Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley

I'm not sure if I should be impressed or depressed by this article.

The pinnacle of success, as far as PR is concerned, is getting your marketing material into the NY Times, disguised as journalism.

First, the specifics of the company profiled in the beginning. Someone is spending at least 5-10k a month on PR for what is a glorified dictionary with some wiki aspects to it? Utterly ridiculous. PR firms can be a necessary evil at some point in a startup's life, but this is being wasteful. http://www.wordnik.com/words/fail

Now onto the general theme of the article. It makes our industry look like a bunch of circle jerking asshats. Basically silly product gets built, silly product goes to silly bloggers, and spammy retweets/reblogs get made. How is that building any value besides getting someone to try your service then leave it? People overdo this launch concept. They get one day of blanketed coverage and think that they have made themselves into a huge brand that the PR Gods love. Um, what happens a week later when your traffic dives off?

Get a simple product out there, come to a niche community to get some basic users to kick the tires, and then just have a final release version. Build a good product, iterate, build more value, charge, and these amazing things will happen:

a) People will pay you b) People will talk about you c) Press will talk about you

Pay all the press, bloggers, or God knows what to tweetlogzinepaper it up, and with utter shit you'll just have wasted bandwidth and a depressing retention rate. Like I said, not all PR firms/people are bad, it's just what's emphasized in this article. We've all busted our ass to make this industry what it is. Articles like this just belittle that work.

I can't even being to guess how you come to this conclusion, and the word "meritocratic" is, quite frankly, offensive.