On the other hand, flaks are the original spammers. I remember 18 years ago when I was all but drowning in a sea of press releases, 80% of which were completely irrelevant to the work we were doing.

And on the gripping hand, I can’t *stand* working with people who are incompetent. If you cannot DO your job, do a different job. If your job is to represent a company, and you don’t do it with excellence, you have no business representing that company. Period. Bloggers are not (usually) beholden to individual advertisers, and regular circulation numbers don’t matter that much (it’s the score when you’re Slashdotted or BoingBoinged that matters), so there’s rarely that gentle hand of an upstanding publication that has a reputation to uphold. If you’re a blogger, you WANT your reputation to be controversial, so you get press.

Until the intertubes eat themselves.

Did you see the big MacHeist II ‘Malcor’ blow-up last week? Talk about backfiring.