At 08:31 yesterday morning, a news release purporting to be from Innotrac Corporation of Atlanta, Ga. hit the wires, announcing a "multi-year, multi-million dollar customer service and technical support agreement" with a large corporate client.

Trading in the company's stock went crazy, with the quote doubling and trading volume coming close to 300,000 shares (compared to an average of just 10,000).

Later in the day, the company issued a statement saying that the release "was not authorized by the Company and is totally untrue."

Now would be a good time to call in your crisis communications counsel.

I hope that, if nothing else, the report emphasizes the importance of encouraging PR students to read. I'm still astonished, every time I speak with a group of young PR students, to find how few of them make a habit of reading daily newspapers. Surely a prerequisite of being in this business should be a natural fascination for the process by which news is made...?

More on this once I've had a chance to read the whole thing.

It looks like that part of the job may have just gotten a whole lot easier with the launch of Confabb, described as "an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience."

It's too early to know for certain whether this thing will become the central magnet for conference listings and discussions it is aiming to be, but from a design and functionality perspective alone it certainly gets my vote already.

I'll confess to being a little biased, as I'm a long-time fan of the co-founders, Salim Ismail (of PubSub fame) and Cameron Barrett (blog pioneer). These gents know what they're doing.

The search and browsing capabilities of Confabb already give the service a considerable edge over competitors. It's a lot more flexible and easier to use than the old approach, as epitomised by sites such as the American Tradeshow Directory. I know where I'll be sending my account teams to do their research from now on.

I only have one other quick observation on the sevice so far, but I'm going to spend some time digging deeper into it.

It's mildly exciting to note that I have a listing already in their Speaker Directory. Rather puzzling to note that a number of much better speakers (most notably David Weinberger) are not yet listed. Odd. But then, I see that even one of their initial investors, the inveterate conference-goer Dave Winer, hasn't made it into the lists yet. Doubly odd.

Still - a valuable and very interesting thing they've done here. Excellent stuff.

[Editors: They should be back up now!]

Dear [blogger],

Sincerely,
PR Flack

Genius. Thanks Tara.

NewsNosh is billed as "a a searchable, user-contributed directory of online business news sources of all types: blogs, podcasts, news sites and newsletters... designed to help fellow PR folks and other communicators follow industries and identify media sources..."

Interesting.

Have I said that before? Almost certainly.

Pardon me while I blow a few cobwebs off the template, and dust down the ol' blog widgets.

Here's the thing: as I mentioned in that post from February, below, I had stopped being a flack for a while - so it was kind of hard to pretend that I was as fully immersed in the troposphere as the author of a blog entitled "Flackster" really ought to be.

Well it seems I've got my flack mojo back. I just couldn't keep away.

Yes, I'm going back to being a PR guy again. I realised I missed it. It's still one of the most utterly messed-up areas of business in the world, but I kind of love that messed-upedness.

Plus, I have a lot more hope these days than I did a few years back. Winds of change, PR 2.0, Social Media coming of age, and all that.

Feels good to be settling in here at Corante again. I wonder if Hylton's still talking to me...?

Blimey. The "century's most influential PR figure", as PR Week tagged him, is a blogger. Tipping point for the PR industry, methinks.

Whatever.

See, I'm not really a flack any more. (SHOCKING REVELATIONS! Full story: p24). After five remarkable years as yer actual senior PR industry exec bloke, I opted to return to my first love: the software industry. So it's fair to say that I'm not really as deeply plugged in to the day-to-day rumblings in the PR business.

Having said that, I'm still fascinated to follow the foibles, failures, and fanfares of my former fellow flacks.

Delighted, for example, to see that Richard Edelman has almost completed his plan to collect a complete matching set of influential flack bloggers. He already had a Guillaume du Gardier, a Phil Gomes, and a Michael Krempasky . Now the limited edition Steve Rubel model has taken up residence on the Edelman mantelpiece.

Reminds me just slightly of the silliness back on Orkut, when the blognoscenti seemed to be competing with each other to "collect the full set" of cool/influential "friends"

All snarking aside, however, this is excellent news for Edelman. They're fast proving themselves to be the smartest and most blog-savvy BigPR firm out there.

I have it on good authority from a close friend that Richard Edelman really does pretty much get it. Top bloke. Now if only I knew what "it" was, I'd be well on my way... somewhere.

Belated congratulations to Steve, and kudos to Edelman for continuing to pay attention to the blogosphere and, even better, working to do something interesting and worthwhile in the space.

This puts Richard Edelman into one of the most exclusive clubs on the planet, btw. The number of genuinely blog-savvy executives who sit at the very highest level in mainstream PR firms is a set of no more than two members, as far as I've been able to tell. Richard is one; Larry Weber is the other. Larry's lunchtime keynote at last December's Syndicate conference was terrific - and empirical proof that he's seen the bloglight. (Hey, Larry! Where's your blog?)

Nothing wakes up a musty, neglected (but still much loved) old blog like the distant sound of unearned praise.

And so it is with dear, dormant Flackster - stirring from slumber at the news that The RSS Pundit (aka Kip Meacham) just included Flackster in a Top Ten list of PR-oriented blogs.

