You always leave conferences like BlogNashville with a renewed sense of purpose and new friends. It was great to meet a number of people that write the blogs that you regularly read and meet some new folks that you will start reading.

When I arrived at the hotel late on Friday night there was a group in the lobby area that included Dave Winer, Rebecca McKinnon, Mark Glaser, Hossein derakhshan, Staci Kramer, Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica. I sat with them for a little bit and just listened to the conversation. It came up that I was the one that wrote the "Blog Movie" post. Staci thought that she should be played by Debra Winger and Dave Winer requested Sean Connery.

The first person I talked to in depth was Henry Copeland of Blog Ads. He and I shared a ride with some other folks over to Belmont University on Saturday morning. Henry was presenting the session on "Making Money" but I had already decided to attend the "Committing Journalism" session by Staci Kramer.

Glenn Reynolds opened the conference with a few remarks, and we were off. First session for me was Staci's. The highlight of the session and the day for that matter was John J. Hooker. For those who live in Tennessee this man is a legend. Staci told me briefly about him and she was very happy to have him in her session.

I need to give credit to Mr. Hooker. He stood up and said that he didn't know that much about blogs but that's why he was here today, to learn. He said:

The blogosphere is the most important thing to happen in country in history, specifically for the preservation of democracy. It is a key part of the constitution and the first amendment. Journalism is the ultimate tool to protect ourselves from the government.

Staci's session was great with valuable input from the audience. Next up was Dan Gillmor's session which I was also looking forward to. In the end though, I was disapointed by Dan's session. Dan did very little talking, he said he was there to lead the discussion and learn. I was expecting to have more input from Dan. He was even asked what his plans were and he said he couldn't answer that. Dan had his Powerbook plugged in to the LCD projector but I don't think ever referred to it. Plus there were too many people in the session for it to be a true discussion.

At the end of Dave's talk I met Mark Dunn of BusinessWire. He said he has been a long-time reader of my blog, that was very flattering. He talked about the work he has been doing to educate journalists about blogs and RSS. It sounded familiar to me since I had that same conversation with Georga Vazquez of PRNewswire on Thursday night.

I spent lunch with Davie Greene of BaySense.com. We talked about a project he was trying to set up for collecting water sample data from all over the Chesapeake Bay region. His initial thoughts were to utilize a wiki and allow a number of people to provide/edit content. While a wiki would allow for easy editing of content my concerns were linking all the content in a usable fashion, and how that solution would scale. He wanted to stay open source so I told him that Wordpress would be a good solution.

The afternoon sessions were great as well. Sitting next to me in the podcasting session was Christopher Rogers of New Shoes Media. Chris had come to the conference to learn first-hand about blogs. I think it was a real eye-opener for him. (Podcast Session Notes)

The final session of the day was Dave Winer's "A Respectful Disagreement". This will probably be the session that is talked about by many for a while. Glenn Reynolds sat in for a while and left once Dave sat down. It was interesting to see how many of the local Tennessee bloggers constantly tried to kiss-up to Glenn Reynolds.

During Dave's 'intervention' it was great to see the honorable Mr. Hooker provide his input. His one closing line summed up most of the session.

You can not call a Son of a Bitch a Son of a Bitch without calling a man a Son of a Bitch.

Right after the last sessions I spent some time talking to Tom Biro of Media Drop and Ad Jab. We chatted about Super Bowl live-blogging and the tension in Dave's session to name a few things.

I hitched a ride back to the hotel with Mark.

There were to be structured dinner parties on Saturday night. Each of the session leaders would host a dinner at a local restaurant and 'continue' the discussion that had started in their session during the day. I decided not to go to the Dave Winer dinner and went with Staci Kramer and her partner Ed Kohn to Tayst.

We were joined by two other people, Kevin Howarth of TechLinks and Jeffrey Brown of AllHeadlineNews. We were supposed to have 12-14 people at our dinner, but there were five of us. We felt awful that BlogNashvile had reserved two large tables to accommodate the 14 folks that were supposed to show up. Tayst could probably seat around 100 people total so having one table sit empty all night was not the best thing for business.

Tayst was very gracious. The food and service was excellent. Portions were small if you compared them with the standard plate-load you get at a chain, i.e. Outback, Olive Garden, etc. but I thought they were just right. Staci had a wine flight, so at one point she had three glasses of wine in front of her. Need to get that picture from Jeffrey.

We didn't talk too much about the 'journalism' subject, we just talked about a variety of subjects. It was a great dinner. In the end the small turnout was great because it allowed you to talk more as a group. Having 12 there would have been difficult to communicate effectively. We discussed interesting restaurants that are small and unique. I told Staci about Peebles Barbeque in Auburndale, Fl. Her parents love BBQ so she got directions from Orlando to Peebles.

Kevin and I talked about meeting next time I was in Atlanta. Staci told me to look up her brother who runs GASports.com.

After returning from Tayst we ran into J.D. Lasica, he said that their dinner was also not very well-attended. Only 3 showed up. Their restaurant was not so accommodating as Tayst. They charged them for the full party of 20. Ouch. Overall many of the dinners had attendees that ditched their RSVP's. Not very professional, and it makes the BlogNashville event look poor in the eye of local restaraunteurs.

Sunday was a travel day. I did see Staci and Ed first thing in the morning before heading to the airport. Great people.

I had a great time in Nashville and can't wait till my next blog conference.

A few other observations:

It was fun looking at the mixture of hardware at the conference. Far fewer PowerBooks than other blog conferences I have seen. Dave Winer has a very small Sony VAIO, Staci Kramer has an X Series IBM Thinkpad, Dan Gillmor a 15" PowerBook. There were a few 17" PowerBooks in the audience, perhaps equal to the number of 15" units.

Tag: blognashville