Guest blogging: I’m going to be doing some business-to-business media guest-blogging on a new blog launched last week by the trade association, American Business Media, called MediaPace. Apparently, some think the blog was “haphazardly launched.” The one thing I know for certain about blogging is this: There’s no other way to launch one, but the haphazard way. (But I digress.)

Anyway, I hope my participation can help get the focus off whether or not the blog sucks, and onto something more productive.

What Staci said: (By, in essence, outsourcing DVD rentals to Netflix) “Wal-Mart is…acknowledging tacitly that a smaller, targeted company can do the job better — and, by doing so, may make more money for Wal-Mart.” (PaidContent.org)

Not chicken feed: Magazines.com CEO Jay Clarke told a Nashville Technology Council roundtable recently that his firm is probably Google’s largest ad client in Tennessee, given his firm spent $1.5 million with Google for key-word ads last year. As I’ve noted before, Magazines.com also has a company blog about magazines.

(via Milt Capps, the best Nashville blogger who doesn’t blog.)

More fan-blogging: If you work for a giant business-to-business media company trying to figure out this whole blogging thing and you want to see an example of a giant-media-owned blog that “gets it,” go to “Blogspotting” one of the blogs from BusinessWeek.

Here’s why I think Stephen Baker and Heather Green are so good: They write with curiosity — even awe — rather than with faux authority. They understand the blogging medium (at least, what it is today), as in posting their interview notes and asking, “Did I miss something?” They point to competitors and even have fun doing so. They invite their readers to help them write stories.

Oh, and they break news.

Curiosity, transparency, creativity, conversation, fun. There are some shared values going on here.

(As I have discovered that readers of the rexblog want more references to American Idol, let me play Randy Jackson here and say, “Dog, you guys are down, man.” )

My weekly fan blogging of ‘The Nashville Nobody Knows’:  My favorite day of the week is quickly becoming whatever day Candace Corrigan posts her podcast, The Nashville Nobody Knows.

Show notes:

To listen or download the MP3 of the show, this is the link.

(Note: the early version of the file that sync’d to my iTunes had a gap
in show — I’m sure that glitch is now, or soon will be, fixed.)

Let me make this simple: This is nuts! MediaPost is reporting that MRI has announced plans to begin testing a technology that will embed a chip onto a magazine page so that “readers could be stationed in retail outlets that sell magazines, or to a panel of magazine readers to measure when, where and for how long they are exposed to magazines and pages within magazines.”

As a magazine publisher, I can understand the desire to be able to do this. But as a reader of magazines, and, frankly as a resident of the United States and lover of the civil liberties men and women have died to establish and protect, I want to say, simply, “Have you people lost your minds?”

Why merely print the chip on the magazine page? Why not tackle people standing in front of a newspaper stand, throw them to the ground, and inject the chip directly into their brains?

This may be “promising” technology for something, but the way it is being positioned as a “measurement” technology is hopelessly misguided and clueless.

What Jeff Jarvis said: “What a relief: No more stories about dorky Star Wars losers without lives waiting in line for a damned movie.” Now I’m looking forward to no more stories about the movie’s politics.

Update:
I’d like to distance myself from the notion that all Star War fans are
dorky losers (apparently a certain percentage of this weblog’s seven
readers don’t like to be called dorky losers). I think the dorky losers
are just the ones who camp out in lines.