Anna Marie Cox, the A-list blogger behind Wonkette, provided the keynote Friday morning at the Ragan Corporate Communicator’s Conference. She said several things that had me shaking my head, but one thing she said was so smart and right that the mistakes pale in comparison.

The keynote took the form of an interview with Charles Pizzo (pictured with Cox) tossing the questions. At one point, Pizzo asked how companies can deal with the fact that thousands of bloggers are poised to attack them and capitalize on their mistakes. Cox’s answer was spot on. Companies, she said, have to give up control in order to gain control. They must strive for as much transparency as they possibly can. If they make information available, they thwart the desire among many bloggers to expose secrets or take them to task for errors.

Cox was flat-out inaccurate when she responded to Pizzo’s question about the value of podcasts. “You mean downloadable audio?” she said, dismissing the fact that the delivery mechanism distinguishes podcasts from plain old downloadable audio. But Cox didn’t let it rest there; she chided podcasts, noting that it’s difficult to slog through most blogs and that it sounds even less desirable to listen to a blogger’s recorded streams of consciousness. Of course, most podcasts are anything but.

It wasn’t her only mistake. Cox also claimed blogs and message boards are pretty much the same thing, suggesting that General Motors could achieve with a message board what the automaker is doing with its Fastlane blog. There are considerable differences between blogs and message boards, as articulated in Lee LeFever’s CommonCraft blog.

I also disagreed with her characterization of most CEO blogs as sounding like press releases. Sure, some do, but she included the GM Fastlane blog among them, which I find to be pretty genuine. Cox only likes Mark Cuban’s blog, although she readily admitted that he’s more like a blogger who happens to own an NBA team, rather than a team owner blogger. I suspect she hasn’t read Tinbasher.

All in all, though, Cox was engaging, witty, quick, charming, and real. All bloggers should have such qualities.