A recent Pew Internet and American Life study reports that 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet.

I'm wondering why real estate public relations professionals and ad agency executives lag mainstream Americans so badly in their use of the Internet. In my experience, none of them are adapting readily to the Internet.

Business executives need to wake up to the fact that their media professionals are serving them very badly when it comes to connecting with an audience on the Internet.

An article at the New York Observer quotes PR guru Richard Edelman as saying that public relations is "the discipline on the rise."

Edelman sees blogs as empowering his clients to get their message directly to the public. "You're not God any more," he reportedly told traditional media.

Edelman is right, but not everyone in his professional has absorbed his message. Housing PR specialists in Chicago, from our experience, are still worshiping the old gods, to their clients' detriment.

I added the parentheses to a quote from a Tom Foremski article over at Silicon Valley Watcher:

Go read Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!

The site starts with a question:

Every day I'm faced with a decision: do I "tell on my peers" or just ignore the fact so many people who do PR just plainly suck.

Check the answers for yourself at The Bad Pitch Blog.

What are the new rules? Head to webinknow to download the free e-book.

Money quote:

"Buyers read your press releases directly and you need to be talking their language."

Is your PR firm playing by the new rules? Does it know that there may be new rules?

Over at Media Guerrilla there's a useful post on traditional public relations versus do-it-yourself PR / blogging.

The subject is Web 2.0 early stage companies, but the advice is equally relevant to most new companies.

Marketing strategist Steve Rubel issues a call to action for public relations professionals to begin learning about the changed media landscape.

For all of the hype about blogs and citizens' media, the PR community still has a long way to go before we can say that we've learned the bare minimum to stay afloat in these new waters.

The good news is that interest in these subjects has skyrocketed. Attendance at industry events on blogging, podcasting, and RSS has been very strong this fall. The bad news is that we're stuck in the pen-and-paper stage. It's critical that the PR industry – particularly firms – start mobilizing and training its communicators to work hands-on in this new world. It's time for us to go the distance.

How many who are stuck in the pen-and-paper stage will end up going the distance? Perhaps Rubel should quote them Oliver Cromwell's injunction to the rump of the Long Parliament:

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

We met today and set a firm launch date of December 1, 2005 for HousingNewswire in Chicago.

The site will be far from feature-complete at launch, but it will offer enough to delight users.

Media outlets are proliferating by the minute, and none of them more rapidly than blogs.

Technorati is now tracking more than 21 million blogs and, by some counts, 70,000 new blogs are added every day.

How many of today's public relations "professionals" monitor the blogs that affect their clients' businesses? How many have ever read a blog or know what blogging is?

How many know how to pitch a blogger?

Our headline question is the topic of a thread at the NewPr Wiki.

Consensus view: yup!

My take is that blogs will have an impact, but that novel interactive news releases and other developments yet to unfold will preserve and extend the role of the news release.