Alan Gutierrez

I’m at the chain coffee shop that inhabits the site of the old Rue de la Course on Magazine, the new Rue is across the street, smokey as ever. Chock full of the young and hip.
The city looks well. There is a lot of activity, a lot of construction. Magazine is crowded and busy. Magazine Uptown, It looks like any other day in New Orleans.

I am so happy to be in New Orleans.

Exhausted. My hostess gave me a tour of Lakeview. Empty. The waterlines are visible.

I’ll be staying in Mid-City. There people are gutting their homes, and there are debris pilled high on the curbs for removal by the city.

Uptown and the Quarter, business almost as usual.

Tonight I’ll be having a sushi dinner at Kyoto uptown, and either kicking about with the girls, or heading to Tip’s with the guys to see some band, I don’t yet know which.

Devil’s Night

We’ve lost a great deal of a great American city this year. So much of New Orleans architecture has been destroyed by the flood, and the subsequent dawdling on the part of authorities and industry. It is truly heartbreaking for someone, like myself, who owes so much to the City Of New Orleans.

There is a parallel in my life. It is a familiar to me as a citizen of Detroit. I’m not unfamiliar with vast swaths of empty, brown space, that was once a proud Victorian neighborhood. Among six square blocks of land will stand a single home, three stories, with turrets, gables, made of red brick and walnut. It stands alone as a model home, in an urban un-development.

This is the Detroit you lost.

Take a tour of Brush Park, the Lakeview of Detroit, at the Ruins of Detroit. Click on the Detour links. Some of the homes are updated for 2004, to show an occasional restoration, or more likely, further decay. There are also photos of homes on Trumbull Avenue and Ferry Street.

This was the result of Devil’s Night. The night before Halloween. People, not just children, would entertain themselves by lighting house fires, hundreds of them. You could take a room at the Mariott in the Renaissance Center and watch the city lights.

This practice began in the 70’s and reached it’s peak in the 80’s, and was finally curbed by Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer’s Angel’s Night program. Since then, people have been restoring these homes, but so many have been lost.

New Years Eve New Orleans

Devil’s Night was a Detroit tradition. Before the house fires of the 70’s, kids would ring doorbells and run, or cover trees in toilet paper. In Huntington Woods, my Detroit suburb, we’d set out with a cable remote control, and change other people channels through their bay windows.

In Detroit proper, however, it was an annual firebombing.

Irresponsible by luvnola via NOLA.com

If I were related to a firefighter,I’d be furious that anyone is thinking about setting fires in the N.O. area. Give it a break. That is one of the “traditions” (right up there with shooting guns in the air) that needs to be discontinued.

I do hope that the bonfires this season will include only the few Christmas trees that can be found. I’m hoping that the desire to preserve the New Year’s bonfire tradition will be tempered by the harsh realities of New Orleans. The city services are taxed. The city is still poorly watered and wired.

I’m pretty sure you all with show some discretion, right?

I do not want to lose another city that I love to tradition.

What Is Blogging’s R.O.I.?

In one of his recent bizcard comics Hugh MacLeod asked What’s Blogging’s R.O.I. ? and offered a succinct answer. I point Hugh’s success with English Cut and Stormhoek to illustrate the worth of blogging. Hugh’s concept of the global micro-brand is a powerful one.

I’d like to turn a couple local firms into global micro-brands, but these firms are already established. There marketing is in place, they are growing successfully. English Cut is a blogging venture.

Naked Conversations, Offline

Local business celebrity Zingerman’s already has loyal customers through naked conversations, but those take place on the phone through their excellent customer service, and in their charming store front. They are one of the fastest grown companies in the US. Cluetrain? Yeah, they’ve got a clue. Oodles of clues.

No blog, however.

The Layman’s Version

Hugh gave an excellent recap of his experience with Stormhoek, in which he says…

Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months.

Hmm… Sounds like someone is offering a measurable R.O.I. after all. Thanks for the nice article Hugh! I can’t want to show it to some local businesses.

What is blogging’s R.O.I.? It sounds like management mumbo-jumbo, but return on investment is a schmancy way of asking one of life’s pressing questions. Is it worth it?

Is Blogging Worth It?

