At Bloggerheads

From: spencer_katt@ziffdavis.com

Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 12:42 AM

To: eWEEK readers

Subject: Blog blog blog blog blog; Sams outsource club; Critique-a-pedia

“At the Copa, Copacabana, hear bloggers and PR folks banter,” the Mouser Manilowed as he watched the high jinks at the BlogOn event held in the Big Apple. Spence guessed the New York night club doesnt typically host business events, as Wi-Fi access at the establishment was spotty at best, forcing the bloggerati to actually (gasp!) talk to one another. As the Katt listened to blog proponents claim Web logs would soon render PR agencies irrelevant, he was reminded of now-laughable bubble-era predictions that the Web would replace every brick-and-mortar business on the planet. Shel Israel, who is co-authoring the upcoming book “Naked Conversations” with überblogger and Microsoftie Robert Scoble, further antagonized the marketeers by saying blogging will reduce all PR people to careers in food service. When one PR woman explained her position at Porter Novelli in an attempt to defend her trade, the panel host sneered, “You mean youre an aspiring waitress?”

El Gato was also assaulted with a bevy of neoblogisms, such as chief conversation officer (an executive managing a corporate blog), underdog blogger (companies that get into blogging to improve their reputation), alpha blogger (used to describe popular bloggers such as Scoble) and the reluctant blogger (an employee whose blogging apathy could ruin your business blog). The scariest news, by far, at the event was that Ronald McDonald will soon be blogging. McDonalds announced its piloting an internal blog for employees, which they hope to eventually supersize into a public corporate blog. Hopefully a Mickey D. blog will reveal what actually constitutes a McRib or a full thesmokinggun.com-like rap sheet on the Hamburglar.

Spence soon retreated from the blog wars and found his way to the OutsourceWorld conference at the Metropolitan Pavilion, a tiny facility that could easily be mistaken for a speak-easy on West 19th Street. There, the Baron of Babble cozied up to an outsourcing law maven who let slip the idea of a buyers consortium for services. Proposed as a kind of wholesale club for outsourcing, members could gain some collective purchasing muscle with service providers. “If you have to buy a full pallet of services like you do at a consumer wholesale club,” pondered the Puss, “where do you store a years worth of bulk services?”

Later, the Tawny Titan caught up with some cronies at The Red Cat on 10th Avenue. His pals noted author Nicholas Carrs recent online critique of the Wikipedia project. Citing “collective mediocrity” as the problem, Carrs “law of the Wiki” states that “output quality declines as the number of contributors increases.” Carr suggests a centralized quality control filter may be necessary to weed out bad entries. “So,” rasped the Rumorologist, in need of reference remediation, “does that mean the Klingons really didnt fight the British in 1812?”