Alan Gutierrez

I’ve been invited by Phil Gerbyshak to going the 100 bloggers project. I’m going to use that platform to draw attention to Think New Orleans.

Think New Orleans is on a mission to remove barriers that prevent civic information from getting out into the real deal web.

Civic groups in New Orleans have a bad habit of using chain e-mail messages. When they do use the web, a lot of information is posted to forums that are frame based and cannot be indexed by Google, or on static web sites where information is moved or deleted.

There are only a handful of forums that have syndicated feeds.

How does Think New Orleans address this? By setting folks up with blogs, or by posting their information to the Think New Orleans group blog.

The Think New Orleans blog itself hosts digitially recorded audio of community meetings. It’s a way to extend the civic discussion and to maintain a record of what’s been discussed.

In any medium, I’ll be banging on about this.

Hugh MacLeod is on a tear about blogging. Creating one punchy top ten list after another, and now the two immutable laws of blogging. A return to discussion of blogging for blogging’s stake, since he’s been away attending to suits and wine. About time.

Sorry, The Blogosphere Is Closed

There will be no more new blogs in 2006, according to Mark Newsome, this comes via Hugh.

Why It’s Impossible to Build a New Blog in 2006 – Kent Newsome

Once you add the element of money into the equation, the element of competition soon follows. So you get the haves linking to one another (and largely only to one another) and ignoring (or at best tolerating) the have nots, in an effort to boost their status and, perhaps more importantly, protect their shares of the readership pie. Anyone who argues this isn’t true hasn’t spent much time surfing around the blogosphere.

What if you don’t add the element of money? Perhaps you’re not intent on raking in Google Ad revenue. You may have a job or some such.

Perhaps you watch the A-List bloggers prattle and link among themsleves and find it somewhat seedy and incestuous.

Perhaps you’ve seen them go around the block more than once on the Cluetrain, Naked Conversations, Power Law, gobbledy-gook and you just don’t feel like reading it one more time.

What if you simply don’t read A-Listers or care much about what they have to say?

The Non-Business Model

Who in my blogroll has a business interest in their blog? Certianly none of the Ann Arbor or New Orleans bloggers. Could there be some other reason to blog?

Can a new blog succeed? – Ric Hayman

But when I think about why I blog, it has more to do with self-expression. While it might be exciting to discover that half the Western world was hanging on my next post, I suspect that a lot of the joy would disappear in a flurry of expectations. I think that there a lot of bloggers out there who are doing it for their own reasons, and that only a few of them relate to reaching a large audience, and/or making money.

My motive for blogging was driven by an open source ideal of communicating my hacks in the hope that someone, somewhere would find it and get a head start.

Post post K this has morphed to a process of introspection that leverages the long tail.

Ric closes with, “I think the ’success’ or otherwise of any blog depends entirely on the blogger’s own definition of success …”

For your blog, how do you define success?