Charles on… anything that comes along

I gave a talk recently to some PR people about how our business is changing: that we’re using blogs as both input and output far more than we ever did.

Another big change is that for me, ideas either come directly from blogs - often corporate blogs - or get cross-checked on blogs, particularly the 700-odd that I have in my newsreader (NetNewsWire on a Mac, if you’re wondering; no Windows version available, I’m afraid, but there are tons of Windows newsreaders).

So I can follow what various freelance contributors are up to via their blogs; it’s often a good way to find out where they are and what they might have to offer.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t go for an idea if it’s not been blogged about. But it has to be a pretty interesting idea, generally. My list of 700, while long, has a pretty big tail of topics.

If I see an interesting subject pop up, I can do a search to see if anyone else in my newsfeeds has written about it. I can see what things have been blogged in the past four hours (I could make it the past day by tweaking the script). It’s robust.

However one of the people asked a question to which I didn’t really have an answer: “which are the blogs that you read that you’d really recommend?”

This is akin to asking “which are the best three songs ever?”. It’s a complete Desert Island Disc question: it’s different for everyone.

You could start with the alleged 100 most important blogs (the ones to read if you only have time to read 100 blogs), but the really important thing - in the PR world - has to be to find the other companies and potential clients who you’ll need to know about. And of course the other PR companies. And the blogs about PR companies. And then to drop those of the alleged “100 most important” which you realise aren’t that important.

I know, it feels weird to be telling people about how to find blogs in this day and age; but then, that was the implication.

(And how did I find that list of the alleged most important ones? By looking back at the post where I remembered seeing it a while ago.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Incomplete web feeds, the bane of aggregated life (18 November 2005; score: 43.39%)
• Sorry, but the internet is down. Please try later (26 July 2004; score: 34.29%)
• David Hewson on leaving the Sunday Times; and disappearing comments (22 August 2005; score: 28.91%)