Apparently, we're mainly of interest to the elitist-bourgeoisie, though - so all you proles can sod off back to Micropersuasion now :-)

Thanks Kip!

Reactions across the blogosphere would certainly seem to say so. Boyd is an Irish Times writer who has just contributed what some view as the Times' own "Attack of the Blogs" diatribe.

I don't know. The Irish Times certainly doesn't do anything to help convince us they might have any kind of a clue, by throwing up a paywall around their stories. Click here if you really want to pay a couple of Euros to read the piece. Or you can go here to read the full article for nothing, courtesy of Gavin Sheridan. (To paraphrase John Gilmore, the blogosphere treats a paywall as damage and routes around it).

For me, I find it hard to tell what position Boyd's really taking in this piece. He bounces around a bit, gets a couple of things wrong, a few other things right, recycles some of the stock inflammatory Chicken Little-ish comments about the "threat" of the blogs, but then settles down into a rather more balanced conclusion:

"There’s a whole new world of reportage out there. It can be fiery, extremist and inflammatory, or it can be unshackled, uncensored and progressive depending on your own leanings or prejudices."

So I'm conflicted. Rather more interesting and insightful analysis from Mick Fealty and Piaras Kelly

And, as he's on his way to Ireland in the very near future, it will be interesting to hear what, if anything, Scoble thinks about this one.

Let's skip the grovelling and get on with business, shall we...? To whit:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.'

I've used this Gandhi quote as a post heading elsewhere in the past, but it seems even more appropriate for the topic at hand this time around.

There's been a minor bushfire spreading through the blogvines in the last few weeks, building into something bigger and more important as each successive blogger and MSM outlet picks up the story.

In short: Gaurav Sabnis, a blogger in India quit his job with IBM after something of a dust storm blew up over his online criticism of a local IBM client, IIPM, and that client's pigheaded and disproportionate over-reaction. As a result, what was a minor dust storm grew into a tornado of criticism and intense online scrutiny of IIPM, spilling over into the mainstream and causing no end of embarrassment for them.

Mark Glaser's account of the tale at Online Journalism Review provides a thorough analysis of the brouhaha and draws some useful conclusions.

To me, the most interesting aspect of what's happened here is not the tale of IIPM's cluelessness -- although that is indeed mighty, and certainly worthy of the scorn and outrage being directed their way by many in the blogosphere.

No; what resonates most for me is the exact point Mark Glaser chooses to make in the closing paragraphs of his piece:

"Bloggers + MSM = better media?"

Mark gets that there is an inevitable and appropriate AND logic in play here. As he says:

"The story of IIPM and its battle with JAM and Indian bloggers follows a familiar trajectory here in the U.S.: There's a story in a smallish magazine, picked up and magnified by bloggers, then picked up and magnified by the mainstream media (MSM). This snowball effect has bloggers exulting, and the MSM taking bloggers much more seriously."

As I've said before - this is why I don't buy into the ongoing "journalism vs. blogging" debate - it's because the "vs." part is so painfully wrong. This is what Forbes failed to get in letting Dan Lyons run off leash.

It's not "Them" OR "Us", it's You AND Me.

Bloggers + MSM = better media. Damn straight.

Complementary, collaborative, mutually reinforcing, keeping each other honest.

When a blogger fisks a poorly-researched, badly-argued MSM piece - that's good. And when an MSM reporter responds to an inflammatory, baseless blog post with their own dissection, rebuttal, and counterpoint - that's good too.

Conversation. Debate. Ebb and flow.

Blog-like "participatory" media initiatives such as Newsvine clearly have the potential to OR and then NOT mainstream media outlets that fail to understand this.

But seeing the AND value is a much smarter path, and one more likely to improve the quality and amplitude of reporting everywhere.

Bonus links:

1. Doc Searls points to a five-year-old interview with the late Peter Drucker (God rest him), in which Drucker tangentially underscores a related aspect of the AND.

2. The Toronto Star so very nearly gets it. They've adopted blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds. One of their smartest reporters, Tyler Hamilton, has a piece in this morning's @Biz section, print and online - "Get your paper by pod" - on the importance of podcasting to traditional print media outlets. It's a great piece. Tyler gets it.

The reason the Star only "very nearly" scores, IMHO? To get to Tyler's story, linked to above, requires you to register before you can read it. So near, yet so far...

A friend who works for a prominent enterprise technology publication has granted me permission to pass on this sublime example of hopelessly befuddled pitchery.

Let’s lead with the email.

>Paul,

OK – first problem. The reporter’s name is not Paul. You got one consonant correct, but I’m afraid that just isn't good enough. Please try harder.

>I have a story or press release to deliver. Something in the now, a very hot topic in all the >magazines and talk. Have a look and put it in your next issue. I have more information on the >project and I can also send you a photo of Cherry Beach Sound studios where it was mixed
>upon request.

>Truly,
[Name Removed to Protect the Guilty]
>Cherry Beach Sound

I’m almost at a loss for words. What kind of nitwit would think this was an even slightly appropriate way to approach a reporter?