorned within the blogging community to show up to keynote in front of a room full of A and B-list bloggers, IMHO.

And he was pretty courteous and good-humoured about my "fact-checking his ass". He said, in response to a question from Dave Winer, that he has never described his AlwaysOn Network experiment as a "blog". Well in fact he has, or at least he appears to have done so.

In this Fortune magazine Fast Forward piece, from February of this year, it says:

"He calls the site a "super-blog," comparing it to Slashdot.org, a phenomenally successful site for serious technophiles that now claims over two million members. "While Slashdot is for techie geeks, AlwaysOn is for business geeks," he says. He will impose editorial order by continuing to fine-tune topic areas, recruiting appropriate bloggers, and contributing heavily himself."

When I brought this up in the conference session just now, I'm afraid the ensuing discussion quickly devolved into yet another "what is a blog?" frothfest. I'm still not sure why this question seems to be creating so much energetic debate.

It reminds me of all the wheel spinning over the attempts to define "knowledge management" a few years ago. Wheel-spinning I was sitting at the heart of, as head of marketing for one of the bigger DM/KM companies.

At the time, David Weinberger wrote something in a white paper for the company I was working with, which still seems relevant here:

"KM has to be one of the most over-defined concepts in history. We will not propose a definition here. Even if we put forth the one Right and True definition, no one would know or care. So, pick one you like and let's get on with it."

Replace "KM" with "weblogging" and you'll get how I feel about this question.

And yet I'm also aware that I may be missing something at the heart of this debate. For so many smart, smart people to be so passionate about finding the one right and true answer to this question, I have to believe there's a level on which I'm not getting it...

Catherine E. Reuben, a labour and employment lawyer at Robinson & Cole, on the Law Of The Blog panel here had a really interesting list of Dos & Don’ts for employers and employees peering into the fun happening in the Blogosphere and thinking about making the leap.

With Catherine’s gracious permission, here’s the list in full – transcribed from her original notes:

Tips for Employee Bloggers

Don’ts

- Don’t do personal blogging on company time or company equipment.
- Don’t talk about your employer on your personal blog.
- Don’t fire off stuff on your blog without being prepared for your employer or your potential employer to see it.
- Don’t sign form “confidentiality” or “intellectual property” agreements without reading them very carefully and consulting with counsel. Many such agreements are way over-broad, and you may have more bargaining power than you think.

Dos

- Do read your company confidentiality, computer equipment and Internet use policies carefully
- If your job is analysis or creation of content – get legal advice with respect to ownership and control of the works you create on your own time. Chances are, you signed a document saying that all works you create during the term of your employment belong to your employer – and that would include your blog.
- Do learn about legal ways to express yourself in a protected manner. For example, while First Amendment protections often do not apply to private employers, there are lots of other laws out there to protect employee speech. For example, the National Labor Relations Act protects employees who in engage in “concerted activity for mutual benefit”. So, if a non-supervisory employee says: “I think my pay stinks”, they aren’t protected, but if he or she says: “we think our pay stinks” they may well be. Statements made in the context of union organizing likewise receive greater protection.

Tips for Employers

Dos

- Do have a confidentiality agreement that has a reasonable definition of what you consider confidential. If your agreement is over broad, for example if you define as confidential things that are on your website, the court may not enforce your agreement.
- Do have a policy on use of company computer equipment and the Internet and enforce it consistently.
- Do have clear guidelines regarding what employees can do on personal websites or blogs. For example – can they link to your company’s website?
- Do have reasonable intellectual property agreements that preserve your right to own and control works created by analysts, journalists, or other creative employees on your payroll.

Don’ts

- Don’t access your employees’ personal blogs under false pretences. E.g. logging in as if you are their buddy or using convoluted technology to get around protections they build in.
- Don’t take any employment action as a result of a blog without consulting with counsel. Many companies have an over-inflated sense of the value of the “employment at will” doctrine. There are hundreds of exceptions to employment at will that could come into play in the blogging context, for example:

o State privacy laws;
o Anti-retaliation and whistle-blower protection statutes;
o NLRA;
o Old-fashioned discrimination, for example: if you do not treat employees consistently.

====

Interesting...

