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.