How did the Country Music Marathon get so big? This morning, as I’m getting ready for an afternoon flight to south Florida for the spring meeting of the American Business Media,
about 18,000 folks are running all over Nashville in what has grown in
a few short years to be one of the biggest events of its kind. Good
luck, folks. (I think part of the answer to my “get so big” question
is, they added a 1/2 marathon a few years ago. The other part is how
easy and inexpensively Nashville is to get to by car or Southwest from
so many places. Then, I guess having live bands located all along the
race course helps, also.).

Here is the official site: www.cmmarathon.com

Here are what bloggers are saying about it via technorati and ice rocket.

By the way, I predict some guy from Kenya wins.

WKRN weblog aggregator launches:
Channel 2 has launched its weblog-hyperlocal news aggregator. Former
waitress
blogger Brittney Gilbert is now the News 2 blogger, aggregator, on-air
personality. The only thing I find weird about it is the strange name
they gave it, “Nashville, I Stalking” What is that about? Nashville, I Stalking!

Update: Oh, wait. That’s Nashville is Talking, not Nashville, I Stalking. Nevermind.

(via: Thursdaynightfever.com)

Staci’s & LaShawn’s sessions have already begun: Staci Kramer is leading a session (and a food for thought dinner) next week at BlogNashville and has started up the conversation
on her heretofore-soon-to-go-live weblog. She’s
inviting the experts (translation: everyone is an expert) to join in.

Quote:

Also, La Shawn Barber has started the conversation for her session
on Faith-based blogging on her weblog. She suspects she’ll be one of
only two evangelicals there and is soliciting help in formulating
qestions for discussions (and has already received 49 comments as of
this moment). As BlogNashville is in, well, Nashville, I don’t think La
Shawn will have too much trouble throwing a rock without hitting
another evangelical (no, wait, that’s not a very good metaphor, is it?).

Actually, I think she’ll find her session filled with individuals who
are seeking ways to use blogs as a means to express their faith and
convictions. I expect she’ll discover a very friendly, kindred-spirited
crowd.

Technorati Tag: blognashville

Why I blog: Yesterday, a business acquaintance asked me a question
that lots of business acquaintances ask me when they discover I’ve been
blogging so long. “Do you make any money from it?” (I have blunt
business friends.)

I
explained how blogging has turned me from an obscure minor figure
in an unknown outpost of the magazine publishing world into an obscure
blogger in an unknown outpost of the blogosphere.  Somehow, that
explanation convinced him that I must have some tremendous economic
incentive in doing this.

So, let me try once more to explain this whole blogging thing, from my perspective. I’ll use an anecdote.

A while back, I posted a really short piece about a group called MagazineLiteracy.org and said something like, “this sounds like a great
thing.”

Unbeknownst to me, one of the rexblog’s seven readers, Shawn Lea, read that post and also blogged about the group. Shortly after that, John Mennell,
the organization’s chairman and founding director, contacted Shawn about possibly helping
resize some ads that were offered free of charge by several national
magazines. Shawn, of course, said yes…and then she also
helped raise funds so that 400 kids homes in Mississippi now receive
magazine subscriptions.

Shawn also encouraged the organization’s founder and chairman, John Mennell, to start blogging. And he has. And today is that blog’s official launch.

And that’s why I blog.

That, and the possibility of a huge cash windfall one day.

I give up — reporters will never get the whole math thing: I
keep trying to retire from my continuous ranting about how ridiculous it is when a
reporter sees one set of numbers (online advertising reaches a gazillion
dollars) and suggests that such a statistic has any relevance to TV upfront spending or
consumer magazine ad sales. I know that nothing I say will convince
reporters that regression analysis is something they should understand before, hmm, let me make this simple, comparing apples to broccoli.

Please, if you’re a reporter who may ever be tempted to compare one set
of numbers to another set of numbers and actually think you’re coming
up with something that is meaningful, pick up a copy of the new book,
Freakonomics. It is written in language even you can understand. It
will make you realize that something you think is so statistically
obvioius will actually make you sound clueless when you include it
in a story.

Nick Bradbury on RSS & advertising: Nick (of FeedDemon fame) blogs why he’s decided that FeedDemon should not strip ads. (Sidenote: Nick is registered for BlogNashville.)

A while back, I complained about the type of RSS advertising (not
about advertising, per se) that was included in the feed from Josh Rubin’s Cool Hunting (the specific ad I was complaining about was, in effect, an animated
gif ad embedded in the RSS feed). After I complained, Kevin let me know that he also offers
an ad-free, summary feed of his posts.

This “tiered approach” may be something others try. However, can
you think of any feeds that are so critical or irreplacable that you’d
allow it to make your newsreader blink? I mean, other than the rexblog.

100 8th grade boys: The 14
year-old in my household attends an all-boys school at which one of the
great rites of passage of the 8th grade is a 2 1/2 day trip to Atlanta that is designed,
as best I can tell, to eschew all hints of the school’s typically
rigorous academic demands. It’s about having fun, in other words.

