1. You're smarter than you think. Yesterday I met with the founder of a search startup who pointed out one list that his company added to the site's front page. "When we added that, our traffic quadrupled." He then drew conclusions about user behavior and his plans to extend those into a new site section. His insight convinced me that this startup was in good hands and was headed somewhere — much more than the hype I'd seen around it for the past months. That, not heady visionary talk, is what CEO blogs are for: no-nonsense explanations of why the product and company are good.

2. Training a flack is like training your entire staff. If your company only employs ten people, a everyone should know enough about everyone else's job to explain it to me. I'm a journalist, if a fake one, and I want to hear the whole story of the company. Even an intelligent PR person can't understand the company or its product as well as someone who made it. So why not schedule time for employees to push their own products? As a bonus, they'll sound more sincere than the flack who was hired just last month.

3. Educated flacks are the worst. We all use clichés because we're too lazy to really talk. I majored in English, so my clichés are "deconstruction" and "thesis statement." PR pros majored in marketing and came out saying "content" and "community input." When a kid named Brandon re-enacts Goodfellas, that's "content;" when a hundred people argue whether soda at breakfast makes you fat, that's "community input." Ugh. Again, I don't get anything out of phrases like "We're moving into an exciting space." That could describe my morning rush to the bathroom. Geeks can't talk. I like that. Founders with a business background can talk, but they still know the value of a minute, and they don't waste that minute with fake words — or fake math, like "if we get 1% of that video market, that's three million people." (Great arithmetic, kiddo, but it assumes that you can snap up one out of every hundred people who already love your competitors.)

4. You can pitch me and I won't feel pitched. I love meeting new people at tech parties. What I don't want to meet is someone who evangelizes a company and then marks their conversation with me as billable hours. Whenever I talk to a startup founder, even if I don't like the company they describe, at least I can honestly ask them why they launched such a dumb idea. It's...I grew up Christian, and talking to a flack is like talking to an evangelist who hasn't even studied the Bible. I spend the whole time wishing I could just call up God.

5. That said, here are my favorite flacks. Okay, eventually your company will grow and you'll need a flack so you and your employees can get back to work. One company I recommend is Bite PR, which has offices in New York, San Francisco, London and Stockholm. I've met several of the SF and London flacks, and I love them. They're witty, friendly, and talk about plenty more than the companies they represent. Thus when they do invite me to a pitch session, I'm cool to go. I also recommend Best PR. The eponymous Susan Best represents Craigslist (and married CEO Jim Buckmaster). She knows how to throw a party, and as for press mentions, well, Craigslist gets 'em. Best knew to keep the commanding (but charmingly disarming) Buckmaster and the self-effacing nerdy founder Craig Newmark in the spotlight. And isn't the best flack the one who lets the founders do the talking?

• Why have I been hiding it from you? Thursty Thursday is the leading weekly Thursday-after-work-happy-hour-gathering-for-professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's unofficially run by the sexy folks at worldwide PR firm Bite Communications. Tonight it's at a downtown San Fran bar, the Royal Oak. No web page for this, so just show up after 6:30 and yell, "I'm here to meet the non-geeky PR people!"
• Third Thursday, though, has a Meetup page AND an Upcoming.org listing, so you won't miss the June edition of this monthly Palo Alto event. Tonight's speakers include former venture capitalist Jeff Nolan or VP of virtual world builder Linden Lab.
• If tonight's SF Tech Session feels even more comfy in the Microsoft SF office than earlier sessions, it's because organizer Niall Kennedy joined Microsoft's Windows Live team this month. Tonight, the demo session features Box.net, Fabrik, and Amazon's S3 — three online storage services.

Swaptree

• Service: Sharing site
• Status: Private beta
• Is it any good? Frustratingly so. Beats the competition by being free and flexible — just throw in everything you're willing to trade out, list everything you want, and Swaptree shows you everything you can get for your stuff. The system auto-arranges three-part and four-part trades to make a thick web of borrow-ability.
• Business plan: You're giving Swaptree of all the media passing through your hands, and your zip code. Holy targeted advertising, Batman!

Limbo 41414

• Service: Bid pennies on products from your mobile phone. Lowest unique bid wins.
• Status: Funded by DFJ, working out its partnerships
• Is it any good? The setup's gimmicky, but hey, this is a world where people pay two bucks for a ringtone.
• Business plan: Sponsored auctions — hey kids, bid on the new Sony plasma TV! Tell all your friends! — and occasionally charging a buck per bid.

Three more after the jump.

oqo

• Product: A handheld computer running a full version of Windows XP
• Status: In production for a year now
• Is it any good? Pretty cool, and it fits in a cargo pants pocket. But since it's market toward the suits-and-slacks crowd, this heavy thing will end up clipped to belts. Works with wifi, but what good is a handheld that doesn't run on cell networks?
• Business plan: 1. Make product. 2. Sell product. 3. Profit!

Inkling

Browster

• San Francisco PR firm Bite interviews the San Jose Mercury News senior web editor about the Merc's new media offerings. Sez the editor about the popularity of the Merc's American Idol blog, "Compelling content still rules the day." And by "compelling content," he means "celebrity trash." (Gawker Media heartily agrees.) [Bitemarks]
• A reader responds to the Apple shared bathroom incident: "SCO (a.k.a. Santa Cruz Operation), when it was still in Santa Cruz, posted similar signs after customers on a late tour of the facility suprised a group of nude hot-tubers. good times."
• USA Today manages to sound like it reads books, and it gives tepid approval to Douglas Coupland's JPod, a novel about game developers that outclasses his '95 novel Microserfs. [USA Today]
• SF Chron tech blogger Alan Saracevic asks about the $100 laptop (meant to put a computer in the hands of every child), "Why does everyone need a laptop?" So we can get more blog traffic, Alan. Geez, catch up with everyone, okay? [SF Gate]
• The Boob Nazi battle on LiveJournal — where militant breastfeeders fight LJ's abuse team — gets attention on the LJ Abuse Blog, which calls the affair "Nipplegate." [Exposing LJ Abuse — NSFW]