Acknowledging the fear raised in that last thought, below, I feel the need to post to some sound counsel for any corporation looking to wrap a little light but appropriate legal CYA around employee blogs.

Examples from Macromedia and Groove, courtesy of one of the finest law blogs ("blawgs") on the planet - Denise Howell's Bag & Baggage.

Denise and Jason were also bloody good nightcap company in the bar after dinner last night.

The current panel here at the Jupiter Weblogs conference is on The Law of The Blog

The moderator, Mark E. Young, just introduced and set up the panel by quoting from some of my evangelical trumpeting in yesterday's panel. A whole crew of lawyers and lawyerlikes are about to debate the credibility and advisability of the challenge I issued to any corporations thinking about blogging.

I feel I should just slink quietly out of the back of the room now...

All morning the Breaking News, Hot Links, and Current Events sections on Technorati have been down.

Looks like the massive uptick in traffic prompted by their beta keyword search feature, announced just yesterday, broke the database.

*sigh*

I feel starved of fresh joy...

"Blogs are the garnish to a well-balanced media diet." -- Back-to-Iraq's Christopher Allbritton quoted in today's Business Week Online piece, that also sources David Weinberger and a host of other interesting bloggers.

Christopher, btw, is now a designated cultural artifact according to The Library of Congress.

From Jeff Jarvis:

"Jupiter swag report: It sucks. Cheap, generic Jupiter tote bag. I wanted a neat briefcase with a big, red BLOG on it so, someday, people would look and gawk and say, "Wow, you were there when."

This is kind of interesting and probably, for some people, necessary -- but I think it's coming from a damaged place.

Maybe there's a little too much back-slapping and self-congratulation going on around here.

I almost want someone to stand up and just say: "Blogging blows - it's all bollocks. None of it is important, get over yourselves fercrissakes."

But people might think I'm Andrew Orlowski. There's 130-odd people in this room - I'm not sure I'd escape alive ;-)

Plus, of course, I agree with and absolutely share in all the enthusiasm and high-fiveing.

This stuff is important. It is cool. It is pushing the envelope. It does (as David ably explained earlier) matter.

Lots of discussion threads here about the differences between these two worlds.

Halley's up on a panel at the moment, confessing to be very much a personal blogger (although she's walled-in, on this panel at least, by biz bloggers).

I’ve been thinking about which category I’m in for some time now and have realised that, as much as it's even a relevant thing to be curious about, it’s certainly a moving target.

This started up as an entirely personal blog, as early posts like this one clearly indicate (Content advisory: long, intensely personal rambling).

Yet it’s inevitably informed and constantly coloured by what I do for a living – so I’ve often written about issues, events, and trends in the PR and marketing worlds I inhabit.

Over the last few months I’ve often found myself wandering further down the path of corporate bloggery. Been trying to figure out why this is and I think I’ve got it sussed.

For the first time since I started it, this blog has started to have some of its focus directed by the audience. This is getting interesting.

The reason I’ve been writing rather more about PR stuff of late is, fairly obviously, because people like Andrew, Jeff, Tom, and others have been asking questions and commenting more about this stuff – and I’ve simply been responding.

I’m having a conversation. Imagine!

He's not getting too many questions at the end of his remarkable keynote, but I get the feeling there's this amazing wave of warm consensus sweeping over the room.

Pope said it best: "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."

Not many questions, because there's not all that much left to say...

This is as close as you're going to get to live, streaming, close-enough-to-verbatim coverage of the ClickZ/Jupiter conference.

Kudos to Heath Row for working so hard to get this stuff into the record.

His post-lunch keynote here at the conference has the entire room in the palm of his hand. Genius, common sense, humour, snarkiness, and telling, telling truths.

He's presenting on why weblogs matter and, as usual, entertaining and informing in equal measure. Nobody does it like David.

Just finished my panel - now I can sit back and really enjoy the rest of the conference. Extremely nerve-wracking being up there in front of so many luminous minds - so many of the people I read and am influenced by on a daily basis.

When I sat down, I thought: "well, there's two flacks and a Microsoftie up here - I guess the other two guys should be pretty safe ;-)" (yes - I think in emoticons). Strangely it kind of went the other way. Beth Goza, who I'm sitting right next to, is just so charming and incandescently bright that she instantly had about 90% of the room on her side (or at least that's how it felt from up at the front). I feel like Carin Warner and I escaped pretty well too.

