Alan Gutierrez

I’d said that I’d write with a lighter touch, but it is too difficult.

I’ve read happy, mission driven business blogs. Web 2.0 marketoid auto-prose.

Culling them now. They make me quesy. Need to keep in mind that these are simply echoing opinions, put out there for the sake of traffic. Chicken soup for the covetous soul. Happy pap.

Better blogging will mean some bitter blogging on days like these.

Wedensdays that is. Every Wednesday is now Bitter Wednesday. I’ll be relentlessly upbeat in the meantimes. Wednesday is when I break my diet.

I’ll store my bile in drafts, and come Wednesday, publish in a peptic flurry.

Back in ‘69, ‘70, the Internet ment something. Those days are gone, baby.

It was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust.

Why didn’t we change the MX records on edu domains? Store that email somewhere outside of New Orleans, let people keep their accounts. Why did webmail bounce? Couldn’t we have dropped quotas for people with Gulf Coast zip codes?

Recovery 2.0 the most thinly veiled agenda I’ve ever seen. Now that people are scattered and their networks destroyed, let’s see if they’ll migrate. Let’s talk about how, in our Web 2.0 fantasies, Ajax and Atom organize people without phone lines.

The Web 2.0 crowd needs to temper their enthusiasm for their untested web based vision, and reocognize that, New Orleans especially, needs practical information technology.

The real hero of Katrina was NOLA.com and the NOLA.com forums. Written in 1998. Never updated. Ineffective search. Limited archives.

Killer interface, though. A box for a message and a button to send.

It is simple. It works.

It is here now.

Web 2.0 papware is for generating content, not generating action. It is for organizing dates, not organizing cities.

It is horrible in crisis. Email is vastly superior. We should have thrown our weight behind email.

The Web 2.0 crowd needs to understand that people facing death, homelessness, and impovershment are not good beta testers.

Culling my feeds of business success blogs. Out of them comes Troy Worman with a punchy post that sums it up nicely.

I’m fed up with life-long self improvement evangelists and their seven steps to happiness. I’m tired of Jack Welch and Donald Trump preaching from the pulpit of unimaginable success. I’m sick of the management gurus and their how-to be what I see doctrines

Pity his insight is destined for Change This, where manifesto is the unit of measure, a commodified revolution.

Breathless, world-changing vision positied daily.

Coming in from Envie, where I purchased a cup of coffee, I’d been gone thirty minutes, to find a neighbor standing at the door of 908 Esplanade Ave, and a young dog sitting in the doorway. The dog is barking with a bark that yelps. A loud squeal of a bark. This is not the retreiver that yelps so in the next courtyard. It is an abandoned mutt. Coo at it or scold it, it continues to bark. The neighbor goes into his condo to call the SPCA. I go into my courtyard apartment to write you with the remaining electricity.