Okay, okay, simmer down.

While our delightful, more northern of the two Rainier MDs is off Euro-gallivanting, he has left yours truly in charge of the blog. He’s introduced me below, which is probably sufficient, but do take the next couple of moments considering the implications of a venerable (not venereal, which I almost typed…) PR overlord leaving his established blog in the hands of a 22 year old excitable girl-nerd.

Two words: LOL Cats.

It’s going to take all the self restraint I’ve got not to flood this page with internet memes, but he did say to ‘be myself.’ This means, amongst other things, you may have to deal with thinly-veiled, badly executed and slightly misled Welsh nationalism (expressed like a true ex-pat.. they say all the most wistful patriots don’t actually have to live there.) I recently felt Dragon’s blood flowing through my veins a little more vehemently than normal (and hey, my mother is Kentish so go figure) in a brainstorm for a Wales-centric client product launch.

Piggybacking last month’s ICANN open season on suffixes, it transpired in the meeting that there has been an ongoing campaign for a dedicated Welsh TLD (Top Level Domain root.) I can’t stress enough how important I think it is not to resign a beautiful language to the annals of history, and with Welsh language uptake in new media on a high, this could be a great affirmation of that. So imagine my horror when I found out their choice of TLD. Yes, that’s right - they've gone for .cym. I’ll leave you monoglots to work out how that’s pronounced in Welsh, but it’s not ‘dot sim.’ Let’s just say, if they don’t think of something more appropriate, the Welsh Assembly could have a real mess on their hands.

Meanwhile, rumblings from the RSS – Charles Arthur in flame war with Amanda Chapel, aka Strumpette. Charles’ run in (I’ll admit I didn’t realise ‘she’ was a ‘he’ either!) with this digital cipher got me thinking. In a space of breaking global news, trends and (gulp) paradigm shifts played out in front of our eyes, a ‘space’ now far too significant for the ‘cyber’ prefix, isn’t it a bit odd that people still seem to get the most excited about, shock horror, a man posing as a woman. It’s all a little IRC chat circa 1999 to me, before you even notice the ruffled feathers of embarrassment from the red-blooded young PR bucks (gross…) who’d found themselves mildly titillated by her, um, image. As colleague and borderline blogging celebrity (blogrity? bloglebrity?) Matt Watson recently pointed out, the Tech and PR blogosphere is enough of a boys club as it is, so let’s leave the alter-egos at the altar and get down to business.

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