Stephen Davies of WebitPR sent me an email that just tickled me. WebitPR issued a social media news release on behalf of Streakr. (Streakr is a spin on del.icio.us that lets people bookmark and rate content they find, identifies similar content, and enables communities to form based on shared interest in the same kind of content.)

Stowe Boyd blogged his skepticism of the service. I don’t necessarily disagree with Stowe on this—it seems there are plenty of sites that already do this, and I’m disinclined to get excited about any new service that drops the “e” in the “er” ending of its name. It was cute when Flickr did it, but now it’s just tired.

What tickles me is that Stowe not only got the news item that proved to be fodder for his blog from a social media news release, but he copied the “Core Facts” section verbatim. Stowe, you may remember, was fairly savage in his attack on the concept of the social media release. Yet it would seem that this one came in handy.

Remember, the idea of the social media release is not to make the release itself social, but to present it in a format that can be used easily by bloggers and online journalists, just like Stowe did. Gosh. There must be merit to the idea after all!