And on Sunday, he rested…….

Holy god damn, what a week. Finally, this morning, TPN is back up (obviously, because I can write this and you can read it). I have to thank Phil Morle from Pollenizer for hooking me up with Jagadeesh from x-minds in India. Jag and his team got TPN back up in amazing time. I wish I’d known about Jagadeesh’s team 10 days ago when I started having problems. I could have saved myself (and TPN’s hosts) a week of grief. Well, they are on my radar now.

And, because I know that THE QUESTIONS THAT I ASK MYSELF DETERMINE MY PERSPECTIVE, I’m thinking up some good questions.

– What could I have done better to avoid this situation?
– How can I make sure we don’t go through that again?
– What made the difference?

The answer to the last one is – Twitter. Phil got involved, and introduced me to Jagadeesh, when I started screaming for help on Twitter. If I didn’t have ~900 people following me on Twitter, I wouldn’t have got that offer of support when I did. Twitter is important, something Misha Cornes obviously misses. If you have a low signal-to-noise ration on your Twitter, then start following better people. She should read my Fast Thinking article.

Before I go – Lee Hopkins wrote a good post about how Aussie PR folks STILL don’t get digital media, based in-part on a chat he and Trevor Cook and I had during lunch at ad:tech in Sydney a few weeks ago.

Over a table discussion after the Digital PR session I took part in, Cameron turned to Trevor Cook (knowing that I am not a PR person and have always taken great pains to point this out) and asked,

“It’s 2008, for f#$ks sake! How come PR companies here STILL don’t get it!?!?”

A very good question.

As he pointed out, we’ve had blogs as a part of our media landscape for at least 5 years, mainstream media are falling over themselves trying to ‘out 2.0′ each other, we’ve had podcasts for a few years, we’ve had YouTube for what seems like forever…

So how come Australian PR companies still play ‘hide head in sand and pretend it will all go away’ games?

It isn’t just PR – it’s Australian corporates in general. By the way, if you want to check out the work I’ve been doing for Telstra recently, visit their new Enterprise site. It contains podcast interviews I’ve done for them with some of their top executives, chatting about what they do in Telstra and what it’s like to work for for The Big T in 2008. The interviews aren’t scripted and don’t get subjected to much editing by Telstra PR. It’s just a real conversation between me, a member of the public, and a Telstra exec. It’s the closest thing so far I’ve seen in Australia where I large corporation is using Web2.0 to be more conversational.