A
Cynical View of PR and Blogging
Exhibit A: From The Submarine by
Paul Graham
PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers
like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this
new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we
should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When
I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the
traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to
feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
Exhibit B: From
My Dinner With Microsoft's Jim Allchin in Thomas Hawk's
weblog
Last night I had a unique opportunity to
sit down with Jim Allchin, Microsoftâs Group Vice President for
Platforms, for dinner along with a group of other bloggers and
technologists and discuss the future development of Longhorn as
well as see an early demo of the Longhorn technology firsthand.
Exhibit C: From
A comment on Slashdot by Thomas Hawk about the dinner
I do feel that there is room in the world
of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing
where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the
news itself.
Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a
huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital
home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our
best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a
reality.
Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw
it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year
organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs.
The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work
going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal
level.