If you missed yesterday's business blogging seminar at the Business Development Institute in New York then you can listen to the archive here. The keynote speaker was Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft and author/creator of the Scobleizer blog. Another prominent speaker was fellow PR blogger Steve Rubel, Vice President of New York PR firm CooperKatz and author of the Micro Persuasion blog.

Just in the office for a short time this morning to do some essentials before heading off to do election campaigning. We'll spend most of the day in Selby, but also with some time in Leeds North West.

One interesting item that caught my eye in Feedreader this morning was this. Stephen Baker on the BusinessWeek blog reports on Dan Forbush of PR Newswire/Profnet talking about an interesting twist on how RSS feeds could be used in PR.

The idea is that journalist will provide keywords about subjects of interest and these will be used in an RSS feed to PR people and/or experts who can then "contact the journalists and inform them".  Stephen's concern is that "this automation of PR will flood us with calls and e-mails" and as a journalist plans to let others try it out first.

I don't see it as any different to what currently happens with journalists using services such as Profnet and Response Source to request leads for stories and specify how they want to be contacted. The fact that the delivery mechanism is RSS makes very little difference.

A much more useful service for both PR people and journalists would be an aggregator where journalists could search for corporate RSS feeds of news releases for companies that interest them.

We've just moved offices and are still waiting for our new broadband connection to go live (next Monday - why does it take BT five working days to do this, and why don't they work weekends?).

I've been using broadband for several years now and you forget just how slow a dial-up connection is. It is interesting to see how quickly different sites load. Our new Bruce Marshall Associates website (which is still very much a work in progress) is reasonably quick.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out why certain sites are slow. For example Neville Hobson's NevOn is quite quick, while Tom Murphy's equally excellent PR Opinions is excruciatingly slow.

Business blogging is still in its infancy in the UK but this Geek dinner in London hosted by Robert Scoble and Hugh McLeod is perhaps another step towards maturity.

It's only two hours on the train from Leeds so I'll be popping down. It would be good to see some other northern business bloggers attending. Perhaps PR academics Richard Bailey or Philip Young.

Veteran IT journalist and blogger David Tebbutt has an interesting article in today's Guardian Online supplement about how Socialtext's Wiki software was used to organise the recent Les Blogs conference in Paris.

I'm not quite as excited yet by wikis as some other communications professionals are. The concept is brilliant but I think we still have some way to go before the usability is easy enough to spread out beyond the more IT literate amongst us.

Update: Just seen that David has a link to the article on his blog.

He also questions the "blog etiquette regarding one's own published articles". I always get irritated by the idea that there is something wrong with the idea of self-promotion on a blog. After all it is a personal publishing medium. Self-promotion is totally positive.

The ethical/moral question is that you should be upfront about it. Full disclosure is essential. Go ahead plug your article, company, product, service, client or anything you want. But be honest about the fact that you have a personal interest in plugging it.

Checking the referrals to this blog I came across a new entry for PR Blogger run by Stephen Davies, an enterprising PR student at the University of Sunderland.