A few weeks back, I blogged this: "The other panelists look interesting. There's a wireless sorceress from the Borg, a fellow flack, and this Rick Bruner bloke, who sounds like someone I may spend a lot of time agreeing with."

Woo boy! Was I ever wrong about that one. I don't think Rick and I actually agreed on one word in the entire hour-long session. Tee hee…

I'm a little disappointed, though. I feel we may have let the audience down a bit, by not getting deep into any of the more painful interfaces between the marketing world and the blogosphere. But I take comfort from the fact that we’d probably have been preaching to the converted anyway.

There are very, very few people at this conference in need of a clue, IMHO. The room is full of people in a state of heated agreement about most of this stuff – so much so, perhaps, that some of what we think are our most pithy comments are starting to go across like well-worn platitudes. “Of course that’s the way it is – why would anyone think anything different?”

We may differ on the specifics, but most of us would agree (and shake our heads with amusement) that old-school marketing and comms mindsets are essentially endangered anyway, so who gives a stuff if they don’t, won’t, or can’t change. Natural selection at work.

All IMHO, as usual.

A beta challenger to Google? Dave Sifry has just added a keyword search to Technorati so you can do word and phrase searching on just blogs.

VERY cool.

While there's still a fair amount of FUD and crud circulating about the "Google is dropping blogs" BS - Dave's clearly jumped in ahead of the noise with a genuinely useful idea. Thanks Dave.

After almost an hour futzing with my Stinkpad, I'm no up on the free, pretty fast Wifi here at the ClickZ/Jupiter Weblogs conference.

This is all thanks to the talented and dedicated efforts of Vince - the resident Jupiter techie. A demi-god sent to Boston to help clueless wifi newbies like me. Thank you Vince, I owe you many, many, many beers.

Michael Gartenberg is just wrapping his opening remarks. I'm missing about 30% of it - too busy stargazing in awe around this packed room. 15 minutes ago, Dan Bricklin sat down 3 seats away from me. Bob Frankston's here too. And Dave, David, Doc, Anil, Denise...the list is amazing.

I'm blown away.

Links later - time to listen.

Because they can write job descriptions that kick flying monkey butt.

Sample:

8. You understand what a deadline is. In this context, Understand != HeardOf, and Understand != KnowsDictionaryDefinitionOf. Understand == HasALongAndImpressiveTrackRecordOfBeingDoneEARLYAndCanProvideProof.

Glad to know us Wintel sufferers are not alone in our pain.

BTW, this blog has just become one of my all time favourites in about 10 minutes flat. This post, for example, just had me in convulsions of uncontrollable tittering for the last couple of minutes. Terrific stuff.

Gevaar!

Er...um...

Nope. I've just spent half an hour on http://yuppiechat.com and I have erp-so-flinking-lutely no idea what it is.

You try it. Mouse around. Click a few links. See if you can figure out what it's for.

Jim thinks it could be the work of a Markov Babbler.

Which gives me an idea. What would a Nigerian spam end up like if given the Markov treatment? Would it actually produce coherent English?

...time for a nice cup of tea.

A couple of days ago I poked and prodded an announcement from MediaMap about their plan to add journalists' blogs to their database of media contacts and profile information.

I was...er...less than convinced. Read the original post, below, and you'll see what I mean (meant?).

Then today, I got email from Jeff Mooney, MediaMap Director of Content Management and Educational Services. Jeff immediately got my attention by both flattering and then agreeing with me ;-) But he also went into a little extra detail about their strategy. With Jeff's permission, here's the main part of his message:

"...We definitely took the safer route by starting with journalists that are already familiar with who we are. We've learned quite a bit. The logical next step is to cover the most influential blogs in specific industries regardless of the blogger's background. The challenge is to do it well. For many of our customers this is the first time they are learning about blogs and they need to understand the rights, wrongs, risks and rewards before they pick up the phone."

This is very good news, imho. And my enthusiasm has only a little to do with what they're doing - I'm just delighted by how they're doing it.

Clearly their first announcement gets them out ahead of the game, even if their plan's not fully baked yet. To build from this point on, it sounds like they're going to be doing a lot of listening. As Jeff said, in a follow up message: "This is definitely an area where we have put our toe in the water and we want to use feedback from both the blogger and PR communities to help us..."

