Collaborative PR was invented in 1954 by a guy named Herb Muschel, who, having seen the power of the teletype in transmitting news for the Associated Press, suddenly realized in what must have been a profound eureka moment that this would be a great way to send press releases.

Imagine no longer having to summon a phalanx of messengers on bicycles when you had major news to announce. Imagine being able to simply key your release into this new-fangled device, hit "send," and know that your release will electronically wing its way to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of news organizations.

Such a glorious vision. 

This was the promise of the teletype, and Herb delivered, setting up a transmitting device in his apartment and six receivers in news rooms around New York, and declaring his network open for business.

TWA was the first to send a release in this totally modern way. Other firms soon followed, and the PR Newswire Association quickly became a major aggregator of PR content, trusted alike by PR professionals and reporters.

I call this the birth of collaborative PR because it was the first corporate enterprise whose success necessitated the participation of PR practitioners in large numbers.

Fast-forward 40 years. In the early 1990s, Roger Johnson, a freelance science writer, signs up for CompuServe and realizes its forums make possible the posting of press releases in easy-to-browse categories. He launches a press-releases distribution service called Sci-News Med-News (later changed to Newswise).

Alan Hall,  former Business Week technology editor and executive editor of Scientifi American, teams with higher ed PR consultant Frank Dobisky in launching Quadnet, which sends news releases summaries into reporters' email inboxes and gives them the option of retrieving the full text of the release. 

And 200 academic public information officers representing 130 colleges and universities launch an experiment called the "Internet Demonstration Project." This morphs into ProfNet, the first Internet-based expert resource.

Collectively, these and other initiatives of the early and mid 1990s are the Second Great Wave of collaborative wave, made possible by the early Internet.

Fast-forward one more time -- this time to 2005. The "static Web" of the mid-1990s, which gave way to the "dynamic Web" of the late 1990s and early 2000s, is morphing again into what we must now call the "neural Web" because its circuitry is, by comparison, so brain-like.

Now we enter the Third Great Wave of collaborative PR, made possible by new Internet micro tools. We call them "micro" because they are personal tools, available to any home office or living room, and because they enable us to link in numbers that are smaller than mass audiences -- and yet they are capable of engaging mass audiences.

What new models of collaboration will we discover?

At ProfNet, we feel a keen responsibility to inform our members what these new forms will be, but of course we can't know until, with our members' help, we collaboratively invent them. This  explains the approach we're taking in Wiki World: Collaborative PR on the Neural Web. In the very process of developing this treatise, we'll explore the powers of the new media and try out new forms that unite us.

Blogs are a fine collaborative medium, but for this type of aggregation a wiki is far better, and so to our wiki we now go. 

Thanks to IAOC for use of this space. If they allow it, we'll return now and then with an update.

Dan Forbush
Best email: expertwiki@yahoo.com