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I know I’m coming late to this particular party, but I’ve been thinking a bit about the implications of BlogBurst, the newly-launched service from Pluck (which also does a feed reader/aggregator). The idea behind the service is that you sign up and BlogBurst syndicates your blog posts to various newspapers, in the same way services like Scripps-Howard or Knight-Ridder syndicate columnists or cartoonists to the Brantford Expositor or the Greensboro Statesman-Review or whatever.

There’s just one difference with Scripps-Howard and other syndication services, however, which is that the columnists or feature writers whose material is sent out actually get paid. Let me be clear on that – they get cash. Money. They don’t get links, or trackbacks or referrers or whatever, but money (although maybe not a lot, unless you’re Dave Barry). By now, you’ve probably figured out what one of my beefs with BlogBurst is. Blogs that are syndicated get traffic referred back to them, but other than that they get nothing – although the terms of the agreement, which are mentioned here, say that Pluck may pay some form of honorarium or royalty. But those who sign up do so on the understanding they will not be paid.

As Darren Rowse of Problogger.net notes, bloggers should think long and hard about whether this makes sense for them. As my friend Mark Evans has pointed out – and Tris Hussey in the comments on Mark’s post – unless you think syndication is going to turn into traffic that you will then be able to monetize in some other way, it’s probably not worth it. Which makes you wonder who would sign up for BlogBurst. From the comments at Problogger.net, it looks as though authors and speakers or consultants who want to raise their profile would be interested, because they are looking to make money through some other outlet. A pure blogger (if there is such a thing) probably wouldn’t see it the same way.

One of the larger questions that this kind of thing raises, I think, is how much of Web 2.0 and the interest in it is just companies (newspapers, in this case) looking for ways to profit from the content of others without having to pay them? This is something I’ve written about before, as have others, and I think it’s going to become more and more of an issue. In that sense, maybe BlogBurst is a sign of things to come.

Update:

Adam from Pluck contacted me via email and said that contrary to some of the early reports, the company is planning a compensation model of some kind — it just doesn’t know how it’s going to work exactly yet. As he put it, “There actually will be a blogger compensation model after the beta period. Initially, of course, we do need to fully understand the dynamics of the whole system and determine the best monetization model for bloggers and publishers alike.” So stay tuned. BlogBurst has (what else) a blog at BurstBlog.com. Adam also has a blog where he has demonstrated what a BlogBurst feed would look and act like.

I’m as excited as the next guy about the introduction of Apple computers running on Intel chips, if only because it raises the possibility that I could someday have a PC that runs both Windows and Mac OS. And I know that the new MacBook laptops are supposed to be ultra-sweet — but does that mean we have to bow down and worship even the box that the new laptops arrive in? A recent post at tech site ZDNet does exactly that, in an entry that is entitled “Exclusive: MacBook Pro unboxing pics,” in the kind of breathless tone that tabloids reserve for photos of Brad and Angelina on a beach somewhere.

What the post gives you is 28 — yes, 28 — close-up shots of the box with the MacBook Pro inside it, then a shot of the box after it has been opened, and then a shot of the styrofoam insert that protects the MacBook, and so on. After the picture of the styrofoam insert, there is a caption that says “The Styrofoam inside the case has a cool circular cutout pattern.” (Note: I am not making this up). In order to see the coolness of the styrofoam up close, there is a second shot from a different angle. Then there are shots of the MacBook in its anti-static bag, then another foam insert, then shots of the power supply (up close) and so on. And they’re not the only ones.

If there’s one thing that gives geeks — particularly Apple geeks — a bad name, it’s the kind of obsessive and lavish attention paid to every tiny detail of a new product, from the finish on the aluminum to the packaging (packaging porn, someone called it). A blog called I Kew makes another point, which is that there has been little said about Apple’s decision to send “cease and desist” letters to websites devoted to hacking OS X so that it can run on any Intel box, but everyone wants to talk about the cool new products and the boxes they came in.

