I've been a little crazed at work over the past week, and the next two weeks will be much the same. I've also got some external writing deadlines. All of this means that posting has been a bit light. In fact, October looks like being the lightest posing month since March, 2005. But I was on holiday for ten days this month, so the numbers come with a Mark McGwire-sized asterisk.

Anyway, to let you know that I've not forgotten about Imagethief, here are a few things I stumbled on in the last few days that I thought were worth reading. These are more PR than China-related, but, as I noted, I've been buried in work of late.

WhoSpace?
The Washington Post reports on how fickle kids are about social networking sites, and the huge swings in traffic momentum that these sites get. This is interesting, because my industry is in the midst of a collective siezure about "how to deal with" user-generated media and social networking. Of course, "dealing with it" is exactly part of the problem. More on this later.

When we said "stay the course" we meant...
It's a marvellous thing in PR to create an intensely powerful piece of language that enables you to rhetorically eviscerate your opposition. Until things go so wrong that this same language becomes a millstone around your neck. A New York Times op-ed contributor with a dissection of the problems that "stay the course" is causing for President Bush now.

Good soldiers never look at lefty web sites
Rebecca MacKinnon on problems some US Air Force soldiers are facing accessing left-wing web-sites. Technical errors? Perhaps. Rebecca compares it to her time doing TV reports from China:
I am reminded of my efforts to transmit politically sensitive TV reports by satellite from Beijing when I was working there for CNN in the 1990's (in the pre-broadband days).  There were often conveniently-timed "technical failures" at the state broadcasting facility that controlled our satellite uplink out of China. Those failures always happened when certain kinds of video appeared, and were more common during certain politically sensitive periods. Always plenty of technical deniability. Nobody ever admitted they were censoring anything..
Darn that squirrely technology.

What's the difference between a blog and a website?
Rebecca again, this time blogging about Chinese blogger Keso's keynote presentation from the China Bloggers Conference in Hangzhou. Keso gets into something I think is pretty important:
The nature of trust between blogs and bloggers, Keso believes, is very different than the relationship between a person and a commercial website. When you interact with a commercial website its cold and transactional. "You dont interact with them as you would with a person who you have come to know." But when you conduct a transaction with another blogger, after having developed a trusting relationship with him through interacting with his blog, its like working with a friend.
This is an important thing for corporations and PR people to remember. In my business we quite regularly get asked to explain what makes a blog a blog. There are a lot of technical ways you can define a blog: diary, reverse chronological, blogroll, blah, blah, blah. But the most important thing is that blog's personal, while corporate websites are institutional. That's why people get so outraged when they come to feel that an apparently personal blog is really an institutional shill. On the other hand, this is the Internet, and identity is a fuzzy thing here, so a certain amount of due diligence will always be called for.

Will PR people ever "get" social media?
Well, the better question might be, will this generation of PR people ever get social media? The next generation will have grown up with it. Imagethief thinks that a lot of utopian bullshit gets blown around when it comes to social media, user-generated media and "web 2.0". Thinking back to his early Internet days, back in 1993-4, Imagethief remembers a lot of the same things being said about the first incarnation of the popular Internet. It'll never be commercialized! That's not what people want!  Well, at the risk of being divisive, I'd call that wrong. And Google, Amazon, E-Bay and all the other commercial properties that made the Internet useful for a lot of normal (read: non-geeky) people.

Nevertheless, in their attempts to understand, get a handle on and --yes, it's true-- manipulate social media, a lot of PR firms are making silly mistakes and getting ahead of themselves. Hence, this interesting essay from Strumpette on PR's inability to get to grips with the Internet and the instinctive hackle-raising that the industry seems to cause in web circles:

Actually, spammers aside, PR has been the undisputed king of the unsolicited and unstoppable strategic commercial message. Now that may very well be the industry’s Achilles Heel. Forget the fact that for years we’ve been shotgun blasting out thousands of press releases and blind pitches to the media. Now our mere presence in a transaction is suspect and damned at the onset. Here, this captures the market sentiment. The Consumerist last week did an expose of Edelman’s Mike Krempasky. In a related link, Scott Womack characterizes Krempasky as "a shill acting the part of arbitrator; but remember, the aggressor, the environmental polluter, abuser of women and children laborers, and destroyer of local economies, Wal-Mart, pays his salary to disguise these facts." And Mike’s a stand-up guy! But remember, perception is reality.

Today, to be a PR person is to be instantly suspected of unsolicited ulterior motives. When we are humming “I want my MTV,” the audience is hearing, “We got to move these refrigerators; we got to move these color TV's.”

Disclosure: Imagethief represents no refrigerator or color TV clients.