Wednesday Night Fever: As a professional marketing guy, I’m
recommending that Mr. Roboto go ahead and change his name to Mr.
Robo-two (or, perhaps, Mr. Robo-2). I think I’ll suggest that to him next Wednesday night when several Nashville bloggers (and, well, anyone else) plan to spend an evening with him.

Recalling that first transistor iPod:

Gee, it seems like only yesterday.

(source:  a vintage ad photoshop contest
at 1000 words. via: yewknee.)

What Seth said: “Pre-bankruptcy marketing.”

What Doc said: As I was rather harsh in my negative
reaction to one aspect of the Odeo story in the NYT a while
back (my specific complaint: the implication in the article and related
blog-post that podcasters need an eBay-like centralized marketplace),
I’d like to once more say I can’t wait to see all of the various tools
that will surely be springing up in the coming months that will make
podcasts easier to create, distribute and receive. Doc Searls
captures my sentiments exactly when he suggests to folks not
to focus on the competition among those who are developing podcast tools and services. “Chill, folks,” says Doc, “Markets are
public places where makers and vendors offer users and customers lots
of choice. Not coliseums where gladiators kick and stab each other to
death while the rest of us cheer over bruises and blood.”

Desperate covers: Entertainment Weekly
(cover date, March 25) has five different covers, each with a different
star of Desperate Housewives.  They’re not posted yet, but the
covers should eventually make it into the magazine’s cover archive.

(via: Blog Magazine)

A new voice: Hey, I just learned that another Nashvillian I know who is not a male has started a weblog. It’s FixinSupper
(not yet, but soon to be at the URL, fixinsupper.com), a food blog with
a big emphasis on southern cuisine. It’s maintained by my Hammock
Publishing colleague, online editorial director (and rexblog commentor) Laura Creekmore. I
wondered why she kept taking photos of her food
wherever we ate in Austin during the South by Southwest Interactive
Festival. Now I know.

Update: I’m discovering even more blogging about my eating adventures in Austin, this one from Cole Huggins.

Apple-free speech update: Boing Boing is filing an amicus brief in the Apple vs. bloggers case. Their lawyer needs help with the following:

“I
need links to news stories broken by bloggers– things a court can look
at and say ‘this looks like what we traditionally think of as
journalism.’ I am particularly interested in examples of stories based
on sources, but any news will do. I will use these both as facts for
the brief and I want to attach printouts from the blogs as attachments
to it. I’m looking for as many as 50 examples, but I need at least 10.”

Email your comments with links to gelman@stanford.edu.

(via: John Battelle)

Nashville’s corporate blogging community grows: Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Publishers is about to launch a site called “House Work” that will aggregate feeds from employees’ weblogs, according to the company’s president and COO and blogger-in-chief Michael Hyatt.

According to Michael, the new site — and encouragement for employees to start blogging — has three primary objectives:

“1. To raise the visibility of our company and our products
2. To make a contribution to the publishing community
3. To give people a look at what goes on inside a real publishing company.

Hyatt
has posted a draft of Thomas Nelson’s corporate blogging terms and
conditions for employees who wish to have their blogs feed into the
aggregator site and is inviting comments and suggestions, not only from employees but
from the blogosphere.

I’m happy to see such a creative and enlightened approach to corporate
blogging come from one of Nashville’s major companies and the world’s
largest publisher in its category.

(By the way, is this a trend story as another, much smaller, Nashville publishing company, also has a company blog maintained by its employees?)

(via: Steve Rubel)