Steve Rubel, Chris Sloop

Steve say Blogging is PR with Candor, and I cannot agree more. But I will say that companies probably would be better in firing most of their PR people, and hiring bloggers as Marqui did in their paid to blog program.

As being one of those previous paid bloggers for Marqui, the experience was rewarding in the way that Marqui allowed paid bloggers to dig around in deep with their product along with being given unrestricted access to their staff and even CEO and being allowed to say anything good or bad.

So long as those paid to blog programs are short, and they do not allow the paid bloggers to become entrenched in the companies they are reviewing, it could be a powerful force to improve companies images, this will result in true “Candor” of firms.

Update: I should note that not all PR people are trying to get us to drink their companies Koolaid, but their are very few with the likes of Robert Scoble who can say what they want. PR profrssionals, and Bloggers can work together, but we must all realize that PR people get a paycheck to make all of us drink their companies Koolaid, and we bloggers should be able to ask the hard questions, and get non political answers for those hard questions. Many times when we ask companies to respond, and come clean we usually get a political response, instead of were humans and make mistakes answers.

This panel was hosted by JD Lasica, Terry Heaton, Cory Bergman

JD Lasica discussed the start of the media blogging revolution. Talking about the power of the OurMedia and the sharing of information. 50% of the traffic originating from the Internet Archive is now being driven by ourmedia.org

Ourmedia needs moderators and volunteers and people that like to tell stories like weblogers and podcasters do.

Cory Bergman discussed how Television is starting to see a rapid decline in AD Revenue with a slower increase in digital revenues, it will become harder for TV’s to stay profitable

Terry Heaton discusses a real world technical approach to connecting local TV stations to the community, he is considered something of radical and has been consulting with TV executives and telling them they need to pay attention to the personal media revolution.

He discussed a station he is working with WKRN in his consulting business with a poorly performing TV station. He helped this affiliate by getting them to embrace technology by launching a website that was not branded directly with the TV station, they launched nashville411.com, which is generating 6 figure revenues

The TV station then reached out to the local webloggers and invited them in and developed a site called “Nashville Is Talking” which contains local aggregated content and is run by a local blogger that they hired. The best thing about that hiring, is she can say anything she wants on the site, the amazing thing is she sits in the news room of the station!

Each of their anchors have independent blogs and are required to actively post it.

The key in their long term strategy is to use the local blogging community to generate news and hopefully bring them into the production community.

That my good friends is TOTALLY AWESOME!