SnapStream Blog (staging)

A little past 11pm here in Seattle and I’m at the airport waiting for my red-eye back to Houston. Today was another great day at Gnomedex. Briefly, the highlights. Julie Leung delivered a eloquent, personal and moving presentation about how blogs are creating community and improving lives. I would have to say that she was the most talented and passionate speaker at the whole conference.

Another interesting session was the one on “Tomorrow’s Media” with JD Lasica, Terry Heaton, and Cory Bergman. I found Terry’s presentation to be the most interesting. Terry has been doing consulting work with WKRN-TV in Nashville, working with them to help them solve the problem of decreased revenues, in spite of record high ratings and viewership. WKRN-TV has been incredibly dynamic in acting to solve this problem with the launch of Nashville411 (an online yellow pages / portal / search engine for Nashville), RSS feeds for WKRN news and sports headlines and a variety of blogs (Big Joe’s Blog, Charlie411, a blog from their local weather department, and Nashville is talking). While Terry admitted that the impact of these efforts haven’t been closely studied yet since they were only started a few months ago, it’s still impressive to see a local broadcaster aggressively embracing the leading edge of media like this. Kudos to WKRN!

Finally, I wrapped up the day at dinner with the Wordpress users / developers and a bunch of other Gnomdexers. Dinner was great and I had a chance to hang out some with Matt, the founding developer of Wordpress, the open source software that powers this blog, and a fellow Houstonian. Houston’s lost him for now while he’s working in San Francisco for CNET, but I’m hoping that we’ll convince him to move back at some point. Houston needs more “Matts”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 12:40 am by Rakesh and is filed under General, Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.