Hi all - I'm a member of the IAOC, and I've been an active online and offline PR professional since about 1997. As an initial disclaimer, I'd like to say that I believe blogs are here to stay in one form or another, that they are vital, fascinating and full of potential for PR. As well as being an online PR practitioner with a busy company website/newsletter etc., I have also run an anonymous, personal blog for over five years. In the interests of making sure the devil's advocate is represented, I'll make a few comments. First of all, the Internet has provided corporations, industries and professionals with numerous "the Next Big Thing" opportunities over the last decade. Blogging is not the Next Big Thing. Blogging is, in essence, no different from the "garage" websites that Joe-Train-Collector was creating in the 90s. Those websites were gradually drowned out by the sheer volume of pages online. Simply 'being there' was very quickly replaced by 'being seen there.' Blogs have followed what now appears to be a pattern with online novelties. They appear under the radar, starting with the 'geeks', they catch on and become a trend with 'online people,' when they finally become entrenched, somewhat mainstreamed and have long since bred like rabbits - the New York Times decides to write something announcing the arrival of "the Next Big Thing." I've seen many veteran PR professionals in a workshop or lecture exhibit a near panic response to things like "blogs" because they believe they are missing the boat, hopelessly out of date and technologically too ignorant to handle this new communication necessity. My point here is mainly to say - Relax. The whole blog culture is - most importantly - useless for a PR professional if they don't possess the foundations of good PR skills. It's in transition - meaning that how we use it as PR people will be constantly changing for some time. What you learn today will be out of date and out of vogue tomorrow. And lastly, what seems like an overwhelming haystack of webpages, indecipherable acronyms and faceless scribblers is much more navigable than it first appears. After that deep breath, remind yourself what PR is all about. It's about communicating. Before we write press releases, create branding messages, make phone calls, book TV shows, etc., we've already done a great deal of work. We've made ourselves very familiar with our client. We've reviewed or even helped the client define his goals, his needs, and then the steps he can take to meet them. Depending on the project, we may have collected some market data, some customer information and/or demographics... you get the picture. This kind of intelligence, and the knowledge of what to do with it once we have it is why they pay us the big bucks. When it comes to a tool like online blogs, all this work still has to be done first. The blogs are, at present, a tool that can be added to the arsenal of tools we already employ such as special interest periodicals, daily newspapers, local rags, TV shows, Syndicated radio, industry newsletters, etc. etc. If the foreign culture of blogging seems overwhelming and opaque - think of it as a community newsletter that people in the neighborhood all pick up and flip through. The advantage of an internet community newspaper (i.e. blog) is that this neighborhood might be one of mountain-bike accessory aficionados worldwide. In the case of Kryptonite - that large corporation should absolutely have had one or more staff people who were paid to keep an eye on what their customer base was chatting about online. If they were hiring the right people in fact, some of their staff should have already been frequent visitors and contributors to those online groups. Bike people. Bike people know bike people. Not too high concept. Blogs are just a new channel for buzz. Gossip. Blather. Evangelical opinion sharing. After five or ten years of this, blogs have, like most things on the internet, cooked down so that the important gossip about something specific (such as bikes or Bush) can be heard by dropping by as few as two or three very popular sites. So, relax. Blogging is here to stay - in one form or another. And, in fact, it's always been here, in one form or another. The exciting part is that there's a new station for PR people like me who live to create Buzz, or, in corporate speak - disseminate the message and assess market opinion. The older I get, and the more experience in both life and PR (is there a difference?) that I amass, I realize how valuable, necessary and perennial the basic skills are - because despite the ever changing face of media communications, the theories and skills that underlie their deployment don't change. Now, if we can get the Microsoft dictionary to add ‘blog’ to its database, we’d up to speed.