Stowe Boyd

A recent post by Jeremy Zawodny, in response to a piece of PR, seems on one hand a tempest in a teapot, but actually may shed some light on the emerging ethics of PR vis-a-vis blogging:

[from PR Spam to Bloggers Continues (by Jeremy Zawodny)]

Today a message arrived at the search-blog-admin@yahoo-inc.com address (the feedback address we publish on the Yahoo! Search blog) which started off like this:

Hi News,

As you may know, AOL today announced a trial for the new “AOL Hi-Q” high quality video format, allowing broadband users to access to video on demand features to watch online movie trailers, music videos and soon a selection of hundreds of classic TV titles from the Warner Bros collection. Kontiki, the leader in legal, secure peer-to-peer networking, is providing AOL with its Kontiki 5.0 grid delivery networking solution that enables the distribution of DVD-quality videos to consumers more quickly and efficiently.

It went on to include more text as well as a full copy of the press release.

Now here’s the best part. Krause Taylor Associates, the PR agency that’s spamming bloggers, also does work for a high-profile blogging company: SixApart. (Check their client list) They really ought to know better!

I wonder if the folks at SixApart can help get the message across to their PR agency: DO NOT SPAM US.

The interesting part is the argumentation raging in the post’s comments. Because Six Apart is mentioned, Anil Dash and Mena Trott both jump in, supporting Krause Taylor as a very clueful agency. Many others point out that spam is awful, and just becuase the agency knows the rules in general, they shouldn’t be left off the hook when they goof.

Barabara Krause of Kause and Taylor weighs in, and after some give and take, clarifies that Zawodny was ‘turned up’ in a search using MediaMap, a marketing tool. Zawodny is ok with being in MediaMap — he is aware that his name is there, and is open to being contacted about tools and products. Krause points out that in the entry about him the following information is included: “BEWARE! Proceed with caution when contacting this blogger.” To which Krause adds, “good advice.”

The remaining ethical questions are these:

• If you are a blogger, and you want to be informed of information pertinent to you and your research (or “beat” to use a media term), is it spam when PR flacks email you news stories? How should bloggers stipulate what they want to receive?
• Should we self-censor after a flap like this occurs, and it turns out that the inflammatory title we have created in a post is potentially damaging to others’ reputations? In this case, Jeremy did in fact alter the title of the post from “Krause Taylor Associates Spams Bloggers” to the current, more benign “PR Spam To Bloggers Continues”. Jeremy states in one of the comments on the post, “Many people seem concerned that “Krause Taylor Associates Spams Bloggers” will have negative affects on the company because it’ll show up in Google. While it’s not my “problem” I’ve changed the title to something a bit more vague. (A discussion of why I should or should not censor myself because of where Google may surface it is a discussion for later…)

In the first case, I bet that it would be very difficult to set up some means for bloggers to state — unequivocally — what they are, and are not, interested in hearing about. But we should come up with some approximation, because in general, this is this is the same approach we should take for all individuals to opt-in to marketing. (A microformat approach might be good, something wrapped around the Technorati blog tags that I set up in the right column, for example.)

The second case is very thorny. Zawodny states that the potential damage to reputation from his words is not his “problem” (what do the quotes indicate?), but obviously they become the author’s problem if they lead to damage and if they are erroneous. There are weak and strong definitions of spam, and this is clearly not spam, in either sense, from my perspective. Zawodny is open to receiving marketing email in the general case, but just gets pissed off if the stuff doesn’t interest him. Then it seems like spam (with a little “s”) to him, but that doesn’t make it Spam (with a capital “s”). So I think Jeremy did the right thing to change the title… although a quick search for the old title on Google shows that the meme that links Krause Taylor with spamming has been loosed on the world, now, and will never, never die.

John Battelle makes a strong case that the Web 2.0 resurgence is not a bubble, but represents a structural change in economics, technology, and society, and that in the final analysis, Web 1.0 led to a tech boom and bust because critical factors weren’t in alignment then which are now:

[from Building a Better Boom - New York Times by John Battelle]

But regardless of all this deja vu, we are not in a bubble. Instead we are witnessing the Web’s second coming, and it’s even got a name, “Web 2.0” - although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies - with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others.

And ubiquitous broadband, wifi in every cafe, and incredibly cheap hardware and open source software, which has made the cost of entry for innovators almost zero.

He addresses the notion that the web is an application platform — although he doesn’t use the Web OS term — and the missionary zeal that seems to pervade the Web+2.0+osphere (yes, you saw that here first). People involved in this movement — and it is a movement, having a lot in common with others, like open source, emergent democracy, and those who are trying to keep governments away from Internet regulation — are, as John puts it, “decidedly missionary - from the communitarian ethos of Craigslist to Google’s informal motto, “don’t be evil.”“

His final point isn’t as compelling to me as those that precede it, but may help to convince finance types: it’s not a bubble because there is little public financing through IPOs. That may come back to haunt him — and us all — if that bubbilicious model begins to be used.

But the natural economics of Web 2.0 development argue against that. I was just on a tour, talking with a handful of Web 2.0 tech start-up founders, and the tendency is to stay small, almost humorously small. At Mary Hodder’s Bloqx, for example, three developers were crammed into a room no larger than a large closet. Jason Fried of 37 Signals advocates keeping teams small, not just from a desire to reduce the burn, but to increase the likelihood of less features creeping into products. This week, I saw the same reflected in the jampacked three-room office of Podcast.com, where Scott Beatty, the CEO, described the company’s plans to the ‘rolling beta’ model of developing more and more rich services, which rely on small, agile development coupled with an obsession with end-user experience.

It’s an austere and highly philosophical era — which John only tangentially touches on — but one that is likely to lead to very different outcomes that Web 1.0. I believe that it’s also a generational thing. These are either young veterans of the Web 1.0 mess, or those that witnessed the fall out of “irrational exuberance” from afar. And they are at least going to make new mistakes, if mistakes are to be made.