Metzger’s Doyle Albee analyzes tech/business blogger Dave Taylor’s response to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington’s rant about a New York Times profile of publicist Brooke Hammerling.

(If you feel like you need a scorecard to keep it all straight, let me see if I can help: Hammerling represents the social/flitty/vapid approach to PR that infuriates Arrington, who is a cranky purist who thinks that PR [and perhaps all marketing] interferes with the natural selection that should determine whether products succeed or fail. Meanwhile, Taylor is a realist who thinks Arrington needs to acknowledge that there is a role for PR to play, and Albee thinks we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from this Hammerling scenario because one example of ineffective PR doesn’t mean all PR is ineffective.)