Bill:
I thought Mike Cutler of NewsChannel 5 was on the panel. I should know. I'm Mike Cutler !!
Hey, I just filled in when Channel 2, sponsor of BlogNashville, chose not to be on the panel.
I'm sure it was an oversight on your part and not related to Channel 2 sponsoring a part of your blog. Hey, I'm just kidding with you.
It was nice to meet everyone and learn more about blogging.
Mike

Funny -- I thought bloggers Officially Don't Care about the "mainstream media."

Yet you know you're getting a secret tingle from the fact that your name was in a real news story propogated by the real information machine. A lot better than sitting stuck in some obscure corner of the Web, eh?

I just saw the fine print about "comments may not post immediately." If my above post showed up twice, it's my bad.

Mike: Er, my bad. I'll correct it (in the post below). And I can take the kidding about WKRN's ad on the site. WKRN bought space, not influence - last week I blogged about a report on WKRN that had a key error in it. The WKRN reporter soon responded, double-checked, and corrected the error.

That's the kind of relationship I'm hoping develops between "citizen-journalist" bloggers and the mainstream media.

SP: Where did you get the idea that bloggers "don't care" about the mainstream media? That's silly. And the story was perfect in tone - we're here trying to help bloggers become better at doing journalists. That's not a bad thing, is it? And, by the way, the AP story is the result of my efforts as a PR rep for Belmont University, co-sponsor of BlogNashville. Had I not done PR work interacting with the media by sending press releases and so forth, the "real information machine" would not have "propogated" the story.

Do you think stories just grow spontaneously from the minds of the MSM? No, they get tips.

I want blogs to not be "obscure." And I look forward to the day that blogs are not the story, but the stories on blogs are the story.

We're in the early stages of adding interactive media and citizen-created media to the mainstream media landscape - just as broadcast augmented print.

This is only a test. Do not adjust your monitor.

This post is being submitted at precisely 5:50:02 p.m. Central Daylight Time, per the atomic clock operated by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Let us now calculate the gap between the submission of this post and its actual appearance at billhobbs.com. Let us also note the accompanying time stamp, which on other posts seems to reflect neither the submission time or the appearance time.

Many of us remain curious about the notorious lag that is involved with comment posting at billhobbs.com, a lag that in the speedy world of 2005 has spawned ample chagrin. The Movable Type comments system here appears to be directly integrated into the site -- i.e., it is not provided by a second-party source -- and thus seems to indicate an issue with the server on which billhobbs.com itself is hosted.

Note: It is widely understood that a comment here is subject to deletion if it is off-topic or includes foul language or personal attack. I would assert that this comment does not meet those deletion criteria:

-- It does not include foul language.
-- It does not include personal attack.
-- While it does not specifically address the BlogNashville event, it is nevertheless on topic because it addresses the nature of the comments themselves. The self-referential, reflective quality of this comment, in other words, means that it is inherently on topic.

It took almost six hours for me to post your comment. You want to know why or are you too busy trying to prove some stupid point?

Has it occured to you that I, as one of the organizers of BlogNashville, might have been just a tad busy today? Has it occured to you that I wasn't sitting at my PC all day, just waiting for your brilliance bloviation to appear on my comments list? Has it occured to you that, after spending an incredible amount of time over the last several days on prep for BlogNashville and then on the event itself, I might be: A) tired, and B) preferring after the event to spend time with my family rather than logging on to see if you had posted a comment?

And finally, has it occured to you that I own my blog, and you have no special right to have your comments posted here, nor to speedy comment approval?

Apparently not.

I delay postings of comments until screen them for spam. I don't want spam on my blog. I also don't want to be shackled to my PC 24/7 just so you can have your verbal barf published for free on server space I pay for.

When I have an important post drawing a lot of comments - dozens - such as my posting a few weeks ago re the Schiavo case, I do keep my laptop logged on to my blog site and I check the comments log every few minutes and approve them just as rapidly.

But not posts like this one, little more than a newsbrief unlikely to spark much commentary and discussion.

There is, of course, a few possible solutions to all this. If enough people like you think speedy commenting on BillHobbs.com is essential, you all should start dropping $10 in the tip jar every week and if it adds up to serious money, I'll make sure to log in and check the comments once every half hour.

Or I can install a different spam-screener. Perhaps some form of commenter-registration. And then not grant you registration, period. That way you would never have to wait to find your Pulitzer-worthy prose drivel posted to my website.

For the record: It is now 11:46 p.m. CDT. The above post just appeared.

There was, in other words, a gap of nearly six hours between the submission of the post and its appearance on the page.

I'm sorry, Bill -- I didn't realize you manually screen and post incoming comments. That's quite an effort, I imagine, and I wish I knew of some better automatic filter to suggest for you. But nothing beats one's own eye, I suppose.

As for this being a simple newsbrief unlikely to garner comment, note that it was the target of an Instapundit link.

Best,
MMU

Hi Bill,

We didn't "officially" meet at the conference, but I wanted to:

a) thank you for all that you did to pull off such a great Blogging conference; and

b) let you know that I've posted some photos that you're in and included a link to your post about BlogNashville in the news here:

http://thefuntimesguide.com/movabletype/archives/2005/05/blognashville.html