I really don’t read a lot of blogs. I sometimes don’t even read this one, and I write it.

But every once in a while, I’ll go on a blinge—a blogging binge. And I’ll read quite a few of them.

So it was today that I ended up on Les Potter’s blog, More with Les.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, Les is one of my favorite people in the entire communications industry—and by far one of the smartest. Even though he yelled at me recently out here for making fun of NASCAR fans, I still love the man. And I probably respect him as much as anyone else in the communications industry—even though he’s a NASCAR fan. Just kidding, Les. Not really. No, I am. Seriously.

Anyway . . . Les posted a brilliant blog item today, and I felt the need to post a link to it. I normally don’t link to too many blogs because, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t read that many blogs. It's hard to link to something you haven't read. But if you’re in communication, you’ll want to check out Les’ one-act play on crisis communication. It had me laughing out loud.

But keep reading once you get past first item on the blog. There is another item that he titled, “Life is Beautiful. It Really Is,” that is one of the best blog entries—or, for that matter, any kind of writing—that I’ve seen in a long time.

I love you Les, you NASCAR-loving Southern gentleman, you.

I'm off to Las Vegas tomorrow for the Ragan conference on Social Media. Look for some interesting posts from Sin City!

Warning: This is a longish post. Read at your own risk.

When you write a blog on communications, you occasionally have to write about other bloggers and the “blogosphere.”

This is one of those times, because something happened recently that really points out some of the flaws in this thing we call the “blogosphere.”

I don’t like to write about the blogosphere very often, mostly because it has a bit of an incestuous feel to it, for some reason. A lot of bloggers, it seems to me, are self-involved navel gazers who jerk off to their own blogs and have an overblown sense of their own importance.

Now, maybe you’re thinking . . . hey, self-involved navel-gazing jerk-off, as a blogger you probably fall into that camp. But I don’t think I do.

Maybe it’s because I write thousands of words every month for print publications that have their own readers who maybe don't even read this blog; maybe it’s because I was a columnist long before anyone ever heard of a blog; maybe it’s because I’ve never thought of myself as a “Blogger” with a capital “B;” maybe it’s because this blog has always been a labor of love for me, and the reason I love it is because of the readers and the comments and the community that this thing somehow created—and not because it enables me to attain some kind of status in the blogosphere.

Whatever. The point is, I don’t give much thought to the “blogosphere” all that often . . . until something forces me to take notice. And something happened last week that made me sit up and pay attention.

I was out in Las Vegas, at a Social Media conference co-sponsored by Ragan Communications and the Society for New Communications Research.

Overall, the conference was a big success as far as I’m concerned. I saw some great sessions (especially ones by Shel Holtz who, against all odds, appears to be getting smarter as he gets older. He’s supposed to be losing brain cells, not gaining them.)

My own individual session on the evolution of employee communication that kicked off the Employee Communications track went really well, too. And the speakers I lined up to speak at the conference all did terrific presentations. In all, it was a really great experience.

With one glaring exception: The lunch panel I sat on, on Thursday afternoon.

It was titled “Winners and Sinners in Social Media,” and it didn’t go very well. Wait. Let me be clear. The session sucked ass. It was the worst session I’ve ever been a part of, in 11 years of professional speaking. And I saw it coming.

This was a train wreck waiting to happen.

The panel was supposed to be me, a guy named David Strom, and a guy named Jeremy Wright. Jen McClure—the head of the Society for New Communications Research and someone I like a lot—was going to moderate it.

I had never met the other two dudes, but I know they are serious bloggers, and very big names in the blogging community. One of them, or maybe both of them, has even written a book, or books.

I was excited about the panel . . .but a little nervous that we didn’t have a firm plan in place for what we were going to talk about.

So two weeks before the conference, I shot an e-mail to Jen, basically saying: “Should we talk? What’s the plan? What do you see as my role on the panel?”