Freedom of speech? Who cares. But cool boxes and styrofoam inserts with circular cutouts? Now that’s something worth talking about.

Anyone who’s been following the whole “Web 2.0” thing for any length of time knows that blogging and all the other tools for interactivity that go along with that – the “conversation” we are all a part of – has profound implications for the media, for marketers, for businesses (both startups and established companies) and for society as a whole. My fellow tech blogger Mark Evans, lawyer/blogger Rob Hyndman, entrepreneur/blogger Mike McDerment and marketing wunderkind Stuart MacDonald and I have been talking about these kinds of things for awhile, and lamenting the fact that while there are lots of great conferences about these issues in France (Les Blogs), in Geneva (LIFT06) and in Vancouver (Northern Voice) there hasn’t really been a good one in Toronto.

So we decided to organize one. Essentially, we want to get some of the smartest and most interesting people in the Web 2.0 movement (if I can call it that) into a room together and talk about how some of these issues are changing the way we live our lives, whether we’re journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs or just people in general. As Mark and Rob and Mike have already mentioned on their blogs, some of the details have yet to be worked out – such as the exact date and location – but we’re looking at early May sometime, and we wanted to throw the idea out to the blog community and see what some of you would like to get out of a conference like that.

We’re going to have some blockbuster keynotes, and we’re planning to have some panel discussions, but we also want to have some smaller, workshop-style discussions for people to really get into the meat of some of the things we’re talking about. Should bloggers be considered journalists? How can the “old” media deal with Web 2.0? How are blogs changing the way companies do business? How have they affected the political process or society in general, either positively or negatively? If you have any ideas, we’d be happy to hear them.

Amid all the hoopla of the 3GSM conference in Geneva last week, most of which seemed to revolve around Microsoft getting into “push” email to compete with the BlackBerry, there were a couple of announcements that probably had telecom companies biting their fingernails (if they weren’t already, that is). One of these came from Microsoft head coach Steve Ballmer, who described how one of the features of the new Office Communicator suite would be the ability to make free VOIP calls over Wi-Fi from your cellphone (running Windows Mobile of course).

Come to think of it, Skype might be a little nervous at that idea too – not to mention the company that paid as much as $4-billion for it. But think about a carrier such as Verizon or AT&T. Their game up to this point has been selling mobile phones and services as fast as they can, in order to make up for the fact that regular old wired phone service is a moribund business. What if even a small percentage of those users (particularly the free-spending business types) could suddenly make free voice calls over Wi-Fi?

If I were a telecom player, that would certainly keep me awake at night. According to one British telecom analyst, voice revenues are set to plunge. “The premium for wireless voice, without mobility, will disappear as wi-fi networks spread,” Westhall Capital analyst Cyrus Mewawalla said. “By our estimates, that puts 75% of the market for mobile voice revenues at risk of a substantial price downgrade (in the order of 50%-80%). For some international calls, prices could fall by 90% or more.” And Nokia has made it clear it is determined to support VOIP over Wi-Fi: “Internet voice is going mobile,” said Nokia head Jorma Ollila.

The telecom companies aren’t completely powerless in all this. Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola and Research In Motion want access to their customers and networks, and they also want the carriers to subsidize their devices so that more people will buy them. That gives them leverage – but it may only allow them to slow the speed with which VOIP eats into their business, not stop it altogether.

As an example of the kind of “viral marketing” that the Internet can achieve with very little effort, the so-called “Lazy Sunday” video from Saturday Night Live is about as good as it gets. In the clip, which was aired on December 17, comedians and show writers Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform a rap about how much they love cupcakes, and take a trip to see the movie The Chronicles of Narnia. The combination of the subject matter and the gangster-style rap made the video a huge hit over the Christmas holidays, to the point where it was downloaded more than five million times in just a couple of days.

