Though dead these 11 years (as of Feb. 20, 2009), the Nashville Banner, Music City’s conservative afternoon daily, enjoys a resurrection of sorts at the “Nashville Banner RIP” Facebook page. With 56 members as of this posting, the site helps staffers keep up with colleagues and also to meet Bannerites from other eras.

Though deeply conservative in outlook, the Banner made history among major unsegregated Southern newspapers when, in 1950, it hired Robert Churchwell to cover the African-American community. I never knew him, but had heard of him and was sad to see he recently passed away.

Most of us have discovered life after the Banner, which served as a training ground for many aspiring, ambitious and scrappy young journalists, and as a career for quite a few who stayed on. You don’t have to look far around Nashville and Middle Tennessee to find Banner alumni in prestigious positions. Some still work at the Banner‘s erstwhile liberal, Democratic competitor, The Tennessean, though as newspapers writhe in the new communications era, more of them are moving on to other places.

I was at the Banner from July 1982 until late August 1987, moving from a night beat (which included covering Metro Council meetings sometimes and newly discovered corpses a lot more of the time), to the federal courthouse beat to a slot as an assistant editor on the city desk. We had three deadlines a day and most of us (except the night beat) rose in the dark and were on the phone to groggy public officials long before decent folk should be awake.

For a time I shared a desk with a chain-smoking writer who could have been in the Spanish Inquisition — he never let someone go without a comment. I met celebrities, though the person who most impressed me was Dr. Albert Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, who in his 70s came to a Rotary International convention here to kick off a world-wide effort against the paralyzing disease. Stars and politicians were easy to come by, but a man who had saved millions of lives?

I also wrote an article about the arrival in Nashville of the first Macintosh computers, whose descendants have served me well for more than 20 years. This was shortly after their introduction in 1984, and I thought at the time, “that’s cool, but who needs a home computer?”

Today, the question is, “who doesn’t?” and my Macs make possible the pleasure of communing with my old Banner buddies via Facebook (and playing the occasional game of Wordscraper or Lexulous with them).

I left the Banner a few years before its last edition, with its classic “End of Story” screamer headline.

I don’t know who owns the rights to the Nashville Banner name and eagle logo, but it might be fun to put the Banner back together again, online. But dear God, not to get up at 4 a.m. every day.

A recent article on Kiplinger.com says that the number of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled since 2005 — from 8 percent then to 35 percent now.

But as author Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet Project points out, using social networks online is still a phenomenon of the young: 75 percent of adults 18-24 use these networks, compared to just 7 percent of adults 65 and older.

The findings also show some other very interesting facts:

• Personal use of social networks is more common than professional use.
• The median age of a Facebook user is 26.
• Nine in 10 say they use social networks to keep in touch with friends.
• MySpace is still the preferred social networking site with 50 percent of adult users having a profile there.

Ahh, to be 26 again.

• Read the article in full.
• Read the report in full.

I was very sad to hear the news yesterday from New York that Condé Nast was shutting the doors of their home décor and shopping magazine Domino. I’ve been a loyal subscriber to the magazine and my mailbox is going to be very lonely without it each month. Luckily, I’ve saved copies from the last two years, so I will treasure those.

Earlier this week, we launched a new Hammock email newsletter. Each month we will bring you insight into the latest custom media, social media marketing and community-building trends. In this issue we hit on topics including partnering with an outside media company, setting social media goals for the year, and 2009 magazine and media predictions.
We hope you are already on our distribution list, but if you aren’t, be sure to signup here.

Here’s a book publishing news-note that is refreshingly appropriate.

A new book from the the O’Reilly “Missing Manual” series called “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” is today being published simultaneously in print and is being posted in the Help section of Wikipedia.

In other words, in addition to publishing a $30 version of the book in print, O’Reilly is open-sourcing a free version of the book’s contents in a way that can keep its contents up-to-date — indefinitely.

The drive to post “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” to Wikipedia was spearheaded by author John Broughton, a registered editor at Wikipedia since 2005 with more than 20,000 edits.

My observation: I have a print version of a similar book sitting on my desk — O’Reilly’s MediaWiki, by Daniel J. Barrett — and I can see how having this new book’s contents online will help promote book sales, rather than cannibalize them. A book that serves as a manual has a certain functionality in print that, despite the belief of many, is unique when working in an environment that is new and complex. My copy is dog-eared and sitting there, just where I want it when I’m trying to figure out a nuanced hack. It’s like another monitor, dedicated to some esoteric stuff.

Having a resource that is simultaneously online and in print adds to the functionality and productivity-enhancing roles of both.

Better still would be also having a video-enhanced version.

[Cross posted on Rex Hammock’s RexBlog.]

On Friday, I’ll be participating on a panel at an all-day workshop the Online News Association is hosting in Nashville at Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt. Registration for the all-day program ends today ($35 if you’re not a member of ONA).

The panel I’m on (at 3:45) has the auspicious title: “Bloggers & Journalism: A panel of traditional newsroom and independent bloggers talk about what journalists do right and wrong in blogging. Learn how to be a better blogger.”

