Mike Golby, in a comment on my first post, below, has raised a bunch of interesting thoughts. Go read his comment, here.

Those are some Big Hairy-Arsed Questions. Important ones, too. In fact – I think they're too big and important to try to address in the dinky little comment box, so I’m lifting the discussion up to here.

Mike’s questions are precisely the kind of BHAQs I'm hoping to tackle through my cogitations, rants and ramblings here at Flackster. There’s plenty of meat in these questions for me to work on in a whole series of posts (thanks Mike -- the cheque’s in the post).

Let’s start with one of the easier ones – and the one that seems to flow most naturally into the thought-threads I’ve been weaving of late. Among many other things, Mike (with his tongue only half-way into his cheek) asks:

“Do we not all, to a degree, engage in the ignoble arts of PR, journalism, and link whoring.”

Yes, we're all link whores. Yes, we're all - to some extent - both flacks and hacks. But that's exactly the point, isn't it? The once clear delineation of roles is becoming essentially meaningless in the blogosphere.

Look at Doc Searls, for example. I love Doc to bits, as he knows – so I hope he’ll forgive me singling him out as the apotheosis of the Flackster/Hackster hybrid.

Doc was a flack for years, then he became a hack, and now he's a blogger. In truth, though, isn't he really all three of these things and yet also none of them at the same time?

He’s still a reporter qua reporter in the typical sense – yet his day job at the Linux Journal is unquestionably informed and influenced by his other day-time persona as an “A List” blogger. So he’s not just a reporter any more.

And he’s surely not a full-time flack these days; yet he still has a great deal to offer the profession (if you’re a flack and you haven’t yet read some of Doc’s terrific commentaries from the early 90s, stop reading this crud right now, and go spend some time over here. Or here. Or here.)

Aren't we all destined (and don’t we all aspire) to wind up like Doc - spanning all three roles with nary a care for the confusion we might be causing? (As there’s no one left to get confused by then anyway – in the future, everyone's a shape-shifter). And isn't this a more natural way for the world to work anyway?

Imagine: instead of a divided population of interested participants with unambiguous, clearly-labelled roles, what if all of us were truly free to wander back and forth across the margins at will? Those labels are kind of scratchy and limiting anyway – much better to snip them off.

Instead of skirmish lines of flacks, hurling their finely honed pitches against the defensive testudo of the beleaguered media – what if we all felt confident enough in the things that interest us (and, yes – the things we’re paid to be interested in) to engage in actual conversations with the other interested participants in our space?

Maybe we will get to the point where we won’t even think of what we do as boxed-off PR or sharply-defined journalism any more – we’ll just think of ourselves, all of us, as bloggers.

Some of us will be bloggers who spend more time talking about neat things our clients are doing; others will be bloggers who spend rather more time commenting on the things the first group offers up – putting them into context, comparing them with other companies’ products.

Some of us will blog these great, rambling treatises about the benefits of our clients’ latest face cream – and we’ll be disappointed when no other bloggers care enough to pick up the dialogue. We'll learn from that.

Others will become the Walt Mossbergs of the blogosphere – we’ll drop a brief, positive sentence about some new gizmo into a blog post we’re scribbling from our handheld in the back of a cab; knowing full well that our words will have the power to move the stock price 20%.

There’ll be good hybrid flackhackbloggers and bad ones. And this will all make sense.

OK, it’s more than a little utopian. But is it that unrealistic? Doc said it first: “markets are conversations”. So marketers should be conversationalists. Explains why so many PR pros have ventured into blogspace. We’ve come here looking for the conversations – and hoping to start some.

[P.S. I know, I know. I promised a bit with a dog. He's coming soon. Honest.]