Nothing Stops A Party In New Orleans
Ms. Mae’ s on Napolean Street is one of my favorite bars in New Orleans. Not only is this place open 24 hours a day, but most drinks cost between $1 and $1.50 while top shelf liquor goes for a mere $2.50. That’s pretty good deal when you are in college.
Only those who have lived in New Orleans and frequented such establishments could possibly understand the following item from Tuesday’s New Orleans Times Picayune:
Blaze damages Uptown barroom
Fire started next door to Miss Mae’s
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
From staff reportsA three-alarm fire damaged popular nightspot Miss Mae’s at Napoleon Avenue and Magazine Street on Monday night.
Fire officials believe the fire started next door at Cafe Bayard and jumped the 18-inch gap between the buildings, according to Chief Glenn Trainor of the New Orleans Fire Department. The owner, Marc LoCasio, was in the 1905-circa cafe building at the time and called 911 to report the fire at 9:07 p.m. The extent of the damage to that building was unclear.
Fire officials say they had some resistance from bar patrons who were reluctant to evacuate because they were watching the Saints game.
Most of the damage was confined to dead space between the walls and between the first-floor ceiling and second floor, Trainor said.
The fire was declared under control at 10:15 p.m., Trainor said.
He said there were no injuries to bar patrons or to firefighters.
In New Orleans, NOTHING stops a party.
Why am I starting a Blog?
I mean, besides the fact that my mother always told me I was a good writer? And because all the cool kids are doing it? Certainly the last thing the Interweb needs is yet another URL with more content from yet another asshole spouting off at the keyboard. Well, there are a couple of reasons.
To Express Myself
“It’s the End of the World As We Know It”- REM
With the Middle East looking like a powder keg about to explode, America engaged in a cruel internal political experiment and the Interwebs entering into phase that will consume and reinvent most of the media and advertising industries, there is no shortage of topics on which to opine.
And I’m good at pontificating.
To Learn
“I believe in my heart, the best teacher is experience.” – Dr. John
If Marc Andreessen, who is pretty damn smart, can learn 11 things in 5 weeks just by blogging, than I can certainly learn a thing or two myself (Andreessen’s blog is a must read for anyone in Silicon Valley or involved in the business of technology).
While I am already a consumer of RSS, it’s past time to become a producer as well as play with trackbacks, pingbacks, Feedburner, Google Analytics and maybe even some widgets.
As Andreeseen notes,
I am convinced there is a whole world of optimization to be done based on detailed stats and studying what works and what doesn’t on one’s blog.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, I think it’s important to have a fundamental understanding of how information flows on the Internet, as this will be the underpinning of numerous successful Internet companies both fledgling and yet to be founded. Just playing with SEO and SEM techniques on a blog will be a valuable learning experience in and of itself. These information flows will be impacted by both technological and social influences and developments going forward and there’s no better way to understand them than to simply get involved.
To Establish An Online Presence
Establishing a personal presence or a brand on the Internet is quickly becoming important. As Om Malik noted recently again, anonymity is a dead concept and sooner rather than later everyone will have an online presence.
And the only reason that I know what Om Malik thinks or that Om Malik’s opinion really matters is because Malik established his own personal brand early on in the blogosphere (it goes without saying that he’s smart, works hard and writes well). There are plenty of smart bloggers out there whose blogs I don’t read simply because they don’t have the credibility of GigaOm and there’s only so much time in the day.
The Lottery Ticket
This blog is also my version of buying a Powerball ticket. On the off chance that some number of people decide that my contributions are entertaining and insightful enough to be worth reading regularly, this blog could become a business unto itself.
Granted, that number of readers would need to be in the millions and I hardly expect that to happen, but stranger things have happened and I’ll write more about that in a coming post too (this topic has been on my mind a lot lately).
Plenty of articulate and opinionated folks have made lucrative careers out of being just that, namely Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. And plenty of bloggers have turned their blogs into lucrative businesses, namely Michael Arrington and Om Malik.
Conclusion
So there are a number of reasons to start a blog and no real downsides. Whether I keep with it or fall victim at one of the 5 stages of blogging remains to be seen. It may also simply amount to an interesting experiment to see how much AdSense revenue I can generate with an audience of just my mother.