Let’s cut to the chase: yes, unfortunately most PR people don’t do their homework. They get their target’s email address (from that target’s site, Google, a media list like Bacon’s, or wherever else) and add X editor to whatever blast they’re cooking up because — as you probably know — many of these “flacks” are paid (extra) for results (read: stories in the media about their company / client). Yes, the resulting PR spam is ridiculously irritating and, when ignored, often leads to embarrassingly clueless and time-wasting followup calls.

But these people aren’t out to make our lives harder, and many of them are just doing what they can with what’s become a severely broken system between media relations and the media. For all our communications tools PR often reminds editors more of telemarketing than valued outreach. Can these firms and companies do a better job at targeting the most relevant publications (and editors therein)? No doubt, so in that sense Chris’s post is founded in the right reasons. PR people simply need to do a cursory amount of relationship-building to know who to get in touch with instead of just spamming the top of the food chain in the hopes of a trickled-down story. But I’m still not sure how lofty disinterest and spoon-feeding spam databases is the correct response to a broken system.

(For reference, this is the same problem faced by editors of publications large and small. Personally, I’ve dealt with it for years with some combination of ignoring / deleting, replying with a template, verbally rejecting calls, or in some cases telling the completely misguided ones only to call / email back when they actually grok Engadget and have something directly relevant to our coverage. Ask around, I’m not shy about doing this — it’s better for both parties, so far as I can tell. I even wrote a post about it.)

PR strategists interested in making real changes about this whole process should feel free to get in touch to discuss further. And don’t you dare add my personal email address to any lists! (Joking. But not really.)

Right now I think Scoble reigns as champ of the feed-obsessed — seriously, have you seen the dude’s OPML?. He uses “impressions” (glances at stories, not deep reading), but I’m definitely curious to know what aggregators people live in, and how other heavy individual feed reading individuals get their intake without missing any of the good stuff and without scheduling their lives around RSS.

• It needs more content. Yeah, I know, it just launched, but this thing needs way more content, and it needs less recent content. It’s not just that there aren’t a lot of shows (I’m sure more are coming), but most of these shows are limited to only the last few episodes that aired. That’s fine, but I still watch The Office on HDTV and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon, the experience is too good. What I want is to catch up on episodes from previous seasons that I missed, not just clips from previous seasons and the last few full eps from this season.
• It’s embeddable. Seriously, and you can even embed a custom clip from the show, if you only want to see the punchline. Check it out after the break. (Note: my site’s column width is only 480px wide, and the Hulu player apparently won’t let me shrink it down below it’s surprisingly-high-res-for-web resolutino of 520 x 295. It’s a feature, it’s a bug.)
• Great user experience and interface for a site in this market. You can dim the rest of the site to focus in on the video being played; going to full-screen is instant and looks pretty good even up close (TechCrunch reports that it’s streamed at 480Kbps or 700Kbps); videos load almost instantly and there’s little or no lag.
• Kara doesn’t like that it doesn’t have user-generated content. Wait, huh? Who actually thought NBC Universal and Fox were trying to overtake YouTube on the Chocolate Rain game? The whole concept here was so they could make sure premium content (like Samberg’s Digital Shorts, for example) is both a) online and b) making THEM money, not other video sites.
• Non-downloadable. Yeah, that’s kind of lame, but better they offer it as web streaming only than piss off the early audience with Windows-only DRMed junk (see: BBC). Not sure when they’ll get this one together though.
• You still have to sit at your computer. The interface is probably usable at ten feet, but not that many people have the hookup on HTPCs. Hulu would be a true streaming TV game-changer if it got Apple TV and Windows Media Center plugins.

Frankly, I found the whole thing pretty surprising. Not only because Engadget and Weblogs, Inc. haven’t made any changes in last few months (or years!) that Google would find substantive enough prompt that kind of severe reaction, but also because there was zero warning before the hit. Engadget has always been a good Google partner (it was the first ever publication to get RSS AdSense, for example), and I guess maybe I expected a warning message in Webmaster tools or some kind of guidance, being that we had no clear way of attributing anything to our sudden drop in rank. I know a lot of people blamed the rank drop to network linking, but Jason, who isn’t even with us anymore, said it best: all the links and cross-pollination on Engadget / Weblogs, Inc. sites are intended to highlight other great content and create a positive reader experience. It’s not now, nor has it ever been, about linkfarming or SEO. (Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make the many cross-network links necessary, and we’re always looking at ways we can make for a better reading experience and be better search engine citizens.)

Well, whatever changes Google made, they’re apparently in the process of unmaking — or is at least getting some of the innocent bystanders on the road to recovery. Engadget, Joystiq, Fortune, Washington Post, and many of the other sites named in the algo “Jihad” are in the process of having their Google rank restored to pre-smackdown positions (others, however, are not) The lesson was learned, though: don’t take your search rank for granted — not even the pub that broke Watergate is immune from Google’s scrutiny. And even though we haven’t made any substantive changes to our sites before or after G’s algo shift, there’s no doubt that now is as good a time as any to take a long, hard look at cutting some of the link-fat on our sites.

Background:
Andy Beard - Digg Favorites Slapped By Google (and followup / reactions here)
TechCrunch - Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms
Scoble - Google Page Rank is dead and has been for quite some time (Yo Robert, you didn’t hear me getting huffy, now did you? I knew this would work itself out fine.)

• Halo 3 keeps track of which levels you’ve beaten in both solo and coop, and on which difficulty. You can skip around and beat different levels on different difficulties if you really must.
• The first player in the lobby (read: the party leader) gets to play Chief; second is The Arbiter; third and fourth are just another couple of Elites named N’tho ‘Sraom and Usze ‘Taham. They’re all identical except for starting weapons (the Elites get a Cov carbine and plasma pistol or rifle). That means that Elites can no longer constantly cloak (but you probably knew that).
• I’ve seen that you can start as an Elite and die and respawn as Chief. I think this happens your friend who’s playing Chief dies at around the same time, so you get to take a turn.
• You can’t respawn until it’s “safe”, meaning someone’s out of the combat zone. With a few players that’s easy, but with one it’s a little more annoying, since if you die your friend has to stop fighting and run away to respawn you.
• Players can only join between levels; once you’ve started a coop level no one can join…
• or leave. So make sure you have the proper amount of time set aside to play, because if one player leaves during coop the entire game is quit and you’re all screwed.
• If one person finds a skull, everyone on your team gets credit — just make sure you finish the level because you can’t save and quit a coop game. (See above.)
• Do your friends a favor: don’t play with a bad disc. As we learned tonight, the (up to) three other players on your team will actually play through the game in extreme slow-mo if one person’s disc is screwed up and caught in a nigh-endless loading cycle. (Obviously this doesn’t happen on multiplayer, they’d just be booted.)
• Update: Oh yeah, metascoring. Just because you can set metascoring to team doesn’t mean that if your team breaks 15k (or higher) you all get the achievements. You still have to each get more than 15k, which is difficult when kills are spread across four people. So if you need those achievements, make sure party leader equips some skulls.

Have fun!