Alan Gutierrez

Sig has released a lovely new version of Thingamy.

Sig has done a great job of showing the progress in Thingamy. He’s done a great job of comunicating that progress to a select group of bloggers. We’re all pretty interested.

In this new model of software development, a extensive feature set is not as important as a tailored feature set, one that reflects a democract process, where the users are the consistuents.

This is the open source model that users have come to expect. If a software application does not follow the open source model, the users will crack it open.

Have you seen what John T. Unger has done with TypePad Hacks?

Update: For my New Orleans readers, this makes no sense. Here is some context. I’m writing about a woman who markets computer software in San Francisco, who has been harping about something she calls the Pinko Marketing Manifesto. She uses Communist imagry and rhetoric to draw attention to her marketing efforts. When someone tries to explain that Communism really was bad, she says that they are ignorant and attributes their ignorance to American education. It would not be worth mentioning, except that she’s getting a lot of support from people in software industry.

This article stunned me.

The post is highlighted with an image of Castro, Stalin, and Mao at a party, along with Lenin and Marx. They are having a party. The text of the post has some rambling about Marxism and a quote from the Communist Manifesto.

Keven Marks in the comments of Marx is back…get used to it questions the decency.

Tara, citing the Communist Manifesto’s rhetoric is one thing, using several of the biggest mass murderers in the history of humanity as graphical elements is quite another.

I wonder why you left Hitler out of the graphic?

Tara then explains that.

A. I didn’t create the graphic, it’s from a very popular Threadless shirt. (which is beside the point)

And then with one of the most stunning own goals I’ve seen in a long time she follows up with.

B. Because Hitler wasn’t a socialist.

This, combined with the rambling lead in where she patronizes her overly sensitive American readers, offended me to no end. She explained that Canadians are more open minded and better educated, thus they are not threatened by Socialism.

History is interpreted through heavily influenced lenses, Kevin. Many countries believe that the US has been run by murderers as well. I don’t think there is a single leader in history that doesn’t have blood on their hands.

For Tara Hunt, Jimmy Carter and Joseph Stalin are six of one, a half dozen the other.

20 million. Start with the Holomodor.

Party Girl

Tara Hunt has every reason to be dismissive. These symbols she’s employing are evocative. They are building her brand.

She has no idea why they are so evocative. They are evocative do to a century of state sponsored murder and torture.

Her dismissal of the complaints of her readers is entirely self-serving.

Why Pinko? She asks herself. Say what she will. I say link bait.

False Diversity

To me it seemed that the marketing bloggers had echoed themselves into the realm of the untouchable. Evelyn Rodriguez linked and chimed in to support Tara in her Marx Is Back post. Doc Searls raved about this new manifesto. I stopped reading blogs for a while.

Do I really want to associate myself with these people?

For all her condemnations of oversenstive Americans, I’d be afraid to offend people that I communicate with in Eastern Europe or on the Pacific Rim.

Heaven help me in any attempt to work with the Vietnamese community in New Orleans, where they to find me on my blog, waving a hammer and sickle.

Communist rhetoric as salon chatter, symbols of the Stalinist state as eye candy, choosing heros among the great murderers of humanity as if they were nothing more than the bad boys of pro-Wrestling; these are exemplary of the sort of narcissism that Tara assigns to her American readers.

Is this a product of false diversity?

For too long, the blogosphere has been dominated by male, college educated, wealthy, white, San Franciscan, Californian, technical industry voices. Now that we have the opportunity to hear from a female, college educated, wealthy, white, San Franciscan, Californian, technical industry voice, we show deferrence to account for our past discrimination.

Rising to defend the appropriate of Soviet propaganda for the creation of a “Global Microbrand.”

The web marketing worldview is more insular than ever.

Fahrfergnugen

Again, I say link bait.

No Google Juice for Tara.

Alas, after a through fisking, now she’s recanted. She has responded to her market. (Ugh!)

Great. Let her off the hook.

Tara is back. I’ll get used to it.

But, did she get it? What about the rest of the bandwagon?

Her apology is timed with her employer’s product launch. What has worked is no longer working. It is obvious that she’s ridden Mao’s coattails as far as they will take her.

In the comments of Tara’s mia culpa, Mark Coller says

It’s the whole mental gatekeepers thing. You say ‘pinko’ or ‘commie’ marketing, and you activate the ‘I don’t like those things, so I’m not going to like what you say next’ mental gate.

True. Decimating a population tends to slam a gate shut for generations.

In high-school I drove a Fahrfergnugen era Volkwagen. I liked my Volkswagen. I’d had it not more than a week when I had a parking lot conversation that, with variations, I would find myself in repeatedly.

“The CRX is quick, but it still feels like a Honda. Hondas are driving appliances. Volkswagens were designed for the Autobahn.”

“Yeah, I wanted a Volkswagen, too, but my dad would never let any of us own one.”

“Why not?”

“He says it’s Hitler’s car. Hitler’s promise the the German people.”

“That was the Beetle.”

“He doesn’t care.”

That is the power of branding.

If You Read Nothing Else

By clicking on the following link, you cast your vote for Nick Varrecchio to participate in the final debates for Clerk of Court. Help a blogger out and click for Nick.

• Vote Nick Varrecchio for the WDSU Clerk of Court debate.

Please note that, once you click, your vote is cast. The click is the vote. There is nothing more to do, except to click again in 15 minutes.

