Enough said!

Hipster PDA nano, originally uploaded by fraserspeirs.

Back-Story Battles

Reporters beware? Mark Cuban blogs the email interview for a NYT piece about him.

This thing, while definitely a warning shot to reporters tempted to take liberties with source material and interview notes, basically boils down to a criticism of the way Sorkin's friendly approach differs from the critical tone of the resulting piece.

The whole kerfuffle is a far less intense version of the war that David Eggers wrought on NYT reporter David Kirkpatrick, which includes a ton of the email correspondence between the two, from Kirkpatrick's dogged effort to draw Eggers into commenting to the bitter denouement. If you can find (and endure) the original "correction" that Eggers ran, you really get to see the seamy side of the journo business.

An Email Blacklist of Technology PR Agencies - at last!

The long-awaited Blacklist of Technology PR Agencies? (by Jeremy Zawodny) is upon us! Buzzkiller.net was long rumored to have an automated blacklist of PR agencies. But our automated email blacklist has always been trained on specific buzzwords and worthless phrases, not on any agency in particular.

Also, I ran into Mr. Zawodny in the lobby of Yahoo building D or B or some letter, and the first thing he said to me was "You haven't updated your blog in, like, a year." Hence all the recent activity here. Thanks for the inspiration, J.Z.

Bad Pitch! Bad!

We hope this is truly a weekly flogging of weak flogging...

Corante > Flackster > Hopelessly Inept Pitch of the Week

Bonus: the first commenter asks the question that we put to bed five years ago, via a poll of our readers: to name or not to name the source of the pilloried pitch?

Flackosphere Intersects Blogosphere!

Russell Beattie flies into the kind of rage here -- PR People Are Morons -- that I haven't felt since the late 1990s, when an earlier wave of completely clueless PR zombies launched an offensive.

There's a lot of thoughtful PR discussion stemming from Russell's rant and an admonitory post by Anil Dash with a slightly more urbane tone.

Napster, Dude what the Dell?

Oooh - Dell is hmmm - reselling subscriptions to Napster at a student discount rate.

Om Malik, none too impressed, has a laugh at the expense of the press release.

Micro Persuasion: 10 Commandments for The Era of Participatory Public Relations

Music to our ears!

If we had to choose one commandment, it would be #8. No, not the old one, about stealing. The new one, about meaningless business jargon...

from Micro Persuasion: 10 Commandments for The Era of Participatory Public Relations:

8) Thou shall banish corporate speak – People want to hear from you in a human voice. Don’t hide behind corporate speak. It will soon sound like ye olde English.

Well said, Mr. Rubel. You're a credit to the profession. We beg to differ with you on that last point, though. Olde English (a.k.a. Eight Ball, for all you EZ-E fans) provides an honest buzz, and Old English means what it says.

peeling back the layers of PR B.S.

John Gruber provides an excellent translation of the company line on Adobe's purchase of Macromedia. Thanks to Bob at Snee dot com for alerting us.

one of the translations - check it:

Who proposed this acquisition — Adobe or Macromedia?

Official answer:
With the recent success and strong momentum of both Macromedia and Adobe, the CEOs of each company agreed that this was an excellent time to combine forces. Together, we have the opportunity to create an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content across a wide range of devices and operating systems.

Translation:
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen was the pitcher, Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop was the catcher.

Every PR department should have someone who can translate like this.

praise be: gibberish generator's gravitas gulls gobbledygook glorifiers

MIT undergrads pull a nice prank on the organizers of a conference. Well done, lads!