What great advertising for NBC and the show Saturday Night Live, right? After all, the success of the video led to stories being written in the New York Times and elsewhere about both the writers and the show itself. So what did NBC do — send a cheque and a big thank-you to YouTube and other sites that helped to drive this Internet phenomenon? Er, no. They sent a letter from their solicitors, telling the site to remove the video or face legal action.

NBC’s argument, of course, is that this is a blatant copyright violation, and that viewers should be forced to go to NBC’s website to see the clip (where it can be watched free of charge) or to download it from iTunes for $1.99 (U.S.). Why? So that NBC can make money from it, obviously. What seems to have escaped the network’s mind is the fact that the video already aired on the program, and therefore has made as much revenue as any episode of the show normally does, not to mention the fact that the attention the video got could drive thousands more people to watch future shows. As usual, the network seems prepared to sacrifice all that free marketing for a little short-term profit. And that’s why it’s called “old” media.

Update:

I wish I could take credit for the headline on this post, which my friend Paul Kedrosky so kindly mentioned as part of the Chronicles of Narnia memewatch, but as it turns out Pete Cashmore of Mashable used it first. Nice job, Pete. I guess great minds think alike 🙂

Update 2:

Paul Kedrosky points to a post at Data Mining that describes how NBC might have gotten things just right — let the video go viral and get lots of attention, then pull it back once the heat has subsided.

My blogging friend Kent Newsome had a great idea recently (I’m sure it’s just the latest of many). After all the talk about gatekeepers and how A-listers such as Doc Searls could do more by linking to unknown bloggers, Kent decided to start a feature he called “second opinion,” in which he singled out and linked to a lesser-known blogger with a good post on a particular topic. Doc has called this “affirmative traction.” (Nice one, Doc).

I think this is a fantastic idea. For all the whining from B-listers and C-listers and Z-listers about how no one links to poor old them, very few go out of their way to link to bloggers who are even lesser known than they are. I know this is kind of cheating, but as my first attempt at doing this, I’m actually going to pick someone I found through Kent’s blog – except that he didn’t link to this person as an example of a second opinion, he linked to them because they agreed with his suggestion and mentioned it on their blog. So who is it? It’s Dave Wallace of Australia, who writes two good blogs – one called Lifekludger, and a personal one called Blob.

I went to Dave’s blog to check out what he said about Kent’s idea, but then I read this post, which was about equality on the blogosphere, and how there plenty of tools for grouping the same dozen or so blogs together around topics, but there aren’t enough that allow you to find the lesser-known voices – kind of like Kent is trying to do. I thought Dave put it quite well. While looking around his blog (because I’m a nosy journalist), I discovered that Dave also writes Lifekludger, which is about the tools he uses to make it easier to do things, since he has been a C4 quadraplegic for the last 25 years or so.

Dave’s blogs aren’t exactly the bottom of the Z-list – Lifekludger is number 342,900 in the Technorati rankings with 30 links from 8 sites, and Blob is number 255,753 with 30 links from 11 sites. But I still think he could use a boost, and I’m happy to do my part to help him get more readers.

If anything sums up the conflicted state of the blogosphere when it comes to startups and Web 2.0 and so on – the fact that the same people who write blogs about cool startups are often people who are involved in other startups, which are then blogged by others, and so on – it is the links that have populated tech.memeorandum.com for most of today (click here for a screencap). Although their positions have shifted around during the day, they are all about Mike Arrington – but from two different vantage points. Some are about his great party (which was held for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book Naked Conversations) and others are about Edgeio.com, his startup.

They do have one thing in common though – apart from being about Mike. And that is, they are almost all raves. The posts about the party are raves (even, surprisingly, some from people who couldn’t make it), and the ones about Edgeio.com are almost all raves as well, although to be fair there are a few questions thrown in here and there. But Dan Farber’s post, as my old sparring partner Scott Karp notes, sums up the tone of breathless enthusiasm: it is entitled “TechCrunch leads Silicon Valley Web renaissance.”

