Mine is All Marketers Are Liars published in 2005. It taught me the importance of authentic communication – “don’t invent stories, tell stories about what you’ve invented.”

Kelvin interviewed Seth on his Sitevisibility podcast this month.

There’s a new sport in social media land: Seth bashing.

Seth Godin announced last week that Squidoo was launching a new service called Brands in Public.

The new service collates the conversations online around a brand onto a Squidoo “lens” (web page) and charges $400 per month to allow the brand to respond.

The service initially launched with pre-baked pages for major brands. Accusations of brandjacking followed and Squidoo backed down.

At best Brands in Public is a crude reputational tool. Time poor brands can comment on content from the blogosphere, Facebook and Twitter in a single place.

But instead best practice dictates that brands should be participating in conversations wherever they are taking place as part of a social media strategy. A direct response from a brand carries authority and remains a permanent contextualised record for search engines to find.

And as econsultancy said $400 per month buys a lot of social media monitoring tools.

Anyone else and this launch would almost certainly have been ignored. But Godin’s profile has driven attention.

Curiously Squidoo’s Brands in Public page hasn’t tracked all the negative conversations during the last week and I doubt that it will pick up this blog post.

Clay Shirky, Seth Godin, and others have spotlighted this approach as a means of breathing life into regional media. But I’ve very quickly identified a flaw in the model of using bloggers to contribute to local media properties.

In local communities bloggers can’t be outspoken and risk causing offence. I’m sitting on at least two cracking stories that as a journalist I wouldn’t hesitate to run, but as a blogger living in the community I’m staying well clear of through fear of pissing off my neighbours.

What’s the answer?