The Savannah Business Report & Journal spammed me with their daily newsletter yesterday, which contained this little gem...

Ideas and IPs: Unconference Proves Real Success

By Burton Sauls
Special to the TBR

...

One organizer, Burton Sauls, said that the expert leaders in specific sessions are considered "conversation starters" rather than presenters. "No trade show sales pitches, no PowerPoint's allowed," said Sauls, of the 10 one-hour conversations. "We had two sessions created on the spot as a result of interest in drilling down further on "How to Start a Blog for Business" and "Social Media Tools. We were ready and had extra rooms available for the impromptu sessions."

...

Conversations were led by local experts on such diverse topics as "Podcasting and New Media" by Phil Sellers of http://www.citytrex.com

...

[Link to article]

Advice to businesses or individuals promoting themselves, their products, their clients products: Don't say you won't do or allow something (like a product pitch) ... then turn around and do that very thing a couple paragraphs later.

Advice to media establishments trying to figure out how to participate in the world of blogs and the 24 hour news cycle: You still have to use editors. Printing press releases, especially where the author quotes himself and promotes a service he's associated with without disclosing it doesn't come across as good journalism.

That's right, I'm married to "the woman behind one of Savannah's most popular blogs."

The teevee done tole' me so.

As if I wasn't busy enough, I attended a meeting Friday with folks from The Creative Coast, Savannah Morning News, and a couple of other folks... and in a moment of weakness offered to host the site for this year's BlogSavannah (un)conference... which turned into hosting BlogSavannah.com itself, as Drew can't do it this year.

When I got back to work and told Randy about this, he threatened to smack me for being so altruistic. Nothing good ever comes of that right?

Well, I figured it was the least I could do to help out, and it was braindead simple to move the database and files over to my server, and get Wordpress up and running.

If I had more time, I'd port the thing to Drupal, but with the unconference tentatively scheduled for January 25th, there ain't no time. Now I just need to grok WP enough to get a couple things done, like a registration page.