More on the Nashville Blog Meetup

I saw some traffic from Bill Hobbs' site this morning and hoped that maybe he'd linked to my HfordJ, Libertarian party opportunities or Marsha Blackburn posts. Well, no. He linked instead to my bitterish post on the Nashville blog meetup Saturday morning at a local television station.

Bill's posts are here and here. Some more reports, with pictures, from Terry Heaton, Rex Hammock and DocB. Huge write-up from Mr. Roboto of the Thursday Night Fever crew. One more: Pink Kitty. All have links to more reports, of course.

Some further thoughts: Who was the red-headed blogger with the black glasses and the black top, sipping from her cup in one Terry Heaton photo? Yow. A hottie. (BTW, don't ID her if she's not cool with that. OK?)

I was dispirited, but after reading the reports I'm floored. Check this out:

I did have the please of speaking with Mike Sechrist who is the General Manager of WKRN and was pleasantly surprised at his vision in interactive journalism. He seems to have a great grasp of the power of blogs in that most bloggers are engaged in the news rather than being passive listeners through someone who reports it. Bloggers want to dig deeper into the story, find the details and not accept things for face value. Its a new era in journalism and Mike seems to be ahead of the curve in taking WKRN 2 through it by embracing them.

Like I said down below, WMC/5 has a station full of bloggers. WREG/3 has blogs now. WPTY/24's Cameron Harper is a self-confessed fan of blogs. The Commercial Appeal has known about the Memphis blogging scene for at least a year; they have their own blog stable. And yet no story, no acknowledgement, no nothing. I don't get it.

I'm sure this sounds jealous, but I'm really not. I'm amazed. It's not that I think Memphis bloggers ought to all hook up and be friends and hug each other, then plot corporate domination and massive profits. Our bashes have all been tremendous fun; I've enjoyed meeting and hanging out with everyone who has come. But I'm also impressed at how one meetup brought so many together for a morning and seems to be spawning all kinds of ancillary ideas. Good job, Nashville.