I don’t make it a habit to praise car dealerships, but this move by Darrell Waltrip’s company was both kind-hearted and savvy.

Waltrip said the general manager of his Franklin auto dealership, John Gallagher, alerted him to the [Tennessean] story and recommended the vehicle giveaway. “I thought that’s a no-brainer — let’s help this kid out,” Waltrip said after handing [Iraq war veteran Jay] Strobino the keys…

“There are so many fake sites,” he said. “You really have to be sure. We’re in the car business, and he got ripped off by someone pretending to be real.” Waltrip said he also was motivated by Strobino’s military service.

Strobino, who was injured in a firefight south of Baghdad in 2004, is a Silver Star medal recipient, the third highest-ranking military honor. When hearing the Honda dealership was going to give him a car Tuesday, Strobino, who described himself as being “broke,” said simply: “Are you serious?”

The cost of donating a nice used car to help a veteran in need was tiny compared with the substantial media exposure generated by a front-page story in the newspaper. This was a good deed and a smart decision to move fast and do the right thing. Well done.

I’m all for people continuing to keep an eye on Google since the Web dynamo has so much power, but I think Google Street View is an amazing resource. I’m happy that my house is on it, and I don’t even mind that my Jeep is clearly visible in my driveway (above).

I think individuals should be able to opt-out if they desire, though I think their homes should be moderately obscured rather than being removed altogether. I can understand wanting to have faces blurred, too. I sure wouldn’t like it if my license plate number were discernible in the photo above, for instance. I disagree with the notion, though, that Google Street View should be an opt-in service:

“If they are going to do that, it seems like there should be some sort of consent,” said Vanderbilt University sportscaster Kevin Ingram, who lives in Hermitage. He said he wasn’t particularly troubled that his own home was pictured, “but they should at least ask.”

It is incredible that technology now grants us the ability to see street corners across the country with a few clicks of a mouse. If residents had to opt-in, though, almost no one would, and it would take a lifetime to get all the approvals needed. Even worse, the few people who did opt in would be easy targets because they would be unusual and easy to find. What makes Street View acceptable, in my opinion, is strength in numbers: If everyone is in there, what does it matter if you are, too?

Commercial real-estate agents, at least those hawking office space in existing properties, can’t be excited to hear the news that the Signature Tower is rightsizing by eliminating half of its condos in favor of other tenants:

Developer Tony Giarratana plans to eliminate more than half of the condos in his proposed 70-story skyscraper, Signature Tower, in a bid to find financing for the project amid a weak real estate market. Giarratana said in an interview that he has decided to cut out 25 floors of condos and will replace them with another business — possibly offices or more hotel rooms — to keep the tower at its proposed height of more than 1,000 feet.

Given that there’s already an excess of vacant office space downtown, the addition of even more — and in a glamorous new building, no less — doesn’t bode well for anyone looking to fill current space. If the tower is built, will it come at the expense of other properties in town? Maybe not, since the economy may well have improved by the time tenants move into the tower (2011 at the earliest), but we’ll see.

Only time will tell if the City Paper’s Mark McGee is on the money about the Preds: “Now, buoyed by the new ownership group, a drastic change in the marketing plan, a new lease agreement and a fourth straight trip to the Stanley Cup playoffs, this is a team with a bright-looking future.”

I sure hope McGee is right, but it will be awhile before we know for sure. I’m encouraged by the fan response during the end of the regular season and the playoffs and the rising attendance numbers down the stretch. I’m relieved that the new ownership group appears to understand that now is not the time to rest on any laurels:

“Honestly, the number we talk about is not 14,000,” said David Freeman, head of the ownership group. “Our expectation is that we’re shooting in the 15,000 to 16,000 range. We have that much confidence in what this franchise has accomplished in a very short period of time and where we can go from here.”

It remains to be seen whether Nashville will maintain the firm grip it now has on its second chance with the NHL. I want this team to be in town for the long haul and for a long, long time, and I hope there are many people locally who agree … and are willing to continue buying tickets to prove it. I’m pleased that last year’s crisis is in the rearview mirror, and I’m hoping the rekindled fan support can survive–and thrive–when it’s no longer an emergency situation.  Go Preds!!

Lexington, Ky., is in the throes of a fight over downtown property that will sound familiar to anyone in Nashville who’s been keeping up with the planned Westin Hotel development on Broadway:

With an announcement of a high-rise downtown hotel development expected as early as this week, two groups are keeping a close eye on a strip of historic buildings on the block where the building will rise. One is interested in the buildings because of their architectural and historic significance (some of the buildings date to the 1820s). The other says the block houses one of the city’s few pockets of night life, which they contend will suffer if the buildings go down.

