Welcome Jim Samples to Knoxville!

Most of this town won't have a clue who Jim is, but I've been an admirer for a while. He's the former chief of Cartoon Network who resigned *cough* after Boston lost its sense of humor and went kookoockachoo over those Adult Swim neon signs were strapped to poles in public view.

Well it looks like HGTV snagged the brilliant man who had the brains to OK shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Everyone who worked at CN (owned by Time-Warner, the same folks who pay my checks via AOL/Weblogs, where I work) said nothing but good things about Jim, and frankly I'm giddy that he'll be setting down roots in our squalid little burg.

Of course, we're not squalid. HGTV and Scripps in general is making some pretty good moves lately. While I doubt their Pickle video service will fly, I do know they've snagged other top talent from the likes of Yahoo, and while I may poke fun at the resilience of their News-Sentinel blogging efforts, the fact is they make a tasty meal of info EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Naturally, I do the same thing, and I do it a a lot cheaper, but we won't get into that now.

Welcome to Knoxville Jim, please don't be offended if I actually ask for your autograph. It's the closest to Frylock I'll ever get.

It's like I'm a psychic or something

I finally get around to reading the Sunday paper this evening, and what do I see? Well the paper has gone and made themselves a blog network. Good on ya! Granted, trying to join resulted in a 404 error, and my blog wasn't included (no shocker there), oh and bloggers won't really be able to monetize their blogs within the page, but hey, it's a start, right?

Anything that gets the blog blog flowing is a good thing. It doesn't necessarily change the fact that, overall, we are still a pretty technologically backwards town. In a moment of true funny I scroll down and see someone blogging about killing the battery on their Wall Street Powerbook. That's the Powerbook from 1998 y'all.

So I dunno, maybe it has been tricked out by MCE Tech and is a screamer with dual DVD-burners. Maybe Blognetwork.Knoxnews.com (catchy, huh?) will be a rocket ride of local success. And maybe, just maybe, Knoxville will learn what it really means to blog and the ethos of the blogosphere. Considering it took Knoxnews a few years to drop the whole "we don't need your stinking Google referrals" and remove the mandatory log-in, we've got an uphill battle on our hands.

UPDATE: As Jack points out in the comments, this blog HAS been added. In my efforts to build an SEO-friendly site, I named my blog "The Knoxville Blog" which is pretty generic when viewed against a number of other "Knoxville" blogs. So I couldn't find it, and complained, and that's my bad. Sorry folks.