An Important Debate

WDSU Channel 6 is going to have a debate between two candidates for Clerk of Criminal District Court.

This is an important office. This office is responsible for conducting election in Orleans Parish. This office manages criminal trial evidence.
My candidate is Nick Varrecchio. I’m fully behind Nick Varrecchio.

There are many candidates running, so how is WDSU going to choose two candidates?

Using an poll on it’s web site.

An Arbitrary Selection

That’s right, by using an entirely unscientific online web poll, WDSU will choose two candidates that will be given valuable television time, and priceless exclusivity. Worst of all, you can vote in the poll every five minutes or so.

Already, two of the candidates have 800 votes apiece. Are voting again and again? Why wouldn’t they?
The poll accepts GET requests, so you can skip the form and vote for Nick Varrecchio by clicking on the following link.

• Vote Nick Varrecchio for the WDSU Clerk of Court debate.

Please, click on that link to vote for Nick Varrecchio. When you click on the link, your vote is cast for Nick. It is such an arbitrary way to allot television time, you may as well help Nick out with a click. Learn more about Nick Varrechio at his campaign site.

In Praise of WDSU

WDSU is a great local station, that has done a great job keeping us informed during Katrina. Their web site is an excellent resource.

I understand why they want to narrow the debate.

A Real Poll Please

I do not, however, feel that this is a good way for them to choose two candidates, since it is so easily manipulated.

Anyone can vote, and vote multiple times. Someone could write a script to vote every five minutes.

The outcome of this poll and the television time it bestows can change the contest. They really ought to use a scientific poll.

Alan Gutierrez

Mission Restatement

I’ve developed a mission statement for Think New Orleans. I’m going to restate the mission a number of times while I blog, so I can find something that is punchy.

Think New Orleans is a non-profit organization community effort whose mission is to help New Orleans communities share information in such a way as to maximize the reach through syndication and search indexing.

Or more simply…

Think New Orleans is all about getting New Orleans soaking wet with Google juice.

I have to find a million ways to say it. It has to be the same thing every time.

Syndicating New Orleans

We’re now working on turning the Think New Orleans blog into a group blog for community organization.

The organizers of the FQTH and L9 Homeowners, Jimmy Delery and Rep. Charmaine Marchand, have been working with me to organize their communiciation online, and movng foward, to create an online record of the decisions in meetings.

Christian Roselund has been digitally recording these meetings. Pending the delivery of a compact flash digital audio recorder, I’m going to fan out with and gather more audio.

The audio is an important service for those who have to choose between relevant meetings, or for those who have to miss meetings due to their busy post-Katrina lives.

Diaspora Volunteers

Learning to blog is not a precondition to community participation.
As I did in Ann Arbor, I’m going to maintain an e-mail list that will serve as a work queue. If a community organizer wants to share information, they can e-mail it, with attachments, to the work queue, and a volunteer from the NOLA bloggers can put the posting in place. The blogging volunteer is at liberty to punch it up with links to relevant articles.

This division is important. People in New Orleans are overwhelmed and simply don’t have time to learn new software.

They will never see the benefit of syndication, because it will be too long in coming.

It is far more important the community organizers and citizens communicate in the high-bandwidth, high-signal, low-noise medium of face to face conversation.

I’ve been invited by Phil Gerbyshak to going the 100 bloggers project. I’m going to use that platform to draw attention to Think New Orleans.

Think New Orleans is on a mission to remove barriers that prevent civic information from getting out into the real deal web.

Civic groups in New Orleans have a bad habit of using chain e-mail messages. When they do use the web, a lot of information is posted to forums that are frame based and cannot be indexed by Google, or on static web sites where information is moved or deleted.

There are only a handful of forums that have syndicated feeds.

How does Think New Orleans address this? By setting folks up with blogs, or by posting their information to the Think New Orleans group blog.

The Think New Orleans blog itself hosts digitially recorded audio of community meetings. It’s a way to extend the civic discussion and to maintain a record of what’s been discussed.

In any medium, I’ll be banging on about this.

Got off the phone with Vince Keenan of Publius. We argued. That’s what we tend to do. Vince is socratic. It drives me nuts.

After a couple hours of mayhem, I sum up the Think New Orleans mission.

The mission of Think New Orleans is to bridge the social networks New Orleans with the syndicated social networks of the contemporary web, by creating an incentive for New Orleanians to post to syndicated and indexed forums that can better disseminate their information through web applications that search and categorize syndicated content.

“I like ideas that have to crawl around for a little while, so they can toughen their bellies before they stand.” said Vince.

Hugh MacLeod on Business Porn

Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it’s about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.

How many times have you seen a reporter say, “Shirley Tibedeaux, you’ve lost your home and you now have no health insurance. How do you feel?”

[response]

“There you have it, Jim. Now back to you.”

The term disaster porn coined by my friend Christian Roselund to describe Katrina journalism.

Like Hugh’s concept, except that it appeals to us in a way that is perfectly purient.

Rather than helping victims or understanding the complexity, we’re invited to share their emotions, from the comfort of our homes, feel their pain, and having done our part stay tuned for the sports roundup.

Here are some photos of the Farrington Smith Gallery.

The approach to 832 Royal St.

Application of Farrington Smith Gallery logo on signage.

Separate signage, a logo resting on a bench in gallery.

A boquet of Farrington Smith Gallery business cards.

A full fuzzy photo set of Farrington Smith Gallery photographs is available at Flicker.