Firstly, I would like to apologise regarding the lack of attention, dear blog. We have been pitching to the South West RDA last week (fingers crossed) and the team are launching www.PRBristol.co.uk on the 30th.

Less of my lame excuses and down to the reason that kick-started my blogging activity in the first place. Kevin's blog is catching me up in the blog stats battle within the team. Bizarrely, there seems to be almost 3,000 readers of this blog, since it was started, which is great (THANKS). However, Kevin Coughlan is catching me up and only a couple of hundred behind. I suppose it is to be expected as he was a journalist for 18 years and editor of the LINK magazine... anyway, I am still miffed.

On the subject of blogging and online media it seems that the sea change of media is almost complete. I was interested to read that
online advertising is set to overtake TV this year.

Online ad spend is expected to grow to £3.56bn in 2008, accounting for over 19% of all ad spend. TV advertising is expected to fall 2.5% to £3.39bn.

Of course, the main driver of this is Google (the gorilla in the room when it comes to online advertising) but I think that the main reason for the sudden surge is, interestingly, a looming UK recession. TV advertising is not cheap and runs into the 10s of millions for a London agency-backed campaign. If any organisation spends that kind of money they want (A) results and (B) to be able to prove that it worked. Online advertising (as well as online PR) by its nature is easy to track: who, what, when and how many people are selecting your product/service.

I think that at a time when we are all watching our budgets, online advertising and communications will seem a more appealing option for marketing managers as they can easily justify their spend to their bosses, against alternative media.

I am busy launching PRBristol.co.uk and working for a big pitch. I thought that I would let our clients do the talking in the meantime!

The Montage team is seeking bloggers from in-house PRs, agencies, freelancers, news agencies, photographers, journalists, bloggers and broadcast professionals to take part.

The network comes in three parts to suit your information needs:

• Dashboard - PRBristol's Pageflakes provides up to the minute news information from all major news sources (with RSS) across Bristol

• Blog - PRBristol.co.uk blog provides all sections of Bristol news, as well as PR and media industry news

• "The Watering Hole" - This site provides the social networking aspect, allowing PRs and journalists to network online.

There will be many more features that are being added to the site. To learn about these, join the Watering Hole!

We are very excited about this project and look forward to your feedback.

If you want a piece of the action, please email: info@prbristol.co.uk