Gavin Baker

Over the weekend I had pleasure of speaking at the East Tennessee Preservation conference in historic Rugby, TN.  I’ve posted a recap of panel on using social media for historic and preservation tourism with slides and video over on the New Streak, where I blog for Moxley Carmichael.  Check it out.

Related articles

• Social media training specific to the tourism industry (drewsmarketingminute.com)
• Tourism meets social media at BlogWorld Expo (smallbizsurvival.com)
• Social media’s impact on tourism (news.bbc.co.uk)

Happy to be in the running for East Tennessee’s Best Tweeter with a couple others from the team at Moxley Carmichael, including Scott Bird and Cynthia Moxley.  (Cynthia’s also nominated for best blogger for The Blue Streak!)  Thanks for the nomination and your votes.

Please vote! Ends tonight Aug. 20!

Vote for Best Tweeter

Vote for Best Blogger

Silence is what I got when I went up to Look Rock to catch sunrise Saturday morning.  If your life is like mine, it is filled with all kinds of devices like mine that chirp, beep, and buzz.   It was glorious to step out of my car into the pre-dawn morning and hear absolutely nothing.  It was so glorious it was stunning – and with a short walk across Foothills Parkway the sweet smell of pines from the Smokies quickly overtook me mingled with the earthy smell of forest.

Best word to describe it: rejuvenating.

Smoky Mountain National Park view from Foothills Parkway

I was down in the ATL aka hot-lanta aka the dirty south early last week and got the chance to connect with they guys at Matchstic, which is a branding identity house. They’ve done some great work for some friends and they sure know how to throw down.

I was fortunate enough to get a quick tour of their house and meet the crew,  (Half of them are from Knoxville) as well as spend some time with one of the founders of Matchstic, Craig Johnson. We took about 45 minutes to share our projects, our goals and backgrounds. As we talked, it became evident that we seemed to share a lot of the same philosophy regarding brand strategy, creativity, business goals and how that final package should look.  It’s awesome to see someone like Craig and his team doing such excellent work and having a lot of fun in process.

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I saw that two guys here in Knoxville I’ve connected with via email and twitter in the past couple weeks, Patrick and Casey have launched a new project. It’s called Knox’d.

I’ll let Patrick’s description stand on it own.

Information seekers in Knoxville, TN have a new way to get the latest headlines and information from the best of the city’s Web sites. It’s called Knox’d, and it is my latest side-project I developed in partnership with soon-to-be fellow Scripps project manager Casey Peters.

Knox’d has one goal: to aggregate the latest news and information (including jobs, real estate and classified listings), in one location. It seeks to fill the technology gap between the folks that use RSS (me), and the folks that don’t.

The site uses a format very similar to one like Popurls, or Alltop.

Eitherway, it’s very cool to have our own local feed aggregator and I’m fortunate they’ve chosen to include my blog in the listing (thanks guys).

Check it out!