• FT on Blogging (logon req). Same old stories. Same old spokespeople. Is anything new happening?

"The answer is this: blogging is transforming the way companies communicate and, for a customer, direct contact with an employee is so much more preferable than dealing with a huge faceless corporate behemoth." FT

• BizWeek on viral advertising that, oh my god, use blogs… (yep, logon needed here as well)

Donovan Unks, a 28-year-old biotech researcher at Stanford University, spent valuable minutes every day for three months to follow an Audi marketing campaign. The ads for the new A3 hatchback, appearing in magazines and on TV, billboards, and the Internet, wove a complicated serialized mystery of a stolen car. Some 500,000 people, according to Audi, tracked the story by following online clues. But Unks and his friend Laura Burstein didn’t just play the game. They were drafted to be characters in the plot by ad agency McKinney & Silver (HAVS ) in Durham, N.C., after they answered an encrypted ad that only solvers of binary code could read in The Hollywood Reporter. In their Audi roles, the two drove all night to a music festival, crashed a party, were blogged about by fans of the story, and Webcast worldwide on the final night of the drama at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 30. – BusinessWeek

• Motor City, Motor Mouth… BizWeek on how DeLorenzo uses his blog to blast the auto makers and how, they read and then pay for more…. Ooooooo, what a cool idea… Sound just like industry analysts right 🙂

If it’s Wednesday in Detroit, then it’s likely that everyone from Ford (F ) Chairman and Chief Executive William C. Ford Jr. on down is logging on to Autoextremist.com to catch Peter M. DeLorenzo’s weekly rants, raves, and often astute observations about the car industry. DeLorenzo’s six-year-old site draws some 65,000 readers a week and could soon rival the industry bible, Automotive News, in popularity and clout. – BusinessWeek.

BTW – he has an interesting post by Allen Bukoff titled: Losing the PR war: An Example from Research. Not sure if this is just a valliant effort to promote thier own research…