Just a couple points on PR and blogs 

Darn it, I wasn't going to talk about this anymore, but Tara's and Anne's posts today made me want to jot down just a couple of things.

But first, consider the above sentence. I wonder what percentage of traditional marketing people have any real understanding of the concept of bloggers who write because they are compelled to do it.

It's so polar to the old publishing system. I don't have a certain number of column inches I have to fill each week, and won't say a word until there's something that's fairly busting to get itself out. So, it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to be influenced by anything resembling a PR pitch.

In a past life, I've written enough pitch letters and news releases (literally thousands) to know how agonizingly they are prepared, and I've had my straightforwardly written releases "improved" by superiors who insert words like "national" and "exciting" in lame efforts to make the mundane sound important.

I totally see Mike Arrington's pain when he says "I don’t want companies to spend cycles with PR firms talking about strategies for getting in front of us." He must be head in hands, wondering what monster he's wrought that it's being treated as MSM.

I'm sure Mike doesn't want, and no blogger wants approaches to be plotted and over-prepared and over-analyzed.

So I was thinking... if PR is going to play in our world, because I don't think there's any turning back now, maybe they'd be best advised to drop the persuader role altogether. Lose the cute pitches and the extraneous adjectives. Forget about schmoozing. Can the gimmicks and events and stunts.

Retreat to the public information officer role and just hand out the news. In the end it would be cheaper than trying to learn to blend in, it would be a transparent mode that bloggers appreciate, and it would win the PR profession a whole lot more respect in the end.

And just one more small idea 

To address the need for startups to be seen by bloggers, what if a group of bloggers set up a message board just for startups to post their announcements, and let anyone reply. If enough people said, "I'd like to hear what TechCrunch or Scoble would say about that company," maybe they'd want to consider writing about it.

They wouldn't promise to cover any of them, but they might get a few story ideas. Not the scoops, or the exclusives, but maybe stories about some of the startups with merit and a potential audience that otherwise might slip through the cracks. It would be something like PR newswire, only free, and intended for online writers and editors.

You'd pick forum software that has an RSS feed, of course.

Parallel 

It's always tricky to talk about conspiracy theories -- and theorists, who so often sound like crackpots and are made to sound like crackpots, that you risk being labeled one yourself.

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists get me to listen when they talk about Building 7. That does seem odd. Then they lose me when they talk about Al Quaeda's inability to pull off coordination of the attacks.

For me, it's like the ancient astronauts theories: I go along with the arguments about similarities among mythical and religious belief systems across cultures that never interacted, and I even keep an open mind about Tiamet. But when some of the writers start in on how human beings did not have the capacity to develop advanced societies thousands of years ago, that's where I drop off. I have too much respect for our species, or rather for its potential.

I don't read about that stuff anymore, but when I did, I tended to resonate more with Zecharia Sitchin's books, but really none of the wilder chariots of the gods schemes. I haven't read any of them written after the fifth book, published in 1991. Even if you don't believe a bit of it, some of it is just fun to read, like the analysis of the math and proportional ratios apparently used in designing the pyramids.

I'm far more down to earth these days. In fact, I'm going to go finish the uncut edition of The Jungle right now. Jurgis just became a socialist and you can see the stars in his eyes.

Adding apps to eyeOS 

Trying some of the user-contributed apps. Some are written in PHP, some Flash, some php. They're all a little primitive, but this is pretty interesting. Also, call me shallow but the pretty interface helps me want to warm to it.

See last night's post about this.