Now, Mike seems like a nice guy. And so do The Scobelizer and lots of the rest who were at the party, and many who wrote about Edgeio and the invitation-only previews they got. Mike has also been pretty good about declaring his conflicts, especially after the whole FON brouhaha. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that at the moment the lines can get pretty blurry in the old blogosphere, especially for those in Silly-con Valley – and no, I don’t feel that way just because I don’t get invited to Mike’s parties (and am too far away to go anyway). I think it’s a lingering problem people will have to confront in one way or another if Web 2.0 is going to get ahead in the credibility game.

Full disclosure: I know diddly-squat about RSS. I know what it does, and I know a little about how it works, and I use it – but I’m not a programmer, so for example I don’t know why sometimes my feeds have weird characters in them where the quotes should be, or where the apostrophes are, or whatever. I do know that RSS is important, because it gives people a way of subscribing to blogs and news sources they like, or even of subscribing to individual pieces of a smart news site such as the one I work for. This allows people to desconstruct the media and reconstruct it in new ways, which is “a good thing” ^TM.

I also know that the inimitable Dave Winer, who by all accounts is a brilliant programmer and is also a long-time blogger, developed RSS and is working on various outgrowths from that, including OPML, which allows the creation of “reading lists,” which also looks like a good thing. But at the risk of pissing Dave off so soon after my most recent run-in with him, it’s also clear that he is too close to RSS, and too personally invested in it, to the point where he appears to be hindering progress in making it better. And that’s “a bad thing.” ^TM

Even digging a little bit into the whole affair gives me the willies, but as far as I can tell, Dave is doing his best to screw around with the RSS Advisory Board, which is run by Rogers Cadenhead – a guy who (as Steve Kirks points out) has supported Dave when he was slammed by critics and worked with him at Weblogs.com. And yet, Dave suggests in a recent post that the board no longer exists.

The comments on Roger’s post, as well as discussions of the topic from Adam Green at Darwinian Web and Marshall Kirkpatrick make it obvious that Dave is trying to control RSS, and that this isn’t the first time he has tried to exert his will and stymie change. I can understand why he feels personally attached to the spec, but that is no reason to stall change. If the board proposes things that aren’t good, presumably others will resist and criticize, and changes will be made – that’s how things work in a democracy, which last time I looked is how these things were supposed to operate. I’m sure Dave will correct me if I’m wrong.

Update:

Paul Montgomery over at Tinfinger says that the board and I are all wrong, and that Dave is right. Why? For some pretty odd reasons, as far as I can tell. For example, Paul says that RSS needs to be fixed, but says it’s better to keep it the way it is because that keeps it “strong;” he also says that it’s vague, and that is also a strength – but the strangest one is when he says that one of the great features of RSS is “its poor quality.” That’s quite the argument you’ve got there, Paul. For me, I’d rather have something that changes and evolves and gets better, and to hell with Dave and his ego.

After the rhetorical beating I got the last time I broached this subject, I should probably keep my mouth shut, but I can’t help myself. The subject, of course, is blogs and comments, and whether one can (or should) exist without the other. I suppose I should know better than to argue about the nature of blogs with a blog that calls itself Bloggers Blog – and (just so you don’t miss the point) gives its motto as “blogging the blogosphere” – but what the heck. The site, which is written by an author or authors unknown, says this:

“The argument that blogs are not a blog without comments is silly. Boing Boing, the most popular blog on the Internet, has no comments. Michelle Malkin’s blog has no comments. Post Secret has no comments. Seth Godin’s blog has trackbacks but no comments. There aren’t many that would argue these commentless blogs are not blogs.”

