Whatever we do needs not to have been done before and needs to be a piece of pish to use.

Brendan have you recently become a ‘thingy’ rather than a planner?

Catch up when I get back from hols – remember I have the prfail.com domain as well – so we can use that if we think it’s right.

And we should get Ben Matthews on board too – he seemed very keen.

We could create a community on Ning maybe, then hook in a feed from a dedicated Delicious tag to capture relevant and useful materials. Not sure on the ‘swing-o-meter’, let me look into it. I’m sure we can find or make a widget that simply counts the number of posts that drop in.

Brendan – thinking caps (bring your ones with the propellor on top!) and beer..

* It needs to be as simple and accessible as Twitter or del.icio.us or Digg. That is, it needs to be something that people can ‘vote’ on during their everyday online lives. If they like it, they vote yes. If not, no.

* It needs to have an immediate, simple metric, centre and front, writ large. So, it needs to have something at the top that basically says whether PR is winning or losing. A graphic? A number? A score?

* People need to be able to comment on every entry. Each and every entry can ellicit debate.

We could be onto something here. An immediate snapshot based on what PR stakeholders – that is, PR people, their clients, their consumers – feel is good or bad about PR right now.

My feeling is that a wiki needs too much thought. People need to decide whether or not to contribute, what they’re going to say, etc.

I guess what I’m saying is, we need Digg, but specifically for PR. If you like, a human-based, vertical search engine.

OK, I really do need to put my thinking cap on.

Paul – surely such a thing exists already? I probably have something tagged in the ever growing pot of links that is my del.icio.us account?! I have a vision of conducting quick short snappy interviews with journos, with tips to avoid a PR Fail and some sort of ‘blogger approved’ list of do’s and don’ts . . . . as well as just a really useful list of resources. I can definitely feel a UK wiki coming on but want to make sure we wouldn’t be replicating something already in existence. PS where do you live online?

As a PR person it does make me wince to read and hear about what some of my peers do, but then taking a step back and looking at it from an objective point of view I guess you have to remember that the PR industry is like my grandad. Really old, really big and doesn’t deal with a rapid change in circumstances very well..

It’s a difficult time PR is going through. Those of us with a passion for the interweb are enjoying the transition and all the cool stuff we get to do, the rest are a couple of steps behind and – as with any learning curve – mistakes get made along the way. As more and more PRs start to reach out online, the number of mistakes seems to be rising. Admittedly a lot of the ones we read about are careless (and make me want to get shouty), but I think the key to making this work between us all is positive education.

Over and above the Tumblr feeds, could we establish a best practice wiki? There are lots of people with lots of opinions and pieces of advice to offer, so why not crowd source the ultimate guide for PRs – get everyone to share the good, the bad and the ugly. Perhaps construct a constitution or a declaration we can all sign up to?

To be honest – it started out as something that took a few minutes to set up and has since given me first hand experience of the power of an idea or a tool and the implications of it.

As you say though, let’s keep talking and keep an eye on what happens. Be good to get more people involved too so that it doesn’t feel like we’re each representing each side of the debate.

Oh – we should meet up soon as well. Be really good to chat through things a bit more informally.

My position on this is that, indeed, it wasn’t a particularly clever thing to do. Lots of companies have done not particularly clever things though, right? I imagine journalists have screwed up in the past. I know I have.

But, that isn’t why I’m not keen on PR Fail.

I just feel that there is a pervasive culture of stamping on PR whenever anything goes wrong, but, because there’s a belief that PR depends on pretty much everyone for its daily crust, it’s fair game: PR keeps shtum.

Sure, flacks need hacks, but hacks need flacks too, right? And business needs us too – just ask any company that’s had a PR crisis, eg Ratners.

So, sites like PR Fail just make me kind of sad cos I don’t think they’re really necessary. I know you’re saying they’ll help us learn to be better, but I’m not sure public disapprobation is the way forward.

Anyhoo, we’ve got PR Wins now to redress that balance. And I think the debate here is pretty healthy too, not least because you’ve stepped in and contributed.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.