Alan Gutierrez

Got a trackback from Matt Hampel on a post about the New Orleans Wiki. He is one of the keepers of the ArborWiki. It was from an automatic posting of his del.icoi.us bookmarks. It struck me as an easy way to reach out to new people. An easy way to reward people for getting my attention. As if my attention was not reward enough already.

On the Internet you only ever preach to the choir, or you pander to the trolls. That’s your choice. You either speak to the like minded who find your message through the magic of the long tail or the hateful spoilers who find your message through that exact same magic. I can feel it when I write. I can feel the trolls. I know they will arrive to leave silly little troll droppings, and I preempt them in my writing. They see it and spew. I’ve got to feel the choir. To write directly for the choir. Kick the trolls. Invite the opposing views.

“I also realized—and this was more important to me—that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect.” from an Inteview with David Simon the creator, writer and produce of HBO’s The Wire.

That is going to be my programming project tomorrow. Putting my asides in the sidebar of the index page. I’d like to have categories breakout out with a main content channel and asides. I want my asides to be permitted to be longer than one paragraph as well. Asides are also called life streams. For added effect it could be animated on mouse over, or it could scroll itself.

I want to move my Asides to the sidebar in all my blogs. Little thoughts news in brief. I like having a carefully crafted message at the top of the main channel of my blogs.

Now that I’m leanring about Tumblr and Jaiku. That was always the intent with Kiloblog. Never got too deep into adding other things, like photo streams, or del.icio.us bookmarks.

I’ve spent the last week alone, trying to get caught up with work that is not directly related to Think New Orleans. I’ve not been paying much attention to the New Orleans bloggers, so excuse me if I’ve missed something that is important. There are plenty of comments in the wings of Think New Orleans and Blogometer. Thank you for leaving your comments, and moving away from email.

I’m going to be doing more organization in the open, here at Blogometer and also at the Think New Orleans weblog. I’ve created a WordPress plugin that allows me to choose what goes on the front page of Blogometer, and what can go in the sidelines.

It’s an extension of a concept I’ve had for a while, of a stream of consciousness blog, a place where you post ideas in their infancy, ask questions, or leave yourself notes. It is not even an aside, one of the short scrunchy posts that you see here, since it is information that ought to interest no one, except perhaps the oddballs that Google brings in.

If you look in the categories section, you’ll find posts that are not visible in on the front page. I’m going to experiment with categorization, so that if you’re involved in a particular project, you can follow along by viewing a particular category, or a particular tag.

For now, if you want to catch what is missing, bookmark Sideline or subscribe to the Sideline feed and I’ll be sure to tag posts that are not on the front page with “Sideline”.