There may not be many who would argue this, but I feel compelled to wade in there anyway (I hate crowds.) Am I really going to argue that Boing Boing, the most popular blog on the Interweb, isn’t a blog? Yes. Or at least, not a very good one. Because I think that’s what we’re talking about here – not what a blog is (because there is no definition, or at least nothing that isn’t so vague that you could just as easily replace it with the term “web page”), but what makes a blog good or not. And I think one of the biggest factors, apart from actually having something worthwhile to say, is to have comments, whether you’re Russell Beattie or Dave Winer.

Why? Because blogs are about conversation, dialogue, back-and-forth, the fray (as Derek Powazek’s early venture was called) or whatever you want to call it. Yes, as Bloggers Blog and Dave and others have mentioned, you can write a response to something on your own blog and then link to the original post and comment that way, but not everyone is going to want (or have the time) to do that. Why leave them out? Maybe they have something to contribute. I would argue that Boing Boing and Post Secret and other sites like that (such as Valleywag, which has limited comments by registered users) are actually more like magazines than they are blogs. That doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them less good.

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere about whether blogs are dead, whether blogs can ever achieve anything, whether blogs will mean the death of civilization as we know it, whether my blog can beat up your blog, and so on – all of which was sparked by this article in Slate magazine.

The point of the piece seems to be that blogs as a business, in terms of making money and being acquired, is over. Fair enough. As many have pointed out, however – including my friends Tris Hussey, Mark Evans and Rob Hyndman, as well as Steve Borsch, Dan Gillmor and Steve Rubel – there is a lot more going on than Slate seems to think. Whether it’s “monetizable” or not (and how) remains to be seen.

I find it interesting that only a couple of people, including Rob, Paul Kedrosky and Munir at Blogging Journalist have mentioned an even more in-depth look at how blogs aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be, which appeared in the Financial Times (written by Trevor Butterworth, who as Paul points out has a name that is almost too British to be believed), under the headline “Time for the last post.” In it, he quotes Choire Sicha (ex of Gawker and now at the New York Observer) as saying blogs are essentially a waste of time and accomplish little.

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.” The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things – the purview of old media – is arguably much more important.”

It’s fine to say – as the article does – that blogs aren’t a revolution, won’t kill the “dinosaurs” of old media, and other lame truisms. But Sicha’s point is a different one: that blogs are bad because they fragment things, that they aren’t connected the way they pretend to be, and that old media needs to be there to “see the totality of things.” As tied to the early success of Gawker as he might have been, this shows that Sicha never really got it to begin with. Do there need to be aggregators or filters or sources that coalesce some of the fragmentation that democracy brings? Yes. Does that have to be “old media?” No. Sicha and others are short-changing themselves and others with their narrow-minded views.

Nicholas Carr is a former editor at the Harvard Business Review. He’s written books, he’s written for the New York Times, he’s spoken at MIT and he’s won awards (see Nick’s comment below for clarification). I have done none of these things (okay, I won an award once in Grade 6). I do, however, have a blog – just like Nick does over at Rough Type – and so that puts us on an equal footing, more or less. Is that bad? After all, I’m not nearly as smart or as accomplished as he is. We may have different tastes when it comes to a bunch of things, like whether ZZ Top is great music or not, or whether John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame is one of the funniest cartoonists alive.

Why is any of this relevant? Because Nick has written a post in which he says that Web 2.0 is part of a “machine” that is killing (or will kill) culture as we know it, since Web 2.0 is designed to fuel what he calls “the new narcissism.” In this, he agrees with Andrew Keen, who has written a long piece for the Weekly Standard (which you can find here) about how Web 2.0 reminds him of Marxism, a utopian vision that became a nightmare.

And what is this Web 2.0 nightmare? Keen calls it “Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.” He also says – to use the quote that Nick pulled out for his post: “If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization… is cultural ‘flattening.’ In the end we’re left with nothing more than ‘the flat noise of opinion.'”

