Alan Gutierrez

I’ve been in New Orleans long enough that blogging is only a wee bit of fun.

These days, it boils down to spending more time in front of the computer. Not good.

It’s too nice outside.

It’d be nice to get some information out there, though. I’m conviced that blogging is a good way to do it.

It once was the case that I’d blog to converse. That was a colder climate.

Here are conversations aplenty just over the courtyard walls. High-bandwidth conversations, with eye contact, hand waving, and table pouding. Pure entertainment.

Human contact spoils you for the keyboard and CRT.

Much of the online conversation now seems dreadfully dull and self-referential. It’s a lot of conversation about a handful of industries, namely, software, media, and marketing.

I make the case for blogging as publishing, but not for conversation.

It’s hard to explain the value of blogging if you show a person the echoing non-sense of the A-List. It’s self-referential, and mostly meaningless.

I don’t show my neighbors the blogs that feature incessant articles about gadgets, networks, or copyrights.

I don’t show my neighbors the national political blogs, with their angry open threads. The polar politics that so closely mirrors the cable news cycle is both dull and horrifying. These are the rantings that people expect when they think online diary.

Rather, I show my neighbors something that is civic and human.

I show them Ann Arbor.

I show and tell recent articles, from Ann Arbor bloggers, exemplary of their authors.

You’ll here me tell of such bloggers as
Ann Arbor Is Overrated a look askance at the city’s culture, Ypsi~Dixit who tells tales of public transportation, Arbor Update with it’s scrutiny of city development, Superpatron Vielmetti’s writing on his work with the Ann Arbor Public Library, Larry Kestenbaum vinettes about Washtenaw County officaldom, and my friend Dave who writes about beer.

These are civic bloggers, with civic agendas.

They have blogrolls that link to the blogging citizens of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Their blogrolls represent a network of friends and fellow citizens.

It is a challenge to get people in New Orleans to leave the anonymity of email, and move towards a more transparent way of organizing.

It is much easier to get folks to transition, when they see that the message does not travel that much futher.

Blogging is not broadcasting. Blogging is not journalism.

Blogging is not a about being naked, it’s about being transparent and inclusive.

Blogging is perfecly civic.

I’ve established a Subversion respository at http://blogometer.com/svn/tbt for the Thunderbird Tagging project lead by Paul Alexandrow and Frederic Wenzel. The Thunderbird Tagging project has been discussed here in the Blogometer and at Frederic’s blog. I use Subversion on Windows, OS X and Linux, and can field and client questions. If Paul has a latest version of Tag the Bird, I can check that in for him, and post some notes on checkout.

People in New Orleans give me their email address and then tell me not to use it. I don’t check my email. Call me. Sending them email is useless. It is not how they operate. It is how I operate. Therefore, I am useless. Must learn to use the phone.

Recently esetablished blog for Southwest Airlines. I trust that Southwest will get it right.

Over the next few days, you are going to watch me purge my drafts. Coffee addled commentaries about blogging bruhahas of months past.

I’m enjoying Brian’s Latest Comments, which I’ve installed at Blogometer. I will install it on all my blogs now. Rather than showing a list of recent comments, it groups the comments by the blog entry, and even colors them based on how recent they were. Now I look at my sidebar as an inbox. I am musing about some FeedBurner FeedFlare that would inform subscribers of the chatter. I find the commenators on this blog more interesting that the author.

In my Firefox wishbook, let me scribe: Allow me please to log in to my Web 2.0 applications with two separate accounts at the same time. With this I can keep track of two different GMail accounts, for example, or I can manage a customer’s Flickr photo stream, as well as my own. I’m going to have a look at see if the Firefox profile manager can do this for me.

My current blogging quandry is that I have no time to read other people’s blogs. I can’t create the outbound hyperlinks necessary to draw attention to by blog.

Most of my socialization takes place on the street or on the phone. No one in my New Orleans life likes to spend time in front of the computer. I don’t blame them.

I much prefer to converse with people in the coffee shops or on the street. It is not good for blogging, however. It means I’m all talked out when I’m at my computer. I do not feel like communicating, especially in this message in a botttle format.

Change of pace? First, create a Google Reader account that contains only the weblogs of recent commentators, so I don’t lose touch with people whe are making an effort. Second, do not write drafts. Write asides until you’ve gathered enough of an idea to create proper entry.