The debut of Xconomy San Francisco is a big moment for me, personally, because it represents a chance for me to move back to San Francisco after four years away from The City. I’ve loved being back in Boston since 2007; it was the ideal place for a career switch to online-only journalism. The opportunity to work with Bob, Xconomy co-founder Rebecca Zacks, and the whole Xconomy team has been amazingly fun and educational. And it’s been a huge privilege to cover the burgeoning Boston-area entrepreneurial scene, which is full of brilliant and friendly people. But as Jeanette McDonald sang in her paean to San Francisco in the archetypal 1936 disaster movie, “Other places only make me love you best / Tell me you’re the heart of all the golden west.”

Together with my colleagues—principally, Xconomy Seattle Editor and National Biotechnology Editor Luke Timmerman—I’ll be operating the San Francisco site remotely for a couple of weeks while I wrap up some final tasks here in Boston. (After all, I can’t miss the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship this Thursday!) Then I’ll be hitting the road for San Francisco—and publishing a video travelogue series along the way (details on that here, along with the pilot video in the series).

The main goal behind publishing the e-book was to bring the columns together in one easy-to-read package. In a column published yesterday (which is also Chapter 80 in the book) I describe the process of publishing Pixel Nation in some detail. It wasn’t easy. I’m glad I did it, because I learned a lot of new stuff about text editing tools and the workings of Amazon’s digital publishing platform. But the experience definitely proved that self-publishing an e-book isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re an author interested in doing this but you’re not versed in HTML, I’d recommend hiring a digital publishing consultant, somebody like Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects. (Tallent’s book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle was an indispensable guide as I went through my project.)

To give you a sense of what’s in the book, here’s the table of contents.

Introduction
1: Reinventing Our Visual World, Pixel By Pixel
2: The Coolest Tools for Trawling & Tracking the Web
3: Google Earth Grows a New Crop of 3-D Buildings, and Other Web Morsels to Savor
4: Turn Your HDTV into a Digital Art Canvas
5: Unbuilt Boston: The Ghost Cloverleaf of Canton
6: An Elegy for the Multimedia CD-ROM Stars
7: The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Screens
8: Science Below the Surface
9: Gazing Through Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope
10: Megapixels, Shmegapixels: How to Make Great Gigapixel Images With Your Humble Digital Camera
11: You Say Staccato, I Say Sfumato: A Reply to Nicholas Carr
12: Space Needle Envy: A Bostonian’s Ode to Seattle
13: You’re Listening to Radio Lab—Or You Should Be
14: Can Evernote Make You into a Digital Leonardo?
15: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?
16: Turn your iPhone or iPod into a Portable University
17: In Defense of the Endangered Tree Octopus, and Other Web Myths
18: Pogue on the iPhone 3G: A Product Manual You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
19: Photographing Spaces, Not Scenes, with Microsoft’s Photosynth
20: What Web Journalists Can Learn from Comics
21: ZvBox’s Unhappy Marriage of PC and HDTV
22: GPS Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone 3G
23: Boston Unblurred: Debunking the Google Maps Censorship Myth
24: Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller
25: Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV’s New Science Dramas
26: Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston’s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn’t Be a Model For Green Buildings
27: The Encyclopedia of Life: Can You Build A Wikipedia for Biology Without the Weirdos, Windbags, and Whoppers?
28: In Google Book Search Settlement, Readers Lose
29: In the World of Total Information Awareness, “The Last Enemy” Is Us
30: Attention, Startups: Move to New England. Your Gay Employees Will Thank You.
31: Springpad Wants to Be Your Online Home for the Holidays, And After
32: Speak & Spell: New Apps Turn Phones into Multimedia Search Appliances
33: Former “Daily Show” Producer Karlin is Humorist Behind WonderGlen Comedy Site
34: The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859—and How to See in Stereo on Your iPhone
35: Ditch That USB Cable: The Coolest Apps for Sending Your Photos Around Wirelessly
36: Have Xtra Fun Making Movies with Xtranormal
37: E-Book Readers on the iPhone? They’re Not Quite Kindle Slayers Yet
38: WonderGlen Comedy Portal Designed to Plumb Internet’s Unreality, Says Karlin
39: How I Declared E-Mail Bankruptcy, and Discovered the Bliss of an Empty Inbox
40: Public Radio for People Without Radios
41: Plinky: The Cure for Blank Slate Syndrome
42: Massachusetts Technology Industry Needs a New Deal, Not a New Brand
43: Three New Reasons To Put Off Buying a Kindle
44: Top 9 Tech Updates: Photosynth, Geocaching, Google Earth, and More
45: Google Voice: It’s the End of the Phone As We Know It
46: Tweets from the Edge: The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Twitter
47: Will Hunch Help You Make Decisions? Signs Point to Yes
48: Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today’s Globe
49: RunKeeper’s Mad Dash to the Marathon Finish
50: Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think
51: Why Kindle 2 is the Goldilocks of E-Book Readers
52: People Doing Strange Things With Soldering Irons: A Visit to Hackerspace
53: Will Quick Hit Score Big? Behind the Scenes with Foxborough’s Newest Team
54: Are You a Victim of On Demand Disorder?
55: German Web 2.0 Clothing Retailer Spreadshirt Finds Boston Fits It to a T
56: Boston’s Digital Entertainment Economy Begins to Sense Its Own Strength
57: The Eight (Seven…Six?) Information Devices I Can’t Live Without
58: Personal Podcasting with AudioBoo, UK’s “Twitter for Voice”
59: Art Isn’t Free: The Tragedy of the Wikimedia Commons
60: Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn
61: Shareaholic Becomes the Link-Sharing Tool of Choice
62: Startups Give E-mail a Big Boost on the iPhone with ReMail and GPush
63: Why It’s Crazy for Authors to Keep Their Books Off the Kindle
64: A Manifesto for Speed
65: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part One
66: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Two
67: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Three
68: Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography
69: How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring
70: Facing Up to Facebook
71: The Kauffman Foundation: Bringing Entrepreneurship Up to Date in Kansas City
72: Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books
73: Is it Real or Is It High Dynamic Range?
74: Using Google’s Building Maker to Change the Face of Boston
75: Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven’t Turned the Page on the Past
76: Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before
77: Entrepreneurship May Work Like A Clock, But It Still Needs Winding
78: The Apple Paradox: How a Company That’s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation
79: What’s So Magical About an Oversized iPhone? Plenty—And There’s More to Come
80: Kindle Conniptions: How I Published My First E-Book

