When I was at ad:tech last week, I picked up a copy of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott. David gets it, as demonstrated by the rules themselves — a pithy distillation of much of what’s been going on in marketing and P.R. over the past decade:

• Marketing is more than advertising.
• P.R. is more than just a mainstream media audience.
• You are what you publish.
• People want authenticity, not spin.
• People want participation, not propaganda.
• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
• Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.
• P.R. is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
• The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
• Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
• Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
• On the Web, the lines between P.R. and marketing have blurred.

Takeaway for marketers: This may not be a seminal book like The Cluetrain Manifesto, but it’s a coupla hundred pages of solid and practical advice. Add it to your business book library. And follow the rules — they’ll put you ahead of the pack, because so many others still don’t get it.

“Confidence… thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.”
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

What’s hot on the Web right now? Alexa Hot Urls updates their answer to that question every five minutes.

I was poking around the Quality Paperback Book Club site yesterday (every couple of years I join to get five decent books at a buck each) and decided to check out their top 100 titles category.

That screen grab up there says it all: “We have 119 item(s) in this category.” That category again: Top 100 Titles. Cool. Maybe if I order five books I’ll really get six or seven books in the mail.

I assume that whoever edits and/or manages the QPB site never participated in MATHCOUNTS.

Breitbart reports that “China could become the first country to classify Internet addiction as a clinical disorder amid growing concern over compulsive Web use by millions of Chinese.”