In attendance: Martin Johnson, Roy, Corey, ae, WillR and Anton. WillR got us talking about commenting on blogs, and he mentioned, again, his efforts to create a tool for tracking the comments he leaves across the blogosphere. He wants to know when someone responds to one of his comments, whether immediately or months later. That led to discussion about conversations, and the various ways bloggers use their comments feature: choosing only certain blog posts to get comments, limiting comments to a certain time period, displaying recent comments on the blog home page and other ways. Somehow, WillR and I got into a mini debate about expression versus dialogue — me arguing that blogs developed first as a tool of personal expression and then as a means of online convesation, while WillR came at this from his role as only a commenter on blogs. When I suggested that his desire for blogs be labeled to make it easier to follow more and more of them was akin to stereotyping, he thought I called him a bigot. I apologized for the unintended slight, and once we got that cleared up, we agreed on the “problem of proliferation,” as he describes the challenge of keeping up with numerous prolific bloggers. I’m looking forward to the solution he comes up with. We talked briefly about social networking software. This could be the main topic of a future bloggers meetup. Maybe Paul Jones will join us, as I know he’s interested in such online communities. Martin asked about ways to get professors to be guest bloggers on SouthNow. ae and I agreed that the best way is to not even mention the word blog but to ask a professor to share his or her expertise and insight in three or four posts about a select and selective issue or topic. Roy talked about his hardware woes at Tabulas and how he just needs time (and I suspect, a little money) to upgrade his blogging service with its built-in authenticity features. What did I miss? Please help me fill in the holes.