Maybe you’d like to have a sleek, attractive blog or website for yourself or your business. Maybe you’ve looked around at some of the free blogging or lifestreaming platforms like Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, TypePad, and WordPress.com and you’ve been underwhelmed by the cookie-cutter sameness of the sites you see there. If either of those things are true, today’s column is for you.

The free platforms used to be the only way for a beginning blogger to take advantage of Web publishing technology. But it’s now possible to set up a good-looking, full-featured, highly personalized blog, simply by buying a customizable site template and setting it up on an independent hosting service. It’s much easier and cheaper than it sounds. In fact, I did it last weekend, and I’m going to walk you through it.

First, though, a word about the pluses and minuses of the free platforms. I’ve used quite a few of them. What’s great about them, of course, is that they’re free, and that they let you set up an account and start blogging instantly. Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and TypePad all make it extremely easy to create posts—in most cases all you have to do is write an e-mail. And they let you post several kinds of material, including text, photos, videos, and audio.

What’s most dismaying to me about the free blogging platforms, though, is that all of their blogs tend to look alike, with a style that’s curiously Web 1.0. Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com are the worst offenders: you can pick from a range of templates or “themes,” but most of them look like they’re straight out of 2004. Innovation is much more alive at Posterous and especially Tumblr, which allow more customization, but those platforms lack many of the extra features—such as integration with photo-sharing or messaging tools—that bloggers need to keep up with today’s social media explosion.

If you want a full-featured blog with a spiffy, up-to-date design, the truth is that you need professionally designed theme running on top of a powerful content management system like WordPress. The good news is that you can get these things quickly and easily. I saw a bumper sticker on I-93 yesterday that said “Websites designed for $500.” Buying a WordPress theme and setting it up on a hosting service yourself will cost you far less than that.