Now, it should be noted that last-minute planning is fairly normal for conferences . . . especially with group sessions. I’ve been involved in sessions that were planned on cocktail napkins the night before . . . and they were terrific.

So I wasn’t all that worried about the fact that we hadn’t talked yet. So I e-mailed Jen, and she e-mailed the group, and we set up a conference call. The day of the call, I called into the number, and the only person there was Jen.

The other two guys didn’t make the call . . . but they also didn’t bother to e-mail anyone and say they needed to reschedule.

Can you say, “red flag?”

I mean, it would be sort of normal if one person couldn’t make it . . .but both of them? And neither of them could bother to call? That’s weird. But, I figured, these are very important bloggers, after all, so maybe this is how it works at the higher levels of the blogosphere.

So Jen and I have a very nice conversation . . . and we decide that, on the panel, I would talk about a case study that I’m involved in right now—a very successful internal blog/podcast combination for a Fortune 500 company.

Great. My role is done. I’m a little nervous that I don’t know what anyone else will be doing . . . but it’s a panel, I only have 10 minutes to talk, and I have more than enough good material to fill that time.

Then it’s go time. I give my morning session, go back to the room, review my notes for the panel, and then go down to the meeting room to meet the rest of the gang. Jen and David are there, and David seems like a nice enough guy . . . outspoken and funny, which is always a good thing for a panel.

But Jeremy Wright isn’t there. Turns out that Jeremy isn’t going to show up for the panel—despite the fact that he’s in the hotel, and attending the conference! Jen tells me that he had “an important business meeting” suddenly come up. The old Brady Bunch excuse. Something suddenly came up.

Now, I’ve planned lots of conferences in the past 15 years, and I’ve had lots of speakers cancel on me before, because of family issues or personal crises . . . but this is the first time someone has cancelled because of a last-minute “business meeting” even though they are on site at the conference!

But okay . . . it is what it is. I can feel the bad karma sitting on my shoulders like a wet poncho. But it has to be done. The show must go on, right?

So Jen introduces us and I lead off, and start talking about my case study. David immediately interrupts, the conversation veers in seventeen different directions, and it’s a clusterfuck. I don’t blame David or Jen . . . there was no plan, and I was focusing on internal communications, and they wanted to go in different directions. I could see it coming a mile away.

And while it’s all unraveling, I notice a man sitting in the front row. He’s an older guy, and the entire time we're talking, he’s typing. Except once, during the audience participation portion of the clusterfuck, he gets up and gives his opinion about something.

When he does that, David addresses him as “Shel,” and says something like, “We can always count on you to voice your opinion, Shel.”

At that point, I realized the man is Shel Israel, one of the bigger names in the blogosphere. Shel, I believe, has not only written one book, but he’s working on a second book. By all accounts, he’s almost as smart as Shel Holtz. Almost, but not quite. He’s a sort of Shel Light, I guess.

But, as big of an intellectual giant as he is, it still pisses me off that he’s sitting there typing the whole time we’re trying to have a discussion. At the time, I told myself: Hey, if you were sitting in this clusterfuck of a session, you’d be doing something else, too.

And I forgot about it. In fact, I immediately grabbed my wife Cindy after the session, and went and had a bottle of champagne and a dozen oysters, to put it out of my mind. That was nice.

Then, the shit storm hits. I get back from Vegas and, out of curiosity, go to Israel’s blog for the first time. Sure enough, he has a write-up on the session, because he was “live blogging” it. When you “live blog” something it means that you are writing the entire time the speaker is speaking.

Bloggers take great pride in “live blogging” events. In fact, at this conference, the planners had to go to great lengths to provide dozens of power strips in all the meeting rooms, so all the bloggers could “live blog” each session—meaning, write reports of the sessions while they are taking place.

