Here are a few cool new web 2.0 tools that we’ve been recently using and wanted to share with you.

Snurl: used for shortening unnecessary (and annoying), ultra-long url addresses. You just paste the cumbersome ulr address in snurl & voila! Snurl gives you an easy-to-use compact url that you can share with bloggers or the media. http://www.snurl.com

Twhirl: was recently bought up by Seesmic, an up & coming online video streaming site. Twhirl is a great Twitter client. What makes Twhirl even more powerful is that it can be used with competing Twitter services like Pownce and Jaiku. Twirl also embeds snurl, which is extremely helpful because Twittering services max out at 140 characters.
http://twhirl.org

Perl: Okay, we really don’t use this and it’s not a cool web service. Just our attempts to be witty here. Perl is actually a dynamic programming language derived mostly from C language and predominantly used for Unix-based operating systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl

We always counsel our clients to be careful and conscientious about what they say to the press and when they say it. We believe it is never a good idea to share sensitive information with media and then hastily use “off the record” lingo–as if that is going to somehow keep the information from being shared. What we do counsel our clients about here is the following: always assume that with a reporter “off the record” means “ON the record.” Juicy tidbits of information are exactly what press seek in order to break a news story.

Today, Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a now-former scenior advisor to the Obama campaign, made deriding comments during an interview in London with The Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper. Prior to the press interview she had actually agreed that everything said during the interview could be printed.

In our opinion, it is unwise to divulge sensitive, confidential or questionable information and then quickly interject “oh that was off the record” during any interview. The use of this popular phrase hardly means that the reporter is under any obligation to agree to your unexpected request. In the case with Samantha Powers, the reporter did his job and ran with his piece and this started off a chain reaction leading to a big political bruhaha.

We recommend a simple rule of thumb to follow: if you do not want to see it in writing, then don’t share “off the record” comments with the press.

Valleywag, one of our favorite reads here at Ignite, had an interesting post today titled, “Wired editor in Snit over unsolicited emails.” The post points to Chris Anderson’s “outing” of 329 PR people who took aim at the Editor-in-chief, pitching him on their clients’ products or services. Boy, did his own blog post set off a firestorm of great debate, as evidenced by the comments too numerous for yours truly to finish reading. (I feel bad for any non-PR person who got accidentally ensnared in this public flogging.)

Whenever I see the title ‘editor-in-chief’ or ‘publisher’ on ANY of our lists that we are building, I immediately cross them out and remind our staff that those titles should not be there. (period)!! (Actually, there are a few exceptions here but these are typically with smaller publications or newsletters that are usually focused in vertical market sectors.  In these cases, the editor-in-chief is indeed the go-to-guy or go-to-gal. ;-)  I, for one, would welcome PR folk applying the basics here. Among the two camps, I fall on the side of supporting Chris for getting fed up with the hundreds of PR people and PR firms that do not bother to do the basic quality control when it comes to promoting or trying to interest reporters. Herein, lays the key — the operative word being “reporter” not editor-in-chief. There is a big difference and if a PR person doesn’t know this, doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care, well then I guess they continue to face public lambasting.

Is it, as Chris is suggesting, laziness by lots of PR folks? I know that, like reporters, PR people are also typically under the gun but, quite frankly, it takes a minimal amount of time to prune out any odd titles (copy editor, publisher, and editor-in-chief). I can understand why, in this age of email overload, there is an even bigger backlash at this type of spamming practice. I guess this quality (and perhaps basic training) or lack thereof is essentially up to each agency to either put in place or disregard.

The NYT’s weighs in on this today as well.