Vaporzine seminar: Despite being full and in San Francisco, I still wanted to point to this announcement about a seminar this Sunday on “How to Start a Magazine” led by some really cool magazine starters.

A Nashville story: About ten years ago, one perfect April evening in Nashville, a beautiful engagement dinner was celebrated in our home. After dinner, as the guests still sat at their tables, a longtime friend of the bride, Marcus Hummon (who needs to update his website), sat down at our piano (perhaps the highlight of the instrument’s long life) and said he’d been inspired by the bride to write (with collaborators) the song he was about to sing. By the time the song was over, many of the 40 or so people listening were all weeping — not only because of the moving performance, but because we recognized the back-story attached to it. In the decade since, Marcus has written a string of hits for the Dixie Chicks, Sara Evans and others, but I’ve always wondered what happened to the song he sang that night.

For the past week, I’ve noticed that, at the iTunes store, the #1 country music song purchased and down-loaded day-after-day has been Bless the Broken Road, the song Marcus sang that night a few feet from where I’m blogging this. And while I’m sure Rascal Flatts fans love their slick (if my daughter weren’t such a fan of theirs, I’d say shmaltzy) performance, I still hear the song in my mind the way it was performed that long-ago evening by Marcus, alone at the piano. No doubt, it will be sung in the future at hundreds thousands tens of thousands of wedding-related gatherings. Others may grow tired of it, but I’ll be thinking of the couple for whom it was sung when I heard it first.

Guidance? (I’m doing some catch-up posting from earlier in the day when the rexblog was MIA) MediaPost’s Michael Shields interviews some “experts” about magazine performance expectations for 2005. He finds the experts won’t talk if they actually sell advertising, are cautiously optimistic if they consult magazine publishers, and are wildly enthusiastic if they teach about magazines.

Pimp my Mac: Via Robert Scoble I just learned of the website Mac Mod that is dedicated to, well, the topic of modified-customized-pimped-out Macs. And we’re not just talking stickers, here. For example, this week’s “Mod of the Week” is a modification called, for obvious reasons, the iTablet.

A new home: The rexblog has a new home that, in some ways, is like a homeocming. Thanks for those who helped in the packing and hauling of boxes. The seven readers of this blog should notice nothing but less comment spam.

Doc is showing off: Last night right after sunset, I shot a picture out my Nashville office window and posted it here. This morning, Doc Searls shot an awesome pre-dawn photo (I assume from his home). In my photo, I identified White Bridge road and some car headlights. In his photo, he identifies Venus, the moon, the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I guess that’s why he’s the A-List blogger and I only have seven readers.

A rexblog technical announcement: The rexblog has been “server erroring” all day but some smart folks are doing something that should keep that from happening (I apologize for being so technical with my explanation.). However, the fix may mean some of you may not get directed to the rexblog over the next 24 hours or so. Don’t worry. I’m still here. Please stand by.

<b>Apple start page now rather bloglike:</b> If one doesn’t reset the default start page of Safari on a Mac, the opening page has always gone to an Appleized version of Netscape’s portal page. Yesterday, the company pointed the start page to <a href=”http://www.apple.com/startpage”>www.apple.com/startpage</a>, which features a middle-well in which stories do not follow the print convention (big headlines above the fold or “cover stories” promote the most important stories — in the opinion of the editors), rather are organized using the blog convention: reverse choronologically available vis RSS feed. Welcome to the future. I’ll be blogging on this in greater length later (as I have in the past).