Communications Tools: Esther Dyson, whose long-awaited appearance turns out to be too brief, kicks off her presentation with a story worth sharing. She recalls a New Yorker cartoon, and asks her audience to picture it in their minds: a small store, a storekeeper behind his counter, a cabinet of shelves behind him, labeled "Communications Tools." She then asks the audience what's in the cabinet.

Laptops? pens? In the cartoon, she says, the cabinet was full of ears. The fact that no one in the audience -- myself included -- thought of that tells you a lot about PR people (and the people who write about them). I have a friend who is fond of saying that PR people are perfectly capable of holding one half of a good conversation.

But in the conversation age, the ability to listen is surely as important as the ability to carefully craft our clients' messages and find the right medium to convey those messages.