This week on the Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable, Jen Zingsheim and CustomScoop founder and CEO Chip Griffin were joined by special guest Christine Perkett, founder of PerkettPR. The Roundtable discussed “machines that eat tweets,” if a PR agency should be judged on whether or not they have a blog, and the perennial favorite question of ’should content be free?’

Click here to listen to the 35-minute discussion.

• First topic for the day was Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about monitoring platforms being “creepy.”  Are we so accustomed to measuring, monitoring, and tracking that we don’t see that some people might find data collection “creepy?” Or, is not being tracked and analyzed even a realistic expectation when people complain about something online–isn’t at least part of the reason they are complaining is that they *want* someone from the company to help? What role does PR play if a practitioner can’t really tell if the customer wants help or is just venting?

• Next, a topic seen before bouncing around the blogosphere is whether PR firms should be judged on the presence of a blog. While some firms, like PerkettPR, have embraced blogging, other firms have blogs that are started and rarely updated, or they aren’t there at all. Is it right to judge a firm based on this, or are there other criteria that are more important when determining an agency’s social media savvy?

• Finally, with the very public fuss between Google and the AP this week, the Roundtable revisits the “paid versus free” debate. The group discussed a NYT piece on the topic, and Jeff Jarvis’s post on how newspapers “blew it.”

Click here to listen to the 35-minute discussion.