Now, here’s the write-up that Shel Israel gave to my portion of the lunch panel: Remember, he’s doing this as I’m speaking:

“Steve Crescenzo begins by slamming a David Weinberger. He's been talking about his successes for five minutes now without mentioning a single winner. Now he's declared that 95% of corporate executives should not blog. Now he's saying any idiot can blog and proves his point my mentioning his blog. He argues that CEOs are not comfortable in situations where they are not in control. Now he says, that as a consultant he should coach CEO, who apparently need not only to be in control, but without his help they will be clueless on what to say in the natural conversation that is blogging.”

Now, that was complete and utter bullshit. I never slammed Weinberger, who was the keynote speaker and one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I never said that a CEO needed ME to coach him.

I actually complimented Weinberger, who by all accounts gave a hell of a presentation.

Yes, I said any idiot can blog. Yes, I said I’m living proof of that (little did I know that Shel Israel was, too).

And yes, I said that 95 percent of corporate executives should not blog because a) they aren’t comfortable with a conversational, non-corporate style of writing; b ) they aren’t comfortable with not owning the conversation; and c) they aren’t willing to live up to the commitment a blog demands—and read the comments, blog frequently, and be a part of the community.

And I didn’t say CEOs need ME if they want to blog. I said that internal communicators need to step up and help coach these people, which is hard for many internal communicators---who often don’t have the access to top executives that other communicators do.

Now . . . I have to admit. Shel Israel is supposed to be pretty smart . . . so I had to wonder if maybe he was right, and I was so upset about the panel to begin with, that maybe I didn’t come close to saying what I thought I said.

But then I happened upon a blog called Pardon the Disruption, written by a communicator named Chip Griffin. Chip also “live blogged” the session. Only he had a different write-up than Israel. Here’s what Chip had to say:

>>>>The lunch "keynote" was a panel with Steve Crescenzo and David Strom.
Steve started out talking primarily about internal communications. He focused on the how internal communicators should use social media. His top point was that executives shouldn't blog in many cases. Unless the exec is comfortable with the medium, they should steer clear. Steve also focused on the need for communicators to coach others within their companies about best practices.<<<<

Now, that is pretty damned close to what I thought I said. Again, I’m not sticking up for the panel or my role on it, because it was pretty awful . . . but it seems to me that Israel’s irresponsible reporting points to a dangerous trend in online communication.

As people sit and “live blog” speakers and events, and get a whole bunch of shit wrong but publish it anyway, isn’t that a little dangerous? Especially when the person doing the “live blogging” is a very respected person who has the power to influence a lot of people?

As I told Israel in the comments section on his own blog:

“You know, I would rate the lunch panel as the worst session I saw at the conference, and I was on it! But your ‘live blogging’ of it was even worse. Maybe you ought to just stop typing for a second, listen to what’s being said, and THEN go back to your room and blog using your notes.”

That seems to me to be pretty good advice. I would never try to write and publish an article while the source was speaking, and I’ve been a reporter for 20 years. I don’t think Bob Woodward could do that. In fact, I can’t think of a single reporter who would try to do what Israel was doing.

But Israel is having none of that argument. His response to my suggestion to take some notes and then write the article was this:

“You know, you almost had me feeling bad about how hard I was on you—not on the panel, but on you. But then I got to your cheap shot and don’t feel badly at all.”

And therein lies the problem with the blogosphere. It’s a bunch of arrogant, self-important people who have suddenly been granted a platform. Never mind that he might have misconstrued my comments, because he was so busy writing as I was talking. Never mind that he may have besmirched my reputation, such that it is.

He gets to write whatever he wants, and that is that. And he gets to do it very fast, with no editors or fact checkers to keep him honest.

People like Shel Israel will spell the end of the blogosphere, sooner or later. Because people will stop trusting what anybody writes.

And that’s a shame.

I just got my ass handed to me.

If you don't know what that means, I think it's a South Side of Chicago expression. Getting your ass handed to you is the worst kind of whipping you can get.

