Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, posted an article titled "Sorry PR People: You're Blocked". He complained that he received over 300 emails everyday from lazy PR people who simply click send button without thinking whom they want to target.

"So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public). "

"Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play."

He did list a looooooooong email address alphabetically. I guess a lot of PR people did check whether themselves or their organisations’ email addressed had been blocked.

Morgan McLintic in his blog mentioned an amusing post by Andrew Conry-Murray excessive press release which follows most virus outbreaks.

"A new product is available to block press releases that invariably follow malware outbreaks. ShuTup 1.0 stops 100 percent of press releases that tell you how a product automatically and proactively blocks the latest worm, virus, spyware, phishing, or 'bot attack. "

"ShuTup 1.0, which is launching this week, is aimed at security professionals, IT administrators, journalists, and editors. These markets suffer crushing volumes of e-mail in the wake of the threat-du-jour."

ShuTup 1.0 maybe launched in the near future since a lot of people are getting sick of these "spams". Clicking the send button is a very easy thing to do, which makes some of PR people won't bother to select addresses from the whole list. There is another possibility that these PR people think maybe, maybe someone else such as Chris Anderson, would interested in the topics. Unfortunately, Chris' answer is "sorry, you are blocked".

If these PR people really want to target the right people, online pressroom could be an effective aid tool. One of the advantages of using online pressroom is that news release will be well in control. And those journalists who are really interested in your organisations could easily find information they want.