We at Put Simply recently attended the PR and New Media Conference in London. Amidst the backdrop of the great, the good and the sweatshops (no names being mentioned) was the overriding theme that us PRs and the corporate peeps trying to get into the 2.0 malarkey are worrying far too much.

Some of the information was just plain obvious…

• If trying to contact a blogger then treat them as a person
• When writing a blog don’t overly fret about the messaging
• Podcasts will be coming to accompany releases
• Technorati is a great tool
• Of the 107,000,000 million (and shrinking) blogs out there, 106,999,990 will be irrelevant to a tech client

But some of the other information downright shocked me…

• Facebook is highly influential
• Start looking into Second Life
• Wikipedia wasn’t even mentioned

Now I’m not so sure…

Wikipedia is losing its appeal but there still is a couple of years left in the old dog.  And, I’m willing to concede that Facebook is a useful tool, many people I know are running from it. Or at least making the updates more infrequent. Saying that, however, it hasn’t stopped me setting up a Facebook profile. Hi, I’m Pete Simple – Sadly, the closest name that Facebook would allow.

Second Life is something that I think is best left alone. The avatars, and believe me, there are fewer than Linden say, hate corporations for being in there. In fact, they positively avoid them.

So, the moral of the tale… Check out Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. Do not do an overly PR’d blog a la Dell. And relax. 2.0 is not so scary. In fact, it’s an awful lot like 1.0 only with too much email.

Disclaimer – ok, I confess, this isn’t my avatar, just someone with a slightly inflated ego and overly floppy hair.