• Anil Dash of Six Apart gave an overview of Movable Type 3.2, which is to be launched soon and offers simplified editing functions and (at last) automatic spam filtering and deletion.
• Janet Johnson of Waggener Edstrom and Robert Scoble of Microsoft talked about blogger relations. Johnson’s client Marqui got lots of negative publicity early this year by paying bloggers to write about it. (Marqui now has its own blog.) Her rules of engagement:
  1. Develop a thick skin
  2. Be absolutely honest
  3. Have a point of view
  4. Do your research
  5. Engage your detractors
  6. Drive to closure (meaning don't let the trolls get the best of you)
  And Scoble gave advice for crisis communications: "The first thing I do when there’s bad press is link to the bad news without comment." That gives him time to meet with communications staff and to find out the whole story. "Silence adds power to the story," he noted. He also admitted he’s obsessive: "I spend almost every waking hour doing something about blogging."
• I was on a panel with fellow PR practitioners and bloggers Lynann Bradbury of Waggener Edstrom and Rick Murray of Edelman, on the topic of "When Worlds Collide," the worlds in question being PR and the blogosphere. Lynnann had a valuable worksheet that companies can use to help them decide whether they’re ready to blog or not. Rick asked the intriguing question of how the highly regulated healthcare industry can participate in blogging. And I defended the press release as not dead yet and outlined some of our lessons learned from the GM FastLane blog.
• Paul Rosenfeld of Quick Books Online and I talked about the nuts and bolts of running corporate blogs in a panel moderated by Debbie Weil.

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