You are absolutely correct in observing that so many of the PR and marketing tools available on the net are not necessarily viable – yet.

Frankly, I think half the battle these days is making sense of what tools offer viable services and which are just wastes of time and money.

I think what is so interesting is the extent to which, the answer to that question lies not in the hands of the original developers/inventors but more in the hands of open source developers who can transform a seemingly useless tool (twitter comes to mind) into something not only useful, but powerful too.

Thanks Steve, for starting a worthwhile conversation.