Alan Gutierrez

How are lawyers going to continue to harrass us when we can publish thier horrible demands on the Internet?

Take the case of a letter to a family in an RIAA suit, saying that they’ll be given 60 days to grieve, before continuing a suit against the estate of a deceased file sharing culprit.

A legal threat can infringe on a person’s rights, if they cannot afford to meet that threat in court, due to limits of money or time. These sorts of legal shake downs are more difficult when people can make a story of a legal outrage, as in the case of The Shops at Willow Bend.

Is it in any way wrong to post a letter that is sent to you?

Something to keep in mind as we are all going to be facing people with a lot of money to spend on a lot of lawyers as we rebuild New Orleans.

Over at a blog called Kiloblog, I’m writing about my programming experiences. I’m wondering if it belongs there or here? It seems that I ought to write closer to Think New Orleans, so I can attact the attention of people who program in XSLT and Groovy, because I’m about to say raving nice things about both. It may serve to flesh out my readership, and draw more attention to that other thing I like to write about, New Orleans. How to I keep people in New Orleans from running away screaming when they hear me talk about immutable decorator implementations?

I went to the communications and outreach meeting that Concordia held. It was disturbing.

We are shortly approaching the anniversary of the flood. In the meeting, we were asked to brainstorm on ideas outreach. Let’s define the problem, and start spit-balling. This is where the frustration the neighborhoods felt, is felt by me. You cannot tell me that we need to start with a blank sheet of paper. Bettie Hill was literally writing “Phone Banking” on a blank sheet of paper on an easel.

WWL-TV was there. Not to brainstorm, sadly. They were there to film the event for the evening news. The correspondent had to explain to Stephen Bingler, that there were ethical boundaries that prevented WWL from participating, now that they had been invited to cover the meeting, rather than contribute to it. Despite the fact that she wishes she could, she would have to be invited, and no, it was too late to change.

That was a glaring failure on the part of this krewe. It was a stunning admission.
It is now obvious that television to them means publicity for Concordia, and not outreach. Had they been in touch at all with local television during the UNOP carnival?

Concordia did not want television at the UNOP meetings. Concordia wants to control the process, as if it were a product launch.

Which it may well be.

The meeting was another display of the Concordia’s “Gosh, this is hard,” fig leaf. They have no idea what they are doing, and they have no shame in displaying their ignorance, despite the handsome sum they are being paid for their guidance in the process. Yet they have no guidance to offer. They best they can do, is beg for answers at every turn. They love to remind us that this is a unique catastrophe, and to our criticisms, they respond, well can you suggest anything better?

The answer to this tidbit of rhetoric, is always yes, but it’s too late by then. Without the easel with the big sheets of paper, how can they capture your idea? Gosh, this is hard.

That was the case with my recent article, For the Record, This Is Not An Election. In it, I offered a viable solution for voting. One that deserves a follow up. There are may viable solutions on offer over at Think New Orleans. Myself and other volunteers are following up on these daily.

There an an old software industry trick. It’s called Vaporware. Tell your use based something new and better is coming, gather user feedback, have press conferences, and while they wait they’ll make do with what we’ve got for them already.

By promising answers and not delivering, this process obstructs progress, it makes us wait until the official communications and outreach plan is released, doing without. Suffering.

Thank you for visiting Blogometer. I’m working to help people get started with web publishing in New Orleans, to share information through the recovery, and beyond. That’s at Think New Orleans.

I’m looking to pay more attention to blogs outside of New Orleans with an interest in New Orleans. Let me know about you blog. I’ll be blogging about the local bloggers in the coming days, so stay tuned. I promise, I’ll link you out of here, to every darn blogger I know. You’ll get to meet everybody.

In fact, I promise that I’ll introduce you to a New Orleans blogger every seven days. I’d start with whichever blogger wants to introduce a new blogger every seven days. They could start the next dy by introducing another blogger who could in turn introduce a new blogger every seven days. At the same time, I’m going to introduce friends of New Orleans bloggers, because if we pay attention to others, they’ll pay attention to us.

I’ll really make the introduction too. I’ll pull quote and link and you’ll have every reason to read that person and you’ll know why I read that person.

Fellow New Orleans bloggers my attention is all yours.

If you love conferences, come down for the Rising Tide Conference. You can also attend a number of commemorations of the anniversary of Katrina.

You could also help me get some new bloggers off the ground. I teach people how to use WordPress to communicate with their neighborhood. I’m starting new web sites every week. New voices from New Orleans.

Update: Hey, I’ll give a proper introduction tomorrow, but you can go and read Adrastos writing about the Katrina memorials right now. I’m busy this morning, and need to compile some examples of his work. Sorry, I thought I’d have a post already, but this isn’t as easy as you would think.

For those of you tuneing in from beyond the bayou, here’s a little more Chocote City for you. It’s Kalypso and Ray Nagin with Kalypso’s take on our city’s diversity.

I spoke with the mysterious Ryan Vis. I’m pretty eager to use these new found social networking skills to create a loosely organized project. Perhaps the people that are working with me in New Orleans can help create the Daily Beta, giving their feedback on the Web 2.0 software they are using as a result of working with Think New Orleans. I thought I’d start with the [Daily Beta Wiki].

How can you rig the election yourself? Go to Spam Gourmet and register. It’s a service that let’s you create disposable email address to catch spam. You can now create an email address by typing it out, the same way I do.

Update: You can cast all the votes you like at the UNOP voting form. You’ll need your email address, and a neighborhood and district. I live in the “French Quarter” which is in district one.

Via Perspective of Niti Bahn. Nibblettes creates the Web 2.0 logo for Delta, which awed more than amused.

This was a belated response to a Yah Hooray a thread called redesign famous logos in Web 2.0 format.