Nice to find you. Another list, amazing! I should disclose I’m a client of your Boston office. Thank you for streaming some of my content, that’s how I got here. Keep up the good work.

I think perhaps I need to work on the definition of ‘flow’. Aggregators and feed readers are chronological and in one place, but reference many other websites etc.

Whereas even a link blog tends to include some reasoning behind the inclusion of links.

Maybe one flow based around the identity of the individual (s) responsible for the website content?

Wikipedia (“Wikipedia – probably the most trusted source in the world”) defines PR as “the management of internal and external communication of an organization to create and maintain a positive image. Public relations involves popularizing successes, downplaying failures, announcing changes, and many other activities.”

I really dislike the second sentence but I guess it’s a start, and wikipedia does offer a number of different definitions on it’s site.

Personally, I like Robert L. Heath’s definition from the Encyclopedia of Public Relations:

“Public Relations is a set of management, supervisory, and technical functions that foster an organization’s ability to strategically listen to, appreciate, and respond to those persons whose mutually beneficial relationships with the organization are necessary if it is to achieve its missions and values.”

I think this encapsulates PR pretty well – including blogs, bloggers, the blogosphere and the issues of influence that are involved in that area. And the “listen to, appreciate, and respond to” distinguishes it from marketing.

@Badger Gravling – Just to point out that “any site which is updated chronologically in one flow” could still apply to news aggregators and RSS feed readers – and even spam blogs.

Blogs: For me, it’s any site which is updated chronologically in one ‘flow’. Any news site is chronological, but articles etc will be spread across sections. A blog can cover numerous areas of interest, but everything is covered in one main stream of information which can then be split out. Rather than a homepage aggregating from the various sections. If that makes sense!

Bloggers: Anyone publishing a blog, whether paid/unpaid, corporate or not. And certainly a journalist can also be a blogger and vice versa. For me, the definition seems to come from what, where and how their content is displayed. Again, going back to my definition of a blog (which is very much a work in progress). I’d hesitate to define it by technical functionality, such as RSS, and certainly look to define it more by form (Any definition of over 100 million examples is going to be fuzzy in some way…)

PR: Definitely the trickiest one. Should it be classed with Marketing/Customer Retention? Is there even a place for it now? I’d argue that to define a discipline by the fact it doesn’t analyse as deeply as another is probably doing it a disservice, but it’s difficult not to. Certainly journalism, PR, marketing, advertising etc are all increasingly about relationships and conversations rather than purely broadcasting. I’m still stunned by at least one PR company I deal with banning employees from using Facebook for example, rather than encouraging the use of every tool to target press releases as accurately and individually as possible. But where the line comes between targetting press releases to journalists and bloggers, and marketing something to bloggers and consumers, for example, is very, very fuzzy. Maybe the terms for PR and Marketing should be merged and then discarded. Engagement and communication? Enunication? Communigagement?