It’s worse than getting your ass beat. It’s worse than getting your ass spanked. It’s even worse than getting your ass kicked. Because when someone hands you your ass, it is complete and total domination. They took your ass away from you . . . and then handed it back to you, as if to say: “Here. I took this from you because I could, but I don’t know what to do with it. So you can have it back. If I need it again later, I’ll just take it again.”

The guy who did it is a guy named Mike Klein. I had never met Mike, but he writes a blog titled, “CommsOffensive325.”

Mike recently posted an “Open Letter” to me, responding to something I had written late last year. My original column, which appeared in the Journal of Employee Communications Management, was titled: “Can we really change a culture?”

I wrote the column after a whirlwind trip that had taken me to Barcelona, Warsaw, and London in less than a month.

After meeting and speaking to all these wonderful Europeans, I posed a simple question:

“Do we, as employee communicators, really think we can shape or change some kind of “internal culture” at an organization when the only culture that matters to most people is their own culture—the culture of their families and their countries?

For example, can we have a wonderful, open, candid, honest corporate culture in a country like, say, England, where the people are generally very cynical?

I wrote that, of course, never having done any real global communications. Oh, I’ve worked with plenty of global companies. But I’ve never done any consulting on the other side of the pond.

I was just taking my notes off my cocktail napkins and writing what I thought was an interesting column.

And Mike, in a very nice, reasonable, logical post handed me my ass.

If you care at all about global communications, you should read his post.

The only thing I disagreed with was his first sentence, where he wrote:

“Dear Steve. I know that you are the closest thing that the internal communications profession has to a 'rock star.'”

Oh, boy . . . I’ve had it with this rock star thing. I think Ragan actually used it in a marketing piece, for which I will never forgive them. Rock stars have millions of dollars, have sex with tons of women (or men, if you’re George Michael), do tons of really expensive drugs and stay in nice hotels.

I drink too much, smoke reefer about four times a year, and go to places like Des Moines and speak to local communications chapters.

When I was in San Francisco last week teaching my Integrating Print and Online seminar, I found out that my American Express card had been shut off. I had to rely on "The San Francisco Crew"--this wonderful, ragtag bunch of crazy communicators I met in the seminar, to buy my drinks and dinner one night.

That kind of thing doesn't happen to Rock Stars. It happens to people like Vanilla Ice, and the guy who played Lemont on Sanford and Son.

If I’m a rock star, I’m Meatloaf: overweight, spastic, given to histrionics--and with a small, disturbed, but incredibly wonderful and loyal following.

Having a bad day? Hate your job? Your boss sucks?

This story might cheer you up . . . because as bad as you have it, at least your job isn’t the one “Billy the Kid” had to do for almost a year.

I met Billy The Kid in Atlanta this week. His nametag said William, but he introduced himself as Billy, and in my mind he immediately became Billy the Kid, because he's from Texas.

After Day One, Billy was one of the drinkers in the bar, and I asked him what he did before he came to his current job.

Turns out Billy worked for the Red Cross . . . but in a very unusual role. He was on the ground in Iraq, near Tikrit, Saddam’s home town.

Billy’s job? He was responsible for delivering bad news from home to soldiers. So if a soldier’s parent died, Billy had to go tell him. If something happened to their spouse, or their kids, Billy had to pay them a visit.

“I was like the Grim Reaper,” he told me. “People would see me coming and tell me to get the hell away from them.”

That may be the worst communications job I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve heard of a lot of bad ones. Telling soldiers—who are miserable enough already—that they now have to deal with a personal tragedy could suck the soul right out of you.

The worst kind of news Billy had to deliver—even worse than the deaths—was when he had to tell a soldier who had been in Iraq for more than a year without a break that his wife was pregnant with somebody else’s child.

“I had to do that quite a bit,” he said.

If there is a worse job out there, I’d like to hear about it.

I never thought I would write this . . . but damn Shel Holtz. Damn him to hell. And damn his wife Michelle to hell, too. Let them join hands and walk barefoot over hot coals and shards of glass down to hell together.

Why? Because they are pushers. Dealers. Corrupters of morals, and stealers of that most precious commodity: time.