Continue reading this column at Xconomy.

But unfortunately, judging from a discussion going on across several PR-related blogs today, it seems that quite a few public relations professionals in the audience felt neglected, devalued, or outright offended by some of the things the panel said (or didn’t say). I wanted to try to clarify some of my own thoughts about the value of public relations—thoughts that will, of course, continue to be from the point of view of a journalist.

First, I want to apologize, because I took the time to write out a little statement before the panel about the value a startup can get from a good public relations firm, and when or why a startup might want to think about engaging one. When Mike asked the question that would have given me the opportunity to recite my statement, I whiffed on it. I guess I felt like I’d already talked too much. But here’s what I wrote:

A truly great PR firm would know the local news landscape, have personal relationships with the key journalists, help you craft the most interesting parts of your company’ story into a pitch, be able to reach out to journalists on a personalized (not form letter) basis, and get stories placed. They’d also help you anticipate issues (e.g. your funding is public information once you file a Form D with SEC) and deal with crises. If you are news savvy and you like journalists you can probably do a lot of this stuff on your own, or if you have angel or VC investors you can probably lean on them for help or advice. If I were an entrepreneur directly responsible to investors and to my board I probably wouldn’t start spending money on a PR firm until I was into my 2nd or 3rd year and earning some serious revenue.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs (and their angel or venture backers) are with me on that last point—that PR is a costly investment that you should put off as long as you can. My understanding of the point of last night’s panel was that the audience wanted to hear suggestions and strategies for doing that, and for stretching out the period before you need professional help. I don’t think the premise was that companies ought to do without professional PR forever—just that there are ways to bootstrap this part of your business, like almost every other part. Of course, it really helps if you’re the kind of person who likes to talk about your company and enjoys the whole social media whirl.

Some PR-industry friends who were in the audience, including Bobbie Carlton, Chuck Tanowitz, and Lora Kratchounova, have said in their blogs today that they felt the panel came down pretty hard on the PR biz. It’s true that we all have our funny or sad stories about bad assumptions or goofy practices on the part of PR folks. But I imagine that PR folks have just as many stories about journalists. Journalists and PR people are frequently at odds with one another, because at bottom we’re all trying to put our own separate spin on the basic information. So I think the inevitable effect of getting four journalists up on the stage was that the audience heard a certain amount of complaining, without any balance from the other side.

I really do think public relations firms play an important role in the innovation ecosystem (which is the part of the business world that I write about), not least by freeing up busy entrepreneurs from having to spend so much time worrying about publicity. They can also help with crisis management, and they can educate entrepreneurs about all the little things they aren’t likely to know ahead of time about working with the press. The absolute best PR people are also constantly thinking about their own craft, and about how the PR business is evolving (just as journalism and the startup process itself are evolving).

I agree with what both Chuck and Bobbie wrote today, the gist of which is that there’s a lot more to public relations than just media relations, and that startups need to be thinking about ways to engage whole broad communities of people—customers, partners, investors, and occasionally journalists. A really good public relations firm or consultant will be able to help with that. As Chuck put it in his blog: “PR is about developing a broad communications program that includes building a long-term strategy that establish lasting relationships with your core audiences, creating content and managing conversations that engage those audiences directly; and reaching industry influencers (media relations gets lumped in here). Tactically this means that the communicator or agency you hire should have skill sets that include: writing ability; audio and video skills; creative thinking and the ability to connect with influencers.”

That’s definitely the skill set I would look for if I were seeking help getting my message out. (And Chuck, who’s formerly with Schwartz, says he’s working to launch a new firm with just those qualities.) So, the bottom line: Yes, PR is valuable, if you can afford it, and if you hire the right professionals. But you don’t have to wait until you can afford PR help before you start reaching out to the press or building the kind of broader communications program Chuck talks about. You can start by shooting a reporter a plainspoken e-mail summarizing your company’s business and inviting further inquiries. (In fact you can send them my way at wroush@xconomy.com.)

Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Peter Kafka from the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog, and Bob Brown from Network World will also be on the panel, which is being moderated by Mike Troiano, himself a serial entrepreneur. I hope to see you there!