It's true, Elvis Presley's birthplace and I are complete strangers. But if I had been there, or better still if I were planning to visit, I hope I wouldn't say anything overtly insulting about the place. Unlike, say, James Andrews, VP of Ketchum PR. He seems to have embarrassed himself terribly.
Not that he's the only one, but it does highlight a major thing about blogs and blogging. And that is that like security in my recent posts, there's a lot for which technology can be blamed when actually it's just a person being daft.
Essentially by Tweeting about Memphis, Andrews appears to have forgotten that he's publishing stuff - or he's forgotten what 'publish' means. This raises the even more interesting point of how soon it's going to be before someone gets into serious trouble because they've put something out there that's more specific than in this instance - something libellous, something damaging, something against which legal action could be taken.
The thing is, Twitter, blogging, Facebook, all of these things allow every individual to become a worldwide publisher. What none of them do is to allow editing, quality control, legal checking or any of the things a professional journalist and publisher will take as read.
I'm just waiting for the first high-profile case. My instinct says this Memphis incident isn't it and will just blow over - but something's going to give one day.