The spread of blogging is making the job of PR people difficult and confusing. Witness this post from Ed Bott, which I found via Scoble - Bott has early access to Office 12, as a member of the tech press. He's restricted by the beta EULA from writing about it, and Scoble was trying to look into that. That's where the confusion started. Here's Bott explaining it:

• A coordinator of the Office 12 beta program dismissed the report as a “rumor” and said the confidentiality requirement of the EULA was still in effect.
• Scoble checked with his sources inside the Office team and said the official word was that press – including bloggers – are indeed allowed to write about Office 12 client apps.
• A few days later, Scoble backtracked: “It turns out that this isn’t quite the case,” he wrote. “There are different NDAs given to different groups. … If you’re an MVP, in the Technical Beta or on the TAP program you’ll need to comply with the EULA of Beta1, which maintains confidentiality except in cases where the information is already public.”
• The next day, I received an e-mail from a representative for the Office team confirming that technical beta testers can write about the client applications in Office 12 only if they’re among the group of press and reviewers recognized by Microsoft. “These folks (there are a few hundred of them) can blog all they want about client apps…”

That's enough to make your head spin, especially when there's been so much talk about various aspects of Office 12 (especially the new Ribbon UI).

What we're seeing is the old PR staff doing business as usual, and getting snared by the ground as it's shifting underneath them. I'm not sure where this is going to end up - it's (mostly) easy to identify a member of the press, and then control the level of conversation with them. It's a lot harder with bloggers popping up with unmoderated comments as that's all taking place.

A new model is trying to be born, and I don't think anyone knows what it's going to look like yet.