Blogger meet-up, more stuff: Another thing about last night’s Nashville blogger meet-upt: Lots, and I mean lots, of new faces. For example, I met Randy Elrod and Mark Lee. Randy said Mark is in a popular contemporary Christian group called Third Day. When I was tracking down the link for this post, my total lack of knowledge of contemporary Christian music became more apparent when I saw how many records they’ve sold and Grammys they’ve won. (Photo: Mike Sechrist, Mark, Randy.) From the “not a contemporary Christian artist” category, I met someone who said I’d linked to his blog a couple of times and I was drawing a total blank. Then he said, “Sarcastro and I said, “Ohhhh.” Maybe because she’s actually paid to blog, Brittney has taken the time to put together a great roundup of the evening. Also, she has some great photos in other posts.

Technorati Tags: nashville

Brand Rex update: (What Murfreesboro blogger Rex L. Camino said) “I finally got to apologize to Rex Hammock for the use of the name “Rex,” but he didn’t seem to mind. However, we began discussions about a class action lawsuit against Rex Noseworthy of the Nashville City Paper.” (Photo: Rex & Rex.)

Technorati Tags: brandrex

Techmeme and conversational clusters: I’m a big fan of Techmeme and its creator Gabe Rivera. I think what he’s doing is a big deal. I am glad that someone as smart as Danny Sullivan also likes Techmeme so he could construct an observation and question that I share — but can’t quite put into words. There are times when a topic is of interest only to a tightly focused group of bloggers — and because those bloggers are obsessively linking to one another, the coverage of and conversation surrounding that topic crowds out anything else. Is that a bug — or is that a feature?

Here’s Danny’s observation: (excerpt) “I love Techmeme, absolutely adore it. But this entire Rocketboom thing illustrates a weakness, how a big story can crowd everything out.”

Here is Gabe Rivera’s response: (excerpt) “So is the behavior he describes by design? Or a “bug” as one emailer put it? That’s easy to answer: it’s working as designed. But I’m still trying to decide if the design needs refinement to change this behavior. Because there are pros and cons to what Danny has observed.”

Update: Nick Bradbury has a solution suggestion: “One option (which is admittedly easier on the client side than the server side) is to simply enable the user to hide a specific topic. I like this idea because users are way smarter than their software when it comes to figuring out what they like.”

Technorati Tags: techmeme