More than a demi-clue in that, IMHO.

Well...not yet. But don't you just wish she would? Instead of giving us this elegant but unsatisfying pablum.

'Course, if enough bloggers were to email her, perhaps we could talk her into it...

It would sure as hell be the tidiest darn blog on the Net.

(with thanks to Jeff Roman for the link)

Does anyone else ever wish their referrer logs worked like an email system, so you could click on the link to the referring URL and be able to reply to the person at the other end?

Like this one, for example, which is someone landing at my blog after searching for instructions on "how to sodder plumbing".

I want to just click to respond to this - you don't "sodder" plumbing (well...I suppose you could try): you solder it.

I've had other examples in the past - desperate, forlorn souls wandering through the net in search of enlightenment (which they're not going to find here, I can tell you that fer nowt). But I want to help them - to reach back down through the wire, with a firm but gentle hand on their mouse, to redirect their wanderings in the right direction...

Palm to buy Handspring for $169 mln

$169 million? Where's the rest?

MediaMap "gets" blogs. Or at least they're trying to.

An interesting attempt by one of the essential service providers in the PR world, to understand and assimilate the blogosphere.

It shows they're recognizing the significance of blogs as a new layer of reportage being defined by a new kind of journalist (as well as a number of been there, done that inkblot journalists).

According to their boilerplate, "MediaMap delivers innovative Communications Management solutions that help public relations professionals more effectively manage, track and analyze communications with key audiences and promote corporate reputation growth and shareholder value."

Hmmm.

Well...despite their inability to communicate what they do for a living in their own press releases, MediaMap is actually a fairly important company in my curious world. This makes their announcement a significant one.

Say, for example, you're a flack who suddenly finds himself in the midst of the country's biggest unfolding transportation story, without the benefit of too many strong relationships amongst the transportation media - MediaMap can come to the rescue.

They keep a deep database of print, broadcast, and online media, by geography and by sector, with up-to-date contact info and, in some cases, useful tips about the individual journalist's interests and preferences.

MediaMap deserves credit for publicly acknowledging the rise and relevance of blogs in the PR world. It’s just such a shame that they still manage to drive their train straight into a couple of 16 foot cluewalls.

First, they state their plan to: “…cover blogs written by accredited journalists in the MediaMap North American Media directory” (my emphasis). Which begs a number of questions.

First off: in the blogosphere, how does one define “accreditation”?

I’m deliberately side-stepping their intent here, of course – I get what they mean, but I can’t fathom it. I know they’re referring to accredited mainstream journalists who also happen to blog – but if that’s all they’re doing, then what is the point of this release?

If you already have info for an “accredited” scribbler in your database, are you just going to update the record to add a pointer to their blog? Where’s the added value in that?

Doc is an important reporter for anyone in the Linux world to know. If I want to reach the influential voices or potential customers in the Linux space, I want to find something interesting to talk to Doc about, in the hope he’ll pick up the conversation, and it will spill over into something he writes for print or online.

Does the fact that Doc is also a top o’ the heap blogger have much to do with this? Nah.

Sure, there’s some value in knowing which “accredited” journalists happen to blog. But am I going to pitch their blog? No. If I "pitch" at all, I’m going to pitch the person based on their domain of expertise or influence.

The relationship of blog to blogger is not like, say, the relationship of publication to reporter.

And if an influential blogger, read and linked to by thousands every day, is not an “accredited” journalist – will they be left out of the system?

Where does this leave someone like Glenn Reynolds, say – with a daily “circulation” of around 55,000 readers and more than 2,000 inbound blog links? Not “accredited”, but one of the 10 most influential voices in the blogosphere.

So there's Cluewall #1

The second big brick cluewall they’ve just smashed their brains against, is evident in this statement:

” MediaMap Performa is a Web-based application that is a one-stop communications solution to manage media relationships, distribute messages and measure results.”

“Distribute messages”. Ahem. Is that what I do for a living?

Still. I applaud their efforts to figure all this stuff out. It’s a start.

I notice their Content Director is on the same panel as me at the Jupiter Weblogs Conference next week – I hope to get to ask him some of my questions.