On the panel with me are Christian Grantham, WKRN’s Nashvilleistalking.com; Michael Silence, Knoxville News Sentinel’s No Silence Here blog; and Tammi Marcoullier, editorial director of Publish2.

If you’re not doing the crossword puzzle with your morning coffee today, we have a little quiz for you.
Each month, we write a post about a simple grammar rule or two because we could all use a little refresher from time to time. Now, it’s time to test yourself on what you know (or think you know) about some of those rules. It’s easy. Simply pick the correct sentence from each of the five sets below. Answers and explanations are below, so no peeking!

“Are you here for the exclusive, online-only content? Right this way. Hey, by the way, how did you find out about us? Oh, the magazine directed you here? Wow, that’s great! It worked!”
30 minutes later: “Wow, you’re still here! You’re right, there is so much information on this site. Well, thanks for coming. Don’t be a stranger. Come back, we’ll have new content tomorrow!”
At least, that’s how I envision a conversation I’d have with a MyBusiness reader who I bumped into online.
With MyBusiness, the magazine we publish for the National Federation of Independent Business, the way we drive readers online is to offer them additional information about a topic that appeared in the magazine.

Any morning that starts with a delicious brunch at Old Ebbitt Grill, especially when it’s bedecked with lots of bunting and flags and patriotic people, has got to be a good one. Established in 1856, the restaurant was a hangout for Presidents Grant, Cleveland, Harding and Theodore Roosevelt and is still a fave with D.C. politicos. No celebrity sighting for me here, but just you wait.

Since the restaurant is just on 15th Street, steps from the White House, we took a short walk to join the throngs of people snapping photos right in front of the gates, then ventured down to 17th street on our way to the mall. Since the Daughters of the American Revolution‘s gorgeous Memorial Continental Hall is right along the way–1776 D Street, natch–my friends insisted on snapping a photo of me, fan that I am of the organization. Not two minutes after the photo–as we’re browsing all the vendors selling Obama hats, pins, shirts and all manner of photoshopped paraphernalia–a convoy of SUVs races by. I glance in one of the windows and see President H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush, then watch as the swift moving line of cars turns into the secured drive of the White House. I wondered if No. 41 was going to help No. 43 pack?

The rest of the day we spent wandering a few awe-inspiring (even in 18-degree windchill) monuments like the WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, catching the chilly little animals at the National Zoo, and enjoying some people-watching and yummy Indian food in the Adams Morgan area.

What’s hard to describe is the palpable feeling that we’re all together at this amazing party. A bunch of “shiny, happy people,” as someone today described. It’s normal to strike up conversations and laugh with perfect strangers. There’s spontaneous dancing and singing breaking out everywhere. People are willing to help each other navigate the stressful reality of a city bursting at the seams. (Tonight we were the last five passengers on a shuttle bus whose driver was going to turn us away … until the onboard passengers squeezed in and sat on laps so that we didn’t have to wait in the cold.)

It’s an early start tomorrow for this non-early bird, and I’ve got some planning to do before I brave tomorrow’s Inauguration Day crowd. It’s a good thing that Rex has done some of the heavy lifting for me here. Hope you stay cozy for the festivities–I’m going to be the dork in front of a JumboTron with hand warmers, 19 layers and hat hair.

P.S. Hope everyone has had a terrific MLK Jr. Day. There have been so many wonderful stories written about what this inauguration means to families across the nation, but I thought today’s Washington Post article about the Caldwell family’s civil rights journey was especially meaningful.

Our Jamie Roberts is “on the ground” at the Inauguration festivities and is blogging her impressions of the event. She and millions more are adding their individual voices — and photos and videos and maps — to the conversation of this historic event. In addition to listening to Jamie, here are some other ways to monitor the online conversation related to the inauguration of Barack Obama, 44th President on the United States.

The Official Inaugural Committee is using conversational media: The Presidential Inaugural Committee‘s website is covering all the events, officially, on their site and on YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

CNN.com:They are trying to integrate as much conversational and social media as possible using their “iReporters” and a Facebook app that will stream video and chat w/ your friends during the speech. One big experiment to check out is: “The Moment,” which will use Microsoft’s “Photosynth” to morph together into a single image the thousands, or tens of thousands, of photos from all different angles of the moment at which Obama in sworn in.

The ‘Tag’ for monitoring the Inauguration conversation: On all the social media sites, i.e., Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, etc., people who are creating content and talking about the inauguration are being encouraged to tag their content with inaug09. For example, on Twitter, you can go to Search.Twitter.com and search the tag, “inaug09” (with or without the “#”) and see a steady stream of “tweets” from around the world. (We’ve created the widget on the left that displays the most recent “tweets” displaying such a tag.)

Flickr: In addition to the inaug09 tag, there is an Inauguration 2009 Group that is filling up with photos taken by those attending the inauguration. (I’ve embedded above a widget that display recent photos posted to it.)

Mashups: There are lots of interesting Google maps user-created mashups. Here’s one that displays on a Google map the location of YouTube videos being posted. The person who created it also produced this drive-through of the Inauguration parade route using Google Earth (and some really bad music).

(For more ways to follow the inauguration online, visit RexBlog, where I’m keeping a running list of inauguration-related online activities that are making me go Wow!)