2004 has been a big year in the blogosphere.

From credentialed bloggers getting the red carpet treatment at the Democratic National Convention back in July, to the spectacle of the massed bloggers flexing their collected muscle to bring about "Rathergate" – we’re clearly at (or already past?) something of a tipping point in terms of the mainstream media's awareness and acknowledgement of the influence of blogs.

This is pretty heady stuff for people so recently dismissed by former CBS News exec Jonathan Klein as a bunch of guys sitting around in their living rooms in pajamas.

Blogs are gaining increasing credibility as legitimate sources of news and opinion, at the same time as scandals such as Rathergate and the Jayson Blair affair have reanimated the perennial debate about the integrity and methods of "old school" news media.

The unabashedly partisan editorial stance of certain major news outlets is no longer accepted at face value – with the rise of the blogger, we now know who watches the watchmen. It's you and me – the citizen journalists. We can, and will, fact check your ass.

Meanwhile, PR people – the symbiotic counterparts of traditional media – have also woken up to the power of bloggers as a direct line of influence into communities of public opinion.

Flacks like me dream of coming up with the kind of campaign that could inspire the instant grassroots buzz that characterised Rathergate. In our deepest dreams, we don't just long to see our clients on the front page of the Wall Street Journal; we aspire to come up with that breakthrough idea that truly sculpts the zeitgeist. We'd love to think we could create the next self-propagating meme, something that would sweep through the netvines into the world's consciousness at the speed of blog.

Given the sheer size of the blogosphere (estimated by Technorati to include 275,000 new posts every day) it's not surprising that many bloggers have started to find themselves on the receiving end of PR pitches. Flacks have started to bypass the mainstream media and take their vox directly to the populi – with mixed results, as you might imagine. I’m not going to even mention that whole Raging Cow thing here (well... not yet, anyway).

I've been blogging for more than three years now, in which time I've had more than a dozen pitches, of various kinds, from companies hoping I'd say nice things about their clients' products on my blog. When a blogger who also happens to be a flack starts receiving pitches from other flacks, things take on a positively moebian twist.

And how's this for an example: a few months ago, Corante's Hylton Joliffe and Stowe Boyd engaged my help, in my capacity as a PR guy, to get the word out about a new blog they were launching (Suw Charman's excellent Strange Attractor). So here we had a blogger (who happens to be in PR) pitching a story to some reporters (most of whom also happened to be bloggers) and bloggers (many of whom are, or once were, reporters) about a fellow blogger (who has also spent time as a reporter) getting hired as an editor at a blog-based news service.

I felt like I'd stumbled into a Christopher Nolan film.

But this ongoing line-blurring is also happening on a bigger scale. Here's a comment from USC Annenberg's Online Journalism Review :

Just a few years ago, Patrick Phillips, who runs the IWantMedia Web site, got in trouble with the Wall Street Journal's legal department for linking to stories behind the subscription wall by using the site's "Email This" function. Now, WSJ.com night editor David Patton sends out an e-mail each evening especially to bloggers to let them know about the site's "free feature," an article that is available for free. (And yes, these e-mails start with "Dear Bloggers" and end with a courteous "Thank you.")

Bloggers being pitched by the Wall Street Journal! What the heck's up with that?

This is exactly why we're launching Flackster – to try to chart the convoluted, shifting territory that lies between the roles of the blogger, the flackosphere, and the mainstream media.

Flackster's "mission" (ugh) is to explore, through the voices of PR professionals, journalists, cultural commentators and others, how the rapid rise of social media and participatory journalism is impacting both the business of news reporting and the role of public relations.

I'm going to look at examples from both sides of the flack/hack equation: egregious cluelessness from PR people trying to influence bloggers, and muddy-headed responses from inkblot journalists, scorning the blogosphere at their peril. I'm hoping I'll also find opportunities to hurl bouquets at the bright sparks, and set up pointers for the perplexed along the way. And I’m not going to shy away from airing some of the dirty laundry in this peculiar little world I inhabit. PR can be a very strange and, frankly, rather silly job sometimes (with some exceedingly odd practitioners), but at it’s best it can also be the kind of work that shapes both corporate strategies and public opinion for the better.

As this is a blog, of course, I'll also be looking for your own contributions to the conversation. Are you a blogger who's been pitched? Or a flack who's pitched some bloggers? Is "participatory media" something to delight in, to diss, or to disregard?

Just to add one more recursive twist to the tale – one of the things I’ve done in launching this blog is to drop a quick note to a long list of fellow PR bloggers, online journalists and media-watchers. Yes: I’ve pitched a blog about blog pitching. I have no shame.

The first proper post, in the next day or two, will dig deeper into this rather curious and risky practice of PR people "pitching" bloggers. Oh, and there's a bit with a dog. Always helps to have a bit with a dog.

Talk to you soon...