It’s a fair question. Conversations take time. Life is short.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Corporate Blogging, Social Networking

A Think New Orleans announcement.

Tags

Today I put a display of tags on the Think New Orleans home page. You can see for yourself. I’m going to being my project of tagging New Orleans related articles, and grouping them by community.

If you think you know how to tag, then please let me know. Open sign-up is not implemented, but interested parties are more than welcome.

http://thinknola.com/

Call For Feeds

Think New Orleans will now import RSS 2.0 feeds and their comments feeds. This is in addition to the native Atom 1.0 support.

If you know of any New Orleans related feeds, please tell me about them.

Create New Feeds

Please help me gather New Orleans related information by tagging articles.

del.icio.us - thinknola
Technorati - Think New Orleans or thinknola

If anyone has any feedback on how to use Flickr, I’d love to hear it. It’s news to me. I’d love a quick tutorial and strategy for creating a photo stream that I can monitor.

Technorati Tags: Atom, Development, RSS, Social Networking, Syndibase, Think New Orleans, thinknola, thinknola.com

The Kiloblog Concept

I’ve been discussing persona management with some fellow bloggers. I’m created a new blog as a place to let ideas develop. Where I can introspect. This blog is going to be called Alan’s Kiloblog.

http://kiloblog.com/

Why? Because it should be higher volume that Alan’s Blogometer.

Blogging Alone

When a person has an office and a home, the division is simple. When those lives a mashed together by a Google search or feed reader, the division between home and office is merely overhead with no return.

There are no boundaries in the blogosphere. There is no water cooler where I can tell you in confidence that I don’t think the new boss likes me. It will appear in the boss’s vanity feed at the next refresh. The best tact is to say nothing.

The upshot is that an online career is isolated and incomplete.

My blog becomes a shield. It corrupts itself into a place where I pontificate and crow. It’s all persona. Until the day that I realize how vapid it is, and I start dumping my sysadmin notes. My work. That’s all. Nothing to see here. Move along.

What Blogging Means To Me

I blog in the hopes of making connections with people in other cities.

In New Orleans the hope was that I could live in New Orleans, and still work on Java and XML, social networking, and what is know known as Web 2.0.

Then I came back to Ann Arbor, which has more contract work for me, and the support of family, but the goal was still the same. Release an open source offering. Be known for a niche project, with niche adoption. Work from my laptop, where ever it may lie, supporting the software. Save money. Buy a house in the Marigny/Bywater.

This is isn’t working, for lack of a water cooler. The bland professional persona of my blog, with occasional quips about the meme du jour, it does nothing for me. There is a personality here, I swear it.

Now That You Know I’m A Dog

I’ll be working on keeping it real. My first project is to return to my notes from when I left New Orleans for Ann Arbor. I had a lot of clarity then. In there was a notion of what I wanted to accomplish through blogging.

I’ll also post more photographs, of myself and of Ann Arbor.

Technorati Tags: Alan Gutierrez, blogging, Social Networking

Alan’s Blogometer Has Moved

The blogometer has moved. The URL for my blog is now.

http://blogometer.com/

This is the new URL for the web log of Alan Gutierrez. I’m going to find another place for the my boring technical notes, and use this as a place to record my real career experiences.

I registered the domain name blogometer.com in early 2004, but foolishly, I’ve not used it. Rather I followed more traditional tact of hiding behind some small corporate identity, fooling no one.

A Good Move?

The Googlenym Alan Blogometer puts me at the top of the list. The ever fledgling Engine Room gave me no ranking at all. Worse it brought up a bunch of stuff that looked like a small software concern, just not mine. When Debbie Weil asked my affiliation, it made me realize that the one I had made me look clueless as a blogger.

These days, however, people are moving away from catch phrases for URLs, and toward long winded, search optimized domain names like, marketingheadhunter.com. Perhaps, it’s not the best move, but

I’m not sure I have a succinct definition of my career at this point, so I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Update Your Feed Readers

Back to the task at hand. Please update your feed readers. My new RSS feed is.

http://blogometer.com/feed/

Hope you enjoy Alan’s Blogometer. I’ll be writing more about blogging, myself, Ann Arbor and New Orleans. It will be a lot more personable

Technorati Tags: Alan Gutierrez, blogging, Social Networking