I love the sound and fury surrounding PR exclusives. The most recent dustup comes from TechCrunch, where Mike Arrington - fresh off ticking off European entrepreneurs - lets slip with this:

The reason this is becoming a larger problem is because there is no downside to breaking embargoes. The PR firm gets upset but they don't stop working with the offending publication or writer. You get a slap on the wrist, and you break another embargo later that day. Our new policy is to break every embargo. We'll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we'll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We'l™ll choose at random. There will be exceptions. We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively.

Here's why this matters a whole lot less than the PR crowd thinks: outside of the circle of PR folks and tech journalists who update sites like Engadget every half second, no one notices the timing. Here's how most people get hot updates:

• One of the people they follow in Twitter says something - and they happen to notice
• Their News reader gets its hourly update, and they have time to look
• They wandered by their favorite news site, and the news happened to be there

Notice the absence of time criticality? The only people who care deeply about the timing are the small circle of A listers who all follow each other. The rest of us? Whether you push the news 3 minutes early or 3 minutes late, we won't even notice.

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