Thursday, August 12, 2004

Hoggard and I had lunch at Undercurrent to plan the blog conference. We were done before the food arrived (and service there is good). We're looking at two sessions, highly participatory, one on campaign and political blogs anchored by Hoggard, Mat Gross, and Ruby Sinreich. The other an intro to tech and technique, anchored by me. But we are flexible as demand warrants. Hoggard can get coffee urns. I'll spring for cups and coffee. He can get us a big screen to plug into my laptop so we can build a blog in real-time, cruise interesting blogs, etc., as the mood strikes us. We agreed that I'd email all GSO City Council members and Guilford County Commissioners, which I just did. Hoggard will follow up by email after the N&R stories run this weekend. Then we were done, and Danielle brought the food. Which was very good, as usual. 1:51:55 PM    comment []

Just spoke with N&R reporter Matt Williams for his upcoming article on local political blogging. He's doing a lot of reporting, seems to get what's going on. Most useful thing I told him: call Mat Gross. 12:12:38 PM    comment []

An email I just sent to the Burr, Coble, and Jordan campaigns: There will be a conference on weblogs, with a focus on political campaign blogs, on Saturday August 28. Free, nonpartisan, focus on sharing information about this new medium. Please consider joining us. 11:02:14 AM    comment []

Hoggard raised the idea of finding sponsors for the August 28 weblog conference in GSO. Why? We have no expenses. I get the conference room for free, I'll bring doughnuts, and anyone who wants to blog can bogart off my wireless network for no charge... 8:52:41 AM    comment []

...At the cemetery, as the other pall-bearers and I lifted the casket out of the hearse, I asked a guy from the funeral home, "Anyone ever drop one of these?" His quick reply: "Oh yeah." 8:38:23 AM    comment []

I am the product of two lost tribes, both removed from the New York-centric narrative of many American Jews, with my father's people debarking at Richmond and never making it much further north, and my mother descended from a line of midwestern Jews. Although Greensboro has a long and rich Jewish tradition, the river town of St. Joseph had a synagogue a half-century earlier... Unlike many of their neighbors, my mother's family were not "Galveston Jews," that cohort of immigrants steered to a Texas port by Jacob Schiff...they came to St. Joe and its environs to farm, keep shops, and work in its once-thriving stockyard business. They stayed for a century, and now almost all of their descendants are somewhere else...The Jewish population of St. Joe, along with the city itself, is dwindling. It was a short, sweet funeral for my grandmother yesterday. She would have been proud of her daughters, who both spoke well. My niece and I walked up together to put a rose on her casket and say goodbye. 8:37:47 AM    comment []

The N&R covers Ivan Cutler's new furniture industry weblog with a nice B-1 article...but doesn't post it online, which seems odd for an article about online media... Meanwhile, the paper of record keeps getting scooped by the BizJournal on what may turn out to be the biggest economic development story of year around these parts: the possible siting of a Dell computer manufacturing plant in the Triad. The latest from Justin Catanoso's BizJournal team is that Greensboro is in the running for the plant, along with long-rumored Winston-Salem. A Dell factory in GSO would be huge, one of the biggest things to happen to local industry since the cotton mills moved south at the end of the 19th century. While the FedEx hub will be a regional magnet for companies, Dell would likely bring a cluster of subcontractors to supply its needs...and the high tech manufacturing bona fides of the Triad would be established. 8:20:14 AM    comment []