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?

Rebecca Houtman has begun to blog her experiences with Rails, at Under the Sofa Cushions.

Should I have a guest blogger? I wonder. I don’t have the time to do much blogging myself.

Was running through my newsreader, the one that I use to keep track of folks that are not in my immediate sphere. There was something that I encountered, and I thought, oh, why didn’t she tell me about this? And it occured to me, that she did. She wrote about it in her blog. But, I don’t read her blog, really. I read and write email. I am so out of touch with what is going on in the world outside New Orleans. It pleases me.

I am creating weekly email newsletter for Think New Orleans. This is in addition to the subscribe by email option on the Think New Orleans weblog. It is a traditional newsletter. It arrives in email, on a Monday morning, to tell a person what’s going to happen in the coming week.

• Subscribe to the Weekly Think New Orleans Newsletter

This is going to cause some confusion. When people get my weekly newsletter, they are going to want a newsletter just like it for their organization. (I am working on a service that will publish a newsletter from a weblog. A real email newsletter, by selecting a specific tag, or tag feed.)

I avoid the term with neighborhood groups, because they are starting with nothing, or a poorly maintained web site. They eed a simple way to publish. A web site where they make frequent updates that look like email messages sounds simple to them. It is like a “newsletter”.

If I were to say “blog”, they might think of MySpace or personal diaries. They might search the web and come across an article like the following…

The second thing blogs do is - to invoke Marx - seize the means of production. It’s hard to underestimate what a huge deal this is. For as long as journalism has existed, writers of whatever kind have had one route to readers: They needed an editor and a publisher. Even in the most benign scenario, this process subtly distorts journalism. You find yourself almost unconsciously writing to please a handful of people - the editors looking for a certain kind of story, the publishers seeking to push a particular venture, or the advertisers who influence the editors and owners. Blogging simply bypasses this ancient ritual.

It creates more work. I’ve had people say, “I don’t want to blog”, or I’m sorry, “I can’t stop thinking of it as something that my son does”.

Some of the organizations for which I’ve established web sites, are further down the road, however.

Bill Knecht and Paul Schafer both know what a blog is. Bill Knecht already runs a very succesful email newsletter. He follows the ettiqutte of infrequent messages, and regularly scheduled announcements. They understand the concept, without quoting Marx. They were enthused about creating the Eracism Blog from the outset.

Thus, it’s not a hard and fast rule. The model for blogging is “conversation”. “Conversation” is the model for ERACE New Orleans. It is a good fit.

Other organizations are not looking to converse on the web. They converse in person. They want to use the web to publish and coordinate. For them it is not siezing the means of production, it’s posting the next meeting agenda.

Today I ran into Loki from Humid City at the very Canal end of Royal. He swings a hammer on my side of the Quarter. We’d met at JazzFest, through Christian Kuffner. We stopped for a beer. I called him a moonbat, because I am straight shooter, a plain dealer, an insufferable prick. We talked about organizing and a music weblog. If I’m lucky, Loki will adopt the civic blogging platform for Humid City. I’d get see what it is like under load. His is a more popular weblog than mine. Grr.

I’ve offered to host a WordPress blog for Dave of Suds and Soliloquies. The first thing he needs to do is wander over to the WordPress Theme Park or WordPress Theme Viewer and choose a few themes. Let’s discuss, since some of them might be iffy for technical reasons. Otherwise, restate your thoughts in the comments please, so we can hash it out in public.