Wikipedia and Public Relations

Joe Brockmeier has an article on ZDNet, 'Is Wikipedia ripe for PR?', which is interesting in that it states the obvious for people involved in open content but aren't obvious to many marketing/public relations people.¹ I actually have been holding my breath, waiting for someone else to write about it publicly because I didn't want to give the marketers the idea that they should have thought of independantly. The reason? Joe Brockmeier makes the case:

...However, I also have to admit a bit of repulsion at the thought that every new media is immediately examined for its suitability for pushing advertising at the general populace. Advertising (spam) has seriously hindered the usefulness of e-mail, threatened to make Web-browsing much less fun due to pop-ups and other noxious forms of online advertising (thank goodness Linux users are still more or less free of adware and spyware), and most people who run blogs have discovered that unscrupulous advertisers are keen on seeding their comments with spam as well