Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

After starting her blog in 2007, she says she was besieged with free product — full-size samples of everything she could possibly want. She describes being fairly journalistic about methodically trying the products and reviewing them. But more came in than she could handle and she gave a lot of it away to her friends and readers.

Then, the recession hit, and the companies a) got chintzy with the samples and b) wanted more out of sending a sample than the possibility of a post — they wanted guaranteed good coverage.

It’s a good post and worth reading for a firsthand account of how the other half lives. My value-add will be the PR perspective:

There are effectively no barriers to entry in blogging — anyone can be a waitress one day and “fashion and beauty blogger” the next (or both at the same time).

Pre-Internet, the barriers to being a recognized and influential writer were fairly high, which made it possible for PR to figure out who to deal with and what they were getting out of the arrangement.

Now, since anyone and everyone can position themselves as “influential,” PR has a lot more trouble to deal with. Accept anyone’s claim to legitimacy and you end up giving away your products, or set up barriers and get blowback like this.

Inside peek: How The New York Times handles its blogs

Excerpt:

In many ways, the Times’ blogs are no different from anyone else’s. But there’s one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don’t work on their own. They don’t handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there’s a reason people work in teams.

Hansell:

Interested in: spot news, little things, debates, interactive features, news analysis and commentary, stuff that’s interesting about the business of tech that would be interesting to the general community

Parker-Pope:

Interested in: prostate cancer, thinks mens health gets short shrift. Health doesn’t happen at the doctor’s office, it’s about decisions you make everyday. Action oriented health information. All about a conversation you can have with your doctor right now.

Look at her “tag” list next to her blog to get an immediate view of what i’m thinking about (this is excellent advice for blogger relations in general).

She’s about to run her first marathon and is interested in stories about running, fitness and nutrition.

Sorkin:

“My job is to find out about your deal before you announce it.

Sorkin says he reads all the comments on DealBook because he’s “egomaniacal.” If you say something nasty or nice he might say something back. He gets good stories from comments and might even hold a moderated comment before putting it up because it’s a good story.

The story: An aviation blog called “The Cranky Flier” got a good little story: that JetBlue was frustrated with the pace of renovation at Long Beach Airport and would consider pulling its flights out of there as a result. The source was none other than JelBlue CEO Dave Barger, who gave the blog an interview.

So did the City of Long Beach get the hint and send Barger some chocolates and a revised schedule for airport renovations? No! They played “shoot the messenger”:

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster said: “We should not take blogs as professional journalism.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Some blogs may be little more than the ravings of a lunatic, but some blogs are published by the New York Times, and there is every kind of blog in between.

Mayor Foster, you need a media relations rep who can tell you the difference (or you need to figure it out for yourself!) and you need to heed the words of the airline CEO (YOUR CUSTOMER) and not blame the journalist who brought you that valuable customer feedback.

In fact, maybe you should send him some chocolates as well — and given the flexible ethics of the online media, he might even accept them!

Hat-tip: PR Junkie.

The reason is implicit in the nature of blogging — every blog and blogger is unique. Every one has a different point of view and publication schedule. Most of the bloggers I’m targeting are industry people blogging on the side — that doesn’t diminish their importance to my client, but it does provide some likely explanation for the infrequency of their posts. It also makes it especially important that we research them and know exactly who they are before pitching them, because my clients could easily find themselves across a conference table from one of them.

All told, there’s really no way around the tedium at this point. It would be nice if one of the media databases had already done this research so I could just pull down a list and go, but they haven’t as far as I know. And with millions of blogs out there, it seems unlikely that they ever will.

This is one of the dark realities of the growth of online media and the fall of the mainstream media. Reaching out effectively to individual bloggers is time-intensive, and given the minute audiences of most blogs, probably not cost-effective for most PR people. Yet spamming bloggers with canned pitches, while cheap, is likely to be ineffective as well.

This is why people are talking about the rise of social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) as ways to “pitch” stories into the blogosphere and online without resorting to time-consuming list-building. But social media pitching has its own drawbacks, namely the indirect nature of such pitches and the loss of control once you put something out there.

Serious stuff, and seriously out-of-bounds, it goes without saying. Arrington writes a blog, for godsakes. Yes, it is influential, but no company’s life or death literally depends on Arrington’s good graces. At least, that’s what I think is at the root of this — TechCrunch is known to drive traffic, so everyone wants Arrington to sprinkle some of his pixie dust on them. When he doesn’t, people get disappointed — or, it seems, worse.

So point of perspective #1 — Arrington writes a blog. If your marketing strategy depends on getting mentioned in his blog, your company sucks and is going to die anyway. If you don’t want your company to suck, find other ways of getting publicity.

Point of perspective #2 — Arrington is a rare figure in the media, someone who has insisted on making up his own rules. I believe that these stupid actions by certain individuals are an unfortunate reaction to his go-it-alone style. So I would a) advise serious PR and media relations people to take a breath and continue to do PR with TechCrunch using proven and intelligent techniques, and b) I would advise Arrington to look at how he does business, compare it to how other successful media franchises do business, and adjust accordingly.

As Arrington titled his post, “something’s got to change.”

So the next time you have a story such as this to pitch, consider giving it first to a smaller blogger, or one who’s trying to build up his readership and online rankings. You’ll make a friend for life, and may very well help drive traffic in a way that will benefit both you and the blogger.

This piece of wisdom is from Charlie White, Deputy Editor of DVICE.com, one of those competitors in the gadget space. DVICE.com doesn’t have the traffic of some of its competitors yet, so every once and awhile, you could help Charlie and his team by giving them the excloo first.

Still, I have to ask: how many ex-journos do we need in PR? Do they know anything about business communications, or are they all about getting “stories” and “ink?” If you were a stressed-out CEO facing a complex business communication decision, would you want a newbie PR person fresh from the newsroom giving you career-make-or-break advice? In all seriousness, I wouldn’t. I know who I would call, and no one on my list has less than 15 years of PR industry experience.

I was prompted to write this item and especially this headline by the esteemed future PR guy Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek, who took yet another cheap shot at the PR industry in his blog post last month, “Freak Out: Twitter Infested by PR.”

What a stoopid headline.

First of all, it shows how little Baker knows about Twitter. It’s the equivalent of writing, “Magazines infested by PR.” Why? Because unless you decide otherwise, people can elect to follow your tweets without your having to approve them. It’s the equivalent of posting a blog. So why would Baker and his colleagues want FEWER people following them on Twitter? Because he wants to be out of a job and in PR faster?

Secondly, Baker’s post doesn’t even address the headline. Go ahead and read it and tell me if you can figure out why he wrote the headline.

I’m sorry Stephen. You get my Neanderthal award of the day. Think a little harder before you write your next headline.

But a blog without updates is nothing but dead Internet content. Yes, it will continue to draw viewers searching for this or that, but it won’t be a factor in the blogosphere, and more importantly, won’t be a factor in your business development efforts.

So here I am, back at the keyboard, trying to eat my own dog food. The message: you’ve got to blog three or four times a week if you want a business blog to be relevant. If you want a news blog to be a player, you’ve got to update it six to seven times a day.

More actual blog posts shortly.