This – not to put too fine a point on it – is a load of elitist clap-trap. (Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web is much more succinct than I in his post about it). Every time something even remotely new or different comes along, there’s always a knee-jerk “how did this riff-raff get in here” kind of response from places like the Weekly Standard. Imagine if everyone were entitled to voice their own opinion, or indulge their own tastes, instead of recognizing the superiority of whatever art or music or literature they’re supposed to be bowing down in front of. Total chaos. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.

In his final paragraph, Nick warns us to “beware of those who come with money and influence and pretty-sounding abstractions and who are utterly unaware that what they so joyfully seek to impose on the world is their own reckless banality.” I can take a little reckless banality, to tell you the truth – and there’s plenty of that at Harvard too, I’m betting – but I’m just crazy enough to think that out there in the blogosphere there are lots of unique voices that could also be heard, if only elitist morons like Andrew Keen would take the poker out and loosen up a little (Eran at supr.c.ilio.us has a nice one).

Update:

Nick has responded to my original post in the comments.

Jason Chervokas, former editor of @NY magazine, has a great piece up on his blog about the continuing stupidity of the current media /DRM model (hat tip to Fred Wilson of A VC for the link):

“I like Howard Stern. I’m willing to pay $13 a month for the option of flipping over to his show when I feel like it. But I’m not willing to invest time, money, or aggravation in the hardware or installation services required to buy into the Sirius distribution network. I’m willing to pay for the content, but I want my content liberated, free to roam the network of networks until I pull it down to the device of my choice at the time of my choice for the personal use of my choice… end users want information to be network- and device-agnostic.”

Jason is totally right, as is Fred. And just after reading both of their takes on the issue, what do I come across but this post at PaidContent, in which Staci points to Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal of the ESPN phone – which comes with all kinds of ESPN content, but is so restricted and locked down and cumbersome in what it allows that it sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I know PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak likes to be controversial, likes to think outside the box – heck, even outside the universe that contains the concept of “boxes” – but his latest column on Apple is a new low (or high, depending on your perspective). I think the editors at PCMag just run his stuff as a kind of gag now. I picture them giggling to themselves, like university students printing some wild-ass piece of gonzo writing in their student paper and hoping the administration doesn’t notice.

Dvorak’s latest brain-wave is that Apple is plotting behind the scenes to dump the Mac OS and run Windows. Makes sense, right? After all, says the columnist, they have moved away from Firewire and are supporting USB now (cue the ominous soundtrack – maybe something from The Exorcist), and the Apple Switch campaign is over and “nobody switched,” he says. That might come as a surprise to some of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought new Macs in the past few quarters, since sales have been rising at a much faster rate than they were before the iPod.

But the biggest weapon in Dvorak’s arsenal is, of course, the switch to using Intel chips. And what kind of chips do PCs that run Windows use? (nudge, nudge) Why Intel, of course (knowing wink). Could it get any more obvious? It certainly could for me. Why on earth would Apple want to run Windows? It wouldn’t make any kind of operating sense whatsoever, since Apple would be giving up the last thing that makes the company unique – apart from some cool hardware. Not only would it piss off the legions of Macolytes who worship Steve Jobs and everything he touches, but it probably wouldn’t win over that many Windows users either.

Not to mention, of course, that Steve Jobs would have to be lobotomized before he would allow something like that to happen, and the odds of that seem slim. Still, I suppose to be fair to Dvorak, the chances aren’t zero. So watch out – if you see Steve Jobs wandering around with a big scar across his forehead where they popped his head open and removed his cerebellum, then the PCMag columnist just might be onto something.

For more on John Dvorak’s growing reality problems, check out Download Squad and MacSlash Phil Sim, the Squashmeister, also has some thoughts – and as usual he takes a refreshingly different tack (although I still think he’s wrong). Not surprisingly, the Unofficial Apple Weblog also has an opinion on Dvorak, and they’ve gone for the “off his meds” angle too. And for the ultimate does of “John Dvorak is nuts,” you will have to go to the obvious URL: dvorakisnuts.org – where you will find a link to this comic strip version of the above incident.

