First, apologies for the paucity of posting over the last 43 days. Just to reassure Sally, nothing untoward happened at the Flackenhack awards in October to cause me to fall off a blog cliff.
No comas here.
However, being referred to as "the de facto godfather of PR blogging" did cause me to fall off my chair (and if I’m the godfather, who are the parents?)
But to take things in reverse order, astute readers (if I still have any left) will note that I have changed the name of the blog to In Front Of Your Nose. This is a none too subtle reference to the the title of an Orwell essay from 1946 as well as the fourth volume of his Collected Journalism and Essays. The concluding paragraph struck me as incredibly pertinent when I first read it nearly 25 years ago. I think it is even more relevant now – especially in relation to blogging (and PR: simply replace “politics” with “PR”):
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
So why the name change and blog silence? Suffice to say, I have been occupied on other matters – namely a decision to take some time away from the world of tech PR (the current trendy phrase is I believe, adult gap months). For a variety of personal and professional reasons, it seemed a good opportunity to do it as this point.
Clearly there has been something in the air recently as other PR bloggers such as TWL and Strumpette have decided to retreat from the fray (though I see that Amanda has taken a very brief retirement and is now back in business).
I will be back on the professional front at some point in early 2008 with something shiny and new. In the meantime, I will continue to post my views on all things tech PR here for the time being – though a new blog is planned in the near future.
Again, apologies for blog silence – appreciated people getting in contact to check that I was OK due to my lack of posting – but near normal service will resume shortly.
