I didn't plan on posting tonight until I came across this great cartoon from The Economist (hat tip to Steve Rubel) about how corporations should have PR plans to handle chatter about them - good and bad - in the blogosphere. The only company I know that closely monitors my blog is Nortel but the company hasn't been as fun to write about with the end of the accounting scandal and the "retirement" of CEO Bill Owens.

As a journalist, objectivity and credibility are everything. So the Wall Street Journal's story on how FON is using a group of influential bloggers such as Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger and Wendy Seltzer, who may be compensated by the company for advisory services, is a troubling eye-opener. It may be that Gillmor and Weinberger wrote objective, fair posts but there are significant perception and conflict of issue problems. How objective can you really be if FON's success could lead to a monetary windfall? As much as journalists like to think we're pure, unconflicted observers, it's difficult, if not impossible, to be completely objective if you have a vested interest in a company's success or failure. This is why I don't own any telecom stocks even though it is the sector I know best and would be able - in theory - to make well-informed investment decisions. There is no way I want my thinking to be influenced by how my extremely modest investment portfolio could be affected. So what does it mean for bloggers? For one, they are going to have to be far more transparent on whether they have any kind of a relationship - paid or non-paid - with the companies they write about. If Michael Arrington, for example, is offering consulting services to a cool Web 2.0 company, his posts should include a disclaimer on the top or bottom of his posts so everyone has an idea about where he's coming from. You'll see this disclaimer at bottom of stories written by many business columnists. Maybe the WSJ story in a tempest in a teapot but the sooner this issue is addressed, the sooner it will become a non-issue.
As an aside, who are FON's PR advisors? How could it come out of the gate with guns ablazing but stumble so badly by announcing an agreement that doesn't exist with a Seattle-based ISP, and now this conflict-of-interest issue? You have to wonder how the VCs, who pumped $21-million in FON, are thinking about how well they did their due diligence.
For more views, check out Paul Kedrosky and Mathew Ingram, who's covers technology for the Globe & Mail newspaper,

It's good see Iotum come home from Phoenix with a 2006 Demo God Award - a nice laurel for Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, who have been toiling away trying to sell their innovative relevance-engine telecom software to carriers, ISPs and investors for the past year. Maybe   this will be what Iotum needs to attract VC support. I'm willing to bet they may even get some calls from Canada's conservative financing community now that Iotum has been given the official stamp of approval. Truth be told, there are simply a lack of Iotums in Canada. For all the talk that we're a world-class innovation country, there's a troubling lack of high-tech entrepreneurs, start-ups and financing to really make it happen. Even Web 2.0 services, which cost little to develop, are few are far between at a time when Silicon Valley is flush with interesting start-ups (even if few of them real business models.)