Both groups say they are not opposed to new development on the block, but they want to see it incorporate the historic buildings and support the existing entertainment district.

Supporters of the mixed-use development — shown as a 40-story tower in preliminary plans — say it will bring new life to the heart of downtown, and that it isn’t economically feasible to keep the old buildings on the block.

Look closely: It seemed appropriate irony to me that there is a Rite-Aid in the foreground of the digitally enhanced photo of the Lexington hotel.

It may be too late, but the Lexington developers might turn to The Tennessean’s Chas Sisk for thoughts on how to proceed. I thought it was strange that Sisk mentioned Free-Will Baptist Bible College in his column today but not Charlotte Avenue Church of Christ or the Westin, two recent and high-profile instances of square-offs between developers and preservationists.

This is absolutely the right message coming from David Freeman and the other members of the Preds’ new ownership group:

“There’s definitely work to be done, but the doors are open,” Freeman said. “In (10 weeks), we’re thrilled. The reception has been very good. We’re very appreciative that people care about Nashville and what we’re trying to do. We have a great ability to walk in with businesses and say, ‘Is there something that makes sense for both of us here?’ …

All during the summer we had heard whispers — that were more like shouts in our ear — about a suggested change in approach,” Freeman said. “We certainly not only listened to those whispers but agreed with them. The basic mindset or approach we’re taking is it’s not their responsibility to buy something. It’s our responsibility to give them a great product that they want to buy. There’s no sense of entitlement.” …

“The easy part of selling for us is that we feel like we’ve got a great product. The entertainment value down here is fabulous. We’re not a charity case. We bring value to our sponsors, to our advertisers, to the people who use us with their human resources department.”

Thank you, David, for all you and your group have done during the past nine months to save this franchise. Thanks also to the fans and the companies who choose to support the Preds, including Taco Bell, AmSurg, HCA and Community Health Systems.

I never had behind-the-scenes experience with the former ownership group, and I have plenty of thanks for Craig Leipold and all he did to bring hockey to Nashville. That said, it’s interesting to me to hear this complaint emerge about a sense of entitlement from the Preds business side.

It’s long been a criticism of the Titans that the franchise has operated with a similar sense of entitlement, a sense of “you need us more than we need you,” but here’s the unfortunate difference in these scenarios: An NFL team, especially in a football-crazed community, can afford to think like that, but an NHL team, outside of Ontario and Quebec, cannot.

I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion today at the Center for Nonprofit Management. The topic, “Meet the Media,” featured local reporters and editors along with yours truly as a local blogger (and admitted non-journalist). I think those in attendance enjoyed the conversation and gained some knowledge along the way, and I certainly hope they did. Here are some things I learned:

• Panel moderator and CNM President Lewis Lavine once worked on the “dark side,” public relations, as I have for the past decade.
• Editor Dave Raiford and the Nashville Business Journal are working on a new design for their print edition that will launch soon. A Web redesign will follow later this year. I’m looking forward to seeing both.
• City Paper Editor Clint Brewer has a three-week old baby at home, and he didn’t sleep so well last night. Never one to spare an opinion, he still had plenty of good and candid insight for the crowd despite his lack of rest.
• WPLN-FM reporter Christine Buttorff, and the rest of the panel for that matter, are out there reading local blogs. They dig Mike and Sean, among others, and said so by name. (I do, too.)
• By the way, check out WPLN’s pretty new Web site. I’ve apparently been listening more than visiting lately and missed this upgrade.
• Tennessean reporter Michael Cass and I are both comfortable arriving casually late (five minutes in this case), more so when we each realize we’re not the only ones who aren’t on time. I think Cass has been one of the best locally at juggling the competing duties of reporting and blogging that so many journalists now have on their plates.
• Something I haven’t learned: Is there a shortcut or subdomain for Metro Dispatch and other Tennessean blogs? The URL I found is one of the longer functional addresses I’ve come across in ages, but at least it works.
• CNM is preparing to launch its own blog later this month. Stay tuned.

There was a lot more useful information shared today, but it’s tough to take notes when you’re participating in a public discussion. (People keep expecting you to say things, you know.) If you work for a nonprofit but missed today’s session, check out CNM’s full-day new media workshop coming up in March.

Clarification: The NBJ will be launching a new version of its print edition soon and a Web redesign later in the year. I’ve corrected that in the original post above, too.

Did you know that the Nashville Public Library maintains a searchable database of articles published in The Tennessean? It’s free if you are a Davidson County resident with a library card, and it’s constantly being updated. The content is usually current within a few days of the present, so January 2008 editions are already online. The library began archiving the paper electronically in 1999, so you can search nearly 10 years of articles.

