Edelman blogs: Exclusive country clubs?

In “Golden age of PR?” and “Does Edelman need a PR rep,” I note how Edelman’s public blog faces are at risk of becoming two-faced:

As all good public relations tradesmen, Edelman President & CEO, Richard Edelman, and Edelman blogger extraordinaire, Steve Rubel, are known for their loquacious and piquant prose. Edelman’s public blog prose on the “Working Families for Wal-Mart” affair, however, is strikingly sparse and unfulfilling…

Rubel apologizes for not speaking “about this” sooner, but does not speak “about this” in any meaningful way at present; Rubel simply cites Edelman’s non-transparent apology for non-transparency and disassociates himself from the matter.

Last week Rubel, senior vice president at Edelman, the “largest independent global PR firm,” aka Micro Persuasion, used his "personal" blog to lash out at Techmeme calling it a “blog country club” that’s a “big turn off.”

What transgression does Rubel accuse Techmeme of? The dot-com U.S. based site does not feature blogs published in Europe:

I love Techmeme and its sister sites - really, I do (yes, Gabe, I mean that). But best I can tell it's like an exclusive country club because it excludes the vast majority of the world's bloggers who write in other languages. These include many huge bloggers who write about tech - particularly in Germany. Further, 60% of the world's blogs are not written in English.

Why does Rubel speak up now about a perceived global injustice he deems is being perpetuated by an independent, for-profit, U.S. based firm which operates in the English language?:

Here's a case in point. Yesterday, some 85 bloggers from France, Germany and Italy linked to one of my posts and it only registered on Techmeme once some heavy hitters wrote about it. I could care less if I make Techmeme, truly. I am grateful every time I am included. But I find it incredulous that a blog post about blogs that spurred such in-depth conversation was ignored outside the country club.

What is the blog post “case in point” that Rubel proudly notes “some 85 bloggers from France, Germany and Italy linked to’?”:

Edelman and Technorati Detail the Most Influential Blogs in German, French and Italian

Two thirds of all blog posts are written in languages other than English. This is why Edelman and Technorati partnered earlier this year. The localized versions of Technorati in German, French and Italian are being pushed out to our teams this week. Now that we have them, we have learned a lot about the European blogosphere and how it differs from the US.

Rubel uses his “personal” blog (although he writes under "we," for himself and Edelman) to promote his employer’s business relationship with a blog tracking service and then uses his same "personal" blog to reprimand a third-party blog tracking service for not acknowledging his own promotion of his employer’s blog tracking efforts.

Rubel is taking a stand not only against Techmeme’s alleged xenophobia, he is is outraged with the entire blogging community:

This is indicative of a larger trend, perhaps embedded in American culture. We don't care about what the rest of the world is blogging about because it's not in English. That's too bad. This is a global conversation and we're missing a lot of voices. According to an Edelman analysis, the top 10 US blogs linked to each other 3,302 times over the last year. They never link to bloggers in other countries and rarely do they even link to non-US media...Techmeme could be more inclusive. Right now it feels like a little exclusive club and that's a big turn off.

What has Rubel done for his part in the past week to foster “a global conversation” with a “lot of voices” from abroad, so that we are not "turned off" with Micro-Persuasion or Edelman?

Rubel has indeed reached out to European bloggers, two. Rubel has linked to:

PR 2.0 Blog: New blog on the future of PR from Edelman in Germany,

PRwordSmith: New Edelman blog in the U.K., by Edelman London CEO.