Michael Arrington has thrown a major wobbly over the misuse of PR embargoes and in a  related stream of barbed vitriol, has begun publicly denouncing the attention-seeking behaviour bordering on spamming tactics employed by some PR people desperate to get their clients  coverage.

As you can imagine, this has caused a right commentstorm, with people coming out both pro and against Arrington’s line in the sand. Louis Gray serves up a measured and rather sensible plea to tech bloggers and PRs to find different and better routes to their goals:

“It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn’t require a PR firm’s input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don’t think today’s missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.”

Meanwhile Marshal Kirkpatrick responds with the assurance that ReadWriteWeb will still respect the embargoed information it receives, to the approval of RWW readers who feel that considered and well-researched stories are much more valuable than the stream of superficial coverage served up in the name of the scoop.

There’s more audience reaction here and here, blogger reaction here and some PR reaction here.

In other somewhat related ‘development of the media’ news, Jeff Jarvis is bemused that people think he’s being revolutionary when The American Society of Newspaper Editors is thinking of eliminating “paper” from its name.

Twittering politicians come under the lens
First Tweet Congress, now Tweetminster; devised over a Twitter conversation between MP Tom Watson and Alberto Nardelli, developed in a day and launched late last night over Twitter (of course), the new site follows British politics through Twitter, and organises related tweets in a meaningful and useful way.

Stan Schroeder at Mashable says:

“All this makes for a very interesting lens of the UK political scene, but the same principle could be used on almost anything; I can imagine a similar service showing and organizing tweets by football players, US folk musicians, astronauts – anything goes.”

Tweetminster’s ‘About’ page puts it succinctly:

“It is a project created by UnLtdWorld.com and Thin Martian, because we believe passionately in the power of social networking and the potential to use social media and technology to benefit public life as well as private and social enterprise.”

Twingly’s BlogRank launch takes on Technorati
A couple of new tools this week came from Twingly, the Swedish social blog search engine that launched its Twingly Top100, which lists the 100 biggest blogs in 12 different languages based on Twingly’s own ranking system. It also launched BlogRank, effectively taking on Technorati‘s system of rating a blog’s popularity.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch gave it a whirl, and reckons:
“It’s a nice feature, but late in the game, and you’ve got to ask yourself how obsolete both Twingly’s and Technorati’s ranking would be if Google were actually the next to introduce the next ‘Google PageRank for blogs’.”

Personally, we at Social Media Influence like what Twingly’s doing for non-English language blogging and integrating the world of blogs with mainstream media news sites – and their nifty screensaver that visualises global blogging activity in realtime looks very shiny indeed… just a pity its Windows only for now.