Here’s another little secret: The Tennessean doesn’t move its articles once they age past its seven-day free archive period. It only stops indexing them on its main pages because they are no longer current stories. They’ll show up as articles you have to pay for in a keyword search on the paper’s Web site, but Google and/or Google News can usually find the direct link to the stories for free.

As technology evolves and presents us with more and more ways to connect than ever before, all of us — including politicians and civic leaders — are learning to adjust. With each new innovation, it seems that transparency and openness become even more important and more expected from anyone in the public eye.

That transparency, I think, has a price, and while it’s not cheap, it’s well worth the cost. We as a society are going to have to acknowledge that our leaders aren’t much different from the rest of us. We all make mistakes and say (and write) stupid things, and it isn’t always going to be easy to sweep those blunders under the rug.

Embracing the Web is a way for leaders to communicate directly with constituents and have more control over their public image, but it also makes it easier for their words to be used against them, observers say.

“The potential downside is that once you put something on a blog, it’s out there for anybody, and maybe for all time,” said Mark Byrnes, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. “Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the place where if you’re a public person, anything you’ve ever said or done can be used against you.”

Is this really a bad thing? Shouldn’t you be accountable for your words and your actions, regardless of how much time has passed? As technology and media advancements lift public figures to a higher standard, the price of that standard may be a dose of reality: We’re all human. We all make mistakes, and we all say things we regret. We all hold ignorant opinions and do dumb things, and hopefully along the way we learn from them.

I hope one casualty of this increasing transparency will be the common refusal by public figures to take responsibility for their mistakes. If we’re poised to witness more blunders and missteps than ever before, I hope those errors are followed with healthy doses of “mea culpa.”

The Preds are reporting via e-mail that only 600 tickets remain for tomorrow’s matchup with the Minnesota Wild (down from 1,600 reported in this morning’s Tennessean). That’s great news for a team that is averaging only 12,853 in paid attendance through 17 home games this season.

Hopefully the typical boost in attendance after football season–coupled with momentum from the new ownership group–will lead to significant increases in attendance the rest of the way.

As an aside, The Tennessean notes that the team’s current lease requires paid attendance of 14,000 per game and that a new lease is awaiting Metro Council and Nashville Sports Authority approval. How did the new lease agreement wind up in a strangely silent limbo the last several weeks?

The Tennessean’s story today on Comcast has generated dozens of hostile comments from readers unhappy with the cable and internet provider, including one by someone claiming to be an employee who is calling out local executives by their names and email addresses.

It isn’t especially surprising to me to see all of this angst, but it did make me wonder exactly why so many people loathe the local cable company. Here’s what I think drives this wrath:

• Limited options: Comcast has a functional monopoly as the county’s only cable provider. Consumers are rarely satisfied with large corporations that don’t have to worry about losing market share.
• Poor customer service: Comcast isn’t alone in this, but it’s well documented in the comments and at comcastmustdie.com that this isn’t a strong suit for the company. Feeling ignored only breeds contempt.
• Pricing: Deceptive introductory offers and pricing plans intended to drive consumers to spend more money to get what they want don’t help. (Again, this isn’t limited to Comcast.)
• Corporate resentment: It’s easier to hate a large company that isn’t based in the local area. You can still hate your neighbor, but your neighbor has a face and a driveway next door. Lashing out against an anonymous conglomerate is much simpler to justify. (For what it’s worth, I like the people who live on both sides of my house, but none of them read this blog.)

What would it take for Comcast (or AT&T, for that matter) to please its customers and its shareholders? Is that a realistic goal?

Full disclosure: My employer serves AT&T as one of its clients, though I don’t do any work on their behalf. Many local residents, including several in The Tennessean’s comments section, feel the same way about AT&T that they do about Comcast, to be fair. My opinions are my own.

State Senator and former Lt. Gov. John Wilder, whose three decades at the helm of the State Senate ended dramatically in January, can’t be excited about this typo from opponents of plans to build a meeting hall at the Governor’s Mansion:

Surely the people energized on this issue could go on and on all day about the veracity of the claims made in the ad. But here’s one thing we know is wrong: The phone number listed for Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey.

The number listed there … is actually the phone number for former Lt. Gov. (now Sen.) John Wilder’s office. We just got a call from Wilder’s office to say they’re being flooded with phone calls from people who saw the ad.

The correct number for Ramsey’s office is [615] 741-4524.

Wilder lost his status as Speaker of the Senate (and Lt. Gov.) despite his strong desire to retain the title. This isn’t a pleasant reminder of that defeat, but it may be a relief to Wilder that he isn’t having to address the calls intended for current-Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. Whew.