For me, it’s simple: time.

I once asked a class of PR undergrads if anyone regularly listens to podcasts. In a class of 20, not a single hand went up. Think about this: if the industry’s future communicators don’t use them, even though the industry still thinks they are important, well, something’s seriously wrong.

MediaShift agrees:
MediaShift . Early Opt-Out’er::6 Reasons I’m Not Hooked on Podcasts | PBS

According to The Telegraph, Gordon Brown, the UK’s new Prime Minister, has had enough of paying the Ministry of Defense’s 1,000 PR practitioners an average annual salary of £39 thousand ($80 thousand—yes, I’m in the wrong country) to foster public support—or lack thereof—for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they can’t seem to figure out who these 1,000 practitioners are:

Yet in a striking admission, an internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) document reveals that senior officials have “no clear idea” of who they are, whether they are making an impact, or their actual cost to the country.

The document, The Defence Communications Strategy, also contains what is believed to be the first official admission by the Government that there is little or no support for the war in Iraq among the British public.

It looks as though Brown is trying to clean house but is a bit lost at the moment. However, he is taking the lead and trying to create change in a country where public opinion of its previous PM, Tony Blair, took a severe nose dive on issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even further for his alliance with the Bush administration on these and other sensitive international issues. In the meantime, Brown is listening to his people who are demanding change. Now let’s just wait and see if he can pull it off.

Missing: MoD’s army of 1,000 press officers [via Strumpette]

Seth Godin talks about how important good service is online because, well, that’s one of the most important factors of ensuring success. Taking this into consideration, you can’t ever turn your back on customers, even when there are a few bad apples who abuse your services:

The temptation is to embrace only the advantages of the web and insist on eternal vigilance against the possibility of getting ripped off. To act as if everyone online is a criminal. To assume that the moment you are generous or trusting, squadrons of bad actors will exploit your generosity. I don’t think that’s the answer. If you treat people like criminals, the good ones will leave, because people have a choice.

The honor system [via Seth's Blog]