I don’t want to get The Scobleizer all riled up again like he was after that whole Google hosted-email thing, but what the heck is wrong with Microsoft? The launch of Office Live looks to me like a bunch of cobbled together stuff the company had lying around, all of which has been “rebranded” under the name Office Live because it sounds really cool and Web 2.0-ish. So what, you say – lots of companies routinely do that kind of thing, Microsoft included. Which is true. But my point is, why cheapen a potentially hot brand idea like Office Live by pasting it on something that looks like a bag of warmed-over, also-ran features?

After all the attention that has been paid to Microsoft’s various “Live” announcements and betas and whatnot, such as the Ajaxy homepage thing at www.live.com and the Ajaxy beta of the replacement for Hotmail, I’m not the only one who was under the impression that Office Live might actually have something to do with Office – the Microsoft workflow-software suite, that is – and in particular might offer some approximation of Office apps over the Web. Nothing could be further from the truth, apparently. There’s a domain service and some email and calendaring applications that seem aimed at small businesses, as well as some collaboration features, but nothing like Writely.com or JotSpot Tracker or even WebEx’s WebOffice.

Why not call all that stuff something else, and save the term Office Live for something that actually offers those kinds of things? Who knows (even Scoble seems a little confused). Maybe the beast from Redmond is planning to buy 37signals.com and all their great services (like Campfire.com, a real-time Web chat collaboration thing they just launched) and roll them into Office Live. Or maybe it will fold Web-based versions of Word and Excel and so on in there at some point – or maybe this will join the growing stack of examples in the “boneheaded marketing decision” file.

Ed Bott of ZDNet has a great column that outlines some of issues that media (both old and new), companies and PR agencies are wrestling with in the Web 2.0 world – using Microsoft and its somewhat elaborate and convoluted structure of EULAs, NDAs and various other restrictions on the Office 12 Beta as an example. Some journalists can write about it, and so can some bloggers – but other media can’t, and some bloggers can’t. Even The Scobleizer couldn’t figure it out immediately: at first he said Ed could blog some of the features, then after some checking he said he probably couldn’t.

Without giving a lot of details from the Microsoft side, Scoble gets into the implications of this new world in his own post, in which he describes how PR types are struggling with questions like “Are bloggers journalists?”

“Now every single one of us has the power to have “the exclusive.” It really is messing with PR team’s heads as they try to deal with this new world of 20,000,000 people who can make or break your PR plans. It was so much easier back when you only needed to deal with a few hundred or less.”

James Robertson has some thoughts along those lines too, in which he says that this is a sign of the evolution that’s going on in the world of PR, as it tries to come to grips with Media 2.o:

What we’re seeing is the old PR staff doing business as usual, and getting snared by the ground as it’s shifting underneath them. I’m not sure where this is going to end up… A new model is trying to be born, and I don’t think anyone knows what it’s going to look like yet.

James has hit the nail on the head. It’s not just that blogs are a massive maelstrom of commentary that is difficult to wrap your head or arms around as a journalist, PR person or company – the incredible power even a single blog can have to alter the way your company or product is perceived is also difficult to come to grips with. Some companies are trying to hire people to pretend to be satisfied customers, as Nvidia has been accused of doing; some are trying to hire bloggers outright; some are counting on relationships and “customer evangelists” like The Scobleizer himself – or reaching out to people like Thomas Hawk.

One thing is obvious: whether it’s scoops or “exclusives” or EULAs or NDAs or private get-togethers with the CEO over drinks at the club (off the record of course), the old ways are rapidly becoming irrelevant. What will replace them remains to be seen (Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research says scoops will continue, but who gets them will change, and Steve Rubel seems to agree). I just gave a presentation today to a group of PR staff here in Toronto about blogs, and there was a tremendous amount of interest – but also a lot of questions. And the most interesting part is that no one really has the answers.