And finally...

Having blogged for the past few weeks, I think I have a far better understanding about how blogging can be of benefit in PR. I was amazed at the number and diverse opinions in blogs which cover so many different subjects.

There is an infinite amount of space and an infinite amount of information on the Internet and it is difficult to comprehend how to best use it. In the future different PR campaigns, though, will have to use different PR 2.0 tools and target audiences with key messages in many different ways.

Everything is also changing so quickly with new products and ideas thrown up almost every day. This means that PRs will need to be ready to match these changes and adapt to new ways of working. Some things, though, never change. This week's data found on hard drives is depressingly familiar to the old newspaper stories about personal information being dumped in landfills or discovered on waste ground. There is now so much information so easily available that it seems it will ever harder to keep it secure.

I am frequently amazed at the personal information, including pictures, phones numbers, details about friends, etc that people willing give over on social networking sites. No one can control the amount of data out there and that is what, in many ways, defines the Internet.

Even this very limited experience of blogging has shown me the way blogging makes people confront such issues. This may be my last post here but I don't think it will be long before I reappear blogging somewhere else.

Evening all

Having worked for the police, I was pleased to see a police officer winning the Orwell prize for his anonymous blog, NightJack. All too often police are in the news for the wrong reasons and police officers are more angry than anyone about the behviour of the tiny minority of officers who fail to keep up the very high standards we so rightly expect of them.

Police officers are not known for their great communication skills, so it is good to read in the blog what life is really like on the beat. This is the best PR the police can have...from the horse's mouth.

This also shows how Web 2.0 tools can empower ordinary men or women to speak to the majority. More power to this PC's PC.

Is this the age of the political blogger?

Even the most powerful communicators can get it wrong at times. Damian McBride, now a former adviser to Gordon Brown at No. 10, will no doubt be wishing he had never suggested blogging about Tory politicians to his erstwhile friend Derek Draper who runs LabourList, a blog for Labour party supporters. For those of us with long memories, Derek Drapper was also caught up in a much earlier Labour row back in 1998 about lobbying.

Picture from: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1022168

McBride should never have forgotten where and who he works for and the immense influence his job gave him. It is always easy to communicate but not always necessary to do it.

However, for Paul Staines it is a massive success for him and his Guido Fawkes' blog. In the UK political bloggers have taken a long time to become popular or influential, unlike the US, where blogs dominated the recent presidential election and President Obama raised most of his funds via Internet sites or various types.

If, as Harold Wilson famously said, a week is a long time in politics, then in then new cyberworld bloggers will speed that up to make just a few minutes a long time in politics.
Perhaps this could be the age of the political blogger.