Anyway, the school’s middle school headmaster is a great e-mail writer
and, in a message to parents reporting on the trip’s first 24 hours,
included this:

    The food tally was most impressive:

Tonight they’ll be going to the Atlanta baseball game — Look for them
on television: they’ll be the large, boisterous group in right center
field … with sleeping chaperones.

(7 cokes per boy may explain that boisterousness.)

Verizon taketh away “free” wi-fi: 
Currently, if you pay for Verizon DSL, you get “free” access to wi-fi
beamed from NYC telephone booths. Now that the company is deploying
cellular internet around the city, it will be pulling the phone booth wi-fi access points.

I suggest it’s time for people to once more, begin doing creative things with Pringle cans.

BlogNashville “Food for Thought” Dinners: Big
news on the BlogNashville front. Dave Winer (Pope Dave I), who created (among many,
many other things) the “we’re all insiders” Bloggercon
concept on which the Friday night-Saturday portion of BlogNashville is
based, will be joining us.

Also, the “Food for Thought” Saturday night dinners
(another idea of Dave’s) have been posted. If you’re registering for BlogNashville (and you still can), sign up for one..

My assistant, Lisa (who just had a baby boy — congratulations), made
the arrangements for these dinners before she left for her maternity
leave. (If you’re from Nashville and you’re wondering why we chose the
restaurants we did, it’s because they were the ones who’d let us make
reservations. Also, we wanted local restaurants and not chains.)

Also, if you’re a conference registrant from Nashville and are planning on
attending one of these dinners, and you’d like to volunteer to be the
official friendly Nashvillian at the table, please send me an e-mail.
Let me know what dinner you’ve signed up for.

One last thing: You don’t have to be registered for BlogNashville to
attend the opening night party. If you’re a blogger, or know a
blogger or would like to meet a blogger, please join us.

Jeff Jarvis questions the Google teat: Last week I blogged why I think “publishers won’t go after Google” 
(I said, specifically, “(the publishers) one might expect to view
Google as a threat are growing so dependent on this revenue stream that
nothing, and I mean nothing, will stop them from being sucklings on
this teat.”).

Today, Jeff Jarvis has lots of good questions for publishers (and has some great links) on this topic.

Quote:

Dave Winer says: “(Google) didn’t put anything into RSS before they started to take out.”

(Background for my non-RSS-geek friends: Dave authored RSS - which is,
strictly for purposes of this explanation, the DVD format of “simple
XML-based syndication.” Alternatively (and pointedly), Google chose to
eschew RSS and support Atom, which is for this explanation, the Sony
Laserdisc format. Google still doesn’t offer such basic RSS-savvy
features as “news alerts” via RSS. (Topix.net does.)
Anyway, Dave’s point is an observation that Google’s first corporate
embrace of RSS  is to hack a way for Google ads to run in RSS
feeds — a rather “crass” way to enter the party, says Dave.)

Why is small business buying
technology?
I rarely (okay, never) blog about esoteric tax policy or small business issues
here (I have other venues to write continuously on those topics), but
an article
in the NY Times today has me scratching my head over what is
omitted.

However, I guess it should come as no surprise that a Times story
about small businesses increasing their technology spending has
no mention of the Bush tax policy (increased limits to $100,000 of
excellerated year-one depreciation on capital investments) that has
encouraged
the specific type of technology purchases covered in the
article.

(Note: This issue is of interest to me because it makes abundant sense and,
well, my support for this rather esoteric slice of tax policy was the
topic of that
discussion that led to my 15 minutes of fame.)

Direct Marketers discover RSS: And they think it’s a means to overcome the frustration of incessant e-mail bouncebacks
from ISPs. I totally agree. I think all e-mail marketers should stop
e-mailing me and, rather, merely offer an RSS feed of their spam. I
promise to subscribe, really. (Okay, I probably won’t. But, like Dave Winer said yesterday, I’ll likely subscribe to some of it.)

(via: Terry Heaton)

WWJarvisD? (also, lots of links related to Infinity’s KYOU ‘podcasting’ format announcement): I’m just imagining how it must be to be Jeff Jarvis right now.  The great Satan, Infinity (okay, I know it was the FCC who Jeff has the beef with), the conglomerate owned by Viacom that destroyed radio by making it boring and homogenous, is now doing  something stupefyingly creative: they are devoting a station’s format to programming created entirely by, OMG, podcasting citizens’ media types. (Update: See comments for Jeff’s take — he likes it, as I felt he would.)

Related links (updated):

What are the responses from bloggers?

Flashback: The rexblog podcasting awareness timeline:*

*Obviously, this is not the timeline
of podcasting technology and “notion” development — this is merely the
rexblog awareness tracker.

I do unconventional elements for a living: The NYT today has a story
about magazines selling event sponsorships and offering special
services and brand extensions and custom products as part of
advertising packages created for major clients.

There’s nothing
new in the examples — clever executions, perhaps, but nothing
conceptually unique — but the headline does have a new name for all of
these rather conventional ideas:  “Unconventional Elements.”

As someone who has been in the “unconventional elements” business for a couple of decades, I appreciate this new way I can describe my job.