Let me explain.

Last year, when Cindy and I got married, Shel and Michele bought us a lifetime subscription to Tivo. It was a very generous gift, from two very generous people.

At time I was very happy. The only thing I watch on TV is cooking shows and Cubs games . . . but now I could fast-forward through the commercials! For an ADD-riddled guy like me, what a blessing!

Now, I’m not one of those pompous asses who say: “I don’t watch a lot of TV” because I’m holier than thou. I don’t wear all-black outfits, sit in coffeehouses, go to poetry slams, and sniff to anyone who will listen: “I don’t even watch TV.”

I don’t watch TV because I have an addictive and compulsive personality. I never do anything in moderation. My first wife used to call me “Mr. Excess,” and for good reason.

When I used to gamble, I wouldn’t gamble what I could afford. I would gamble thousands of dollars on sporting events. So now I don’t gamble at all (except in Vegas, where Mr. Excess makes an appearance again). It’s either/or for me.

If I thought I could do drugs recreationally, I might do them again. But I know I can’t. So I don’t do them at all. Everything I do, I do to excess.

It would be the same thing with TV. I know that, if I started watching various shows, I would get addicted, and would have to watch them all the time. And I’d rather be doing other things with my time.

Cindy, of course, jumped into Tivo with both hands and feet. Like a crack whore who just won a lifetime supply of rock, she immediately set up “Season Passes” for Grey’s Anatomy, Boston Legal, 24, and every single stupid show on that home improvement station—shows like Flip That House, and While You Were Gone.

(And yet, Cindy still manages to work out regularly, read lots of books, be a great step-mom and aunt, run our company, and enjoy the hell out of life; I don't know how she does it . . . she somehow gets more hours in a day than most people).

And, of course, Cindy Tivos “The Idol.” Yes, that’s how she refers to that semen stain on American society, American Idol . . . as in, when she says to my son, Zach: “Did you watch The Idol this week?” And then her and Zach launch into a 20-minute discussion on some sissy no-talent’s hair!

Oh . . . the corruption. The moral decay! He’s only seven! I want to scream at Cindy: “He’s too young to be this shallow and stupid!! Let him at least grow into it!!”

I’d rather give him a one hitter and a quarter ounce of reefer, and tell him to go sit in a corner and smoke pot the entire time The Idol is on. At the end of the hour, he’d have more brain cells after smoking the dope than he would have if he had watched that God-awful show.

Anyway . . . the point here is, Tivo got me. It’s too powerful. You can’t resist it. The damn thing makes it so easy to watch TV! You can watch an hour-long show in 40 minutes! No commercials! It reminds you when your show is on! It automatically records your preferences! If you’re watching something else, like a cooking channel, it will switch over to your preferred show for you!

I’m being sucked into the electronic wasteland, and I can’t help myself.

It started with 24. I’ve always been a sucker for spy books and terrorism stuff . . . so, because Tivo had already recorded it, I thought I would give it a try. Tivo’s siren song finally pulled me in.

Next thing I knew, I had borrowed Season One of 24 from my brother (he bought the entire DVD set of all the seasons) and Cindy I spent six hours watching it the other night.

Six hours! Six hours of my life I can’t get back. Six hours I could have been working on my novel, or my one-man show—or having sex (though I would have had to find something else to do for the remaining 5 hours, 53 minutes) or cocktails or walking by the lake.

Sure, it’s a good show. It hooks you in. But would my life be any less full if I didn’t see the damn thing? I doubt it.

So far, I’ve only been sucked in to 24. I’m holding out on Grey’s Anatomy or Boston Legal, though Cindy assures me I’ll like those just as much. Of course I will. That’s the problem.

But I won’t let 24 be a gateway drug. I will not be Mr. Excess about this. I realize it’s a slippery slope, and I’m going to take one day at a time. I will not slide down that slope, slipping and skidding to rock bottom, where they are showing The Idol.