Wilshire Baptist Church, is going to be taking donations and money to Baton Rouge on Monday.   For more information click here.  Or call/email Mark Wingfield, Associate Pastor Wilshire Baptist Church at 214.452.3128 or mwingfield@wilshirebc.org. 

The evening Business Week picked up Brian’s Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog.  CNN just covered the destruction and devastation in Slidell after reading about the town on Brian’s blog.  Boing Boing mentioned the blog and Slidell.  Instapundit.com mentioned the blog here.  Finally, David Parmet is writing about Slidell via Brian in his blog.  Update:  over 29,000 unique visitors and too many blog mentions to list. 

Brian Oberkirch, our CEO, is from a small town just outside of New Orleans called Slidell.  Both he and his wife were raised in the area, have parents living there, and have friends and relatives devastated by the hurricane.  Everytime Brian and I would talk he was telling about the lack of news from the area.  He had little tidbits, but no one had the full story.  The picture to the right is the bridge to Slidell.

I suggested that he start a blog where he could share his feelings and information about Katarina and its wrath (this seemed obvious since he runs a blog consultancy).  Anyway, he had one of the techs set it up and within an hour he was posting.  Shortly thereafter a reporter from CNN IM’d him asking for information, next Brian’s high school buddies were calling him after they read the blog and all sorts of people who had little bits of information were contacting him.

Interestingly Brian posted the blog so that he could share the little information he had, and as a result a much larger dialogue was created.  You can visit the Slidell blog here:  slidell.weblogswork.com.  On a more somber note, I am shocked by how bad it really is – we are still working on ideas to help out.  I think Brian will be headed back very soon.

Update:  You can help the victims of Hurricane Katarina by donating to the Red Cross. 

I can’t recall how we came to the decision to build Gahbunga, but I am happy to report that we are launching it in early beta this month.  If you visit the site you will be able to create an account, add friends and start using the service.  What is Gahbunga you ask? 

Gahbunga is ‘hot or not’ for your camera phone.  Here is how it works:  take a picture of your date or potential date with your camera phone and forward it to Gahbunga.  Gahbunga will send the picture to your friends, asking them to ‘rate’ your date on a 1-10 scale.  They will receive an SMS message asking them to check their email (most U.S. phones do not allow SMS attachments).  Within 30 minutes you will have an average score from your friends.  If you select the community rating option you will also receive an average score from all Gahbunga users who responded. 

Currently Gahbunga is written with basic LAMP technologies, incorporates SMS and postfix.  We plan to add certain functionality with AJAX shortly.  If you have an idea for an additional feature please leave a comment on the site.   

Last week we were doing the first podcast for Architel.  The thinking was that they were fairly early to the podcasting game.  Now I visit the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration website and realize that they are podcasting the Hurricane!  So a good rule of thumb is that when the government adopts a new trend/technology before you do – you are late!

Saturday afternoon I was talking to my father about replacing his consulting firm’s website with a blog.  I wrote about it in my blog here.  I referenced a blog post from 2004, but I read Paul Kedrosky’s post from today and he basically makes the case that blogs are a "disruptive content management system innovation."  He reposted an article from Cathleen Moore that I will reblog here as well:

Blog tools tackle content management
Six Apart, NetWin introduce enterprise blogging features

By  Cathleen Moore
August 26, 2005

Deploying a full-blown ECM (enterprise content management) system to address basic corporate content publishing and workflow needs has been likened to trying to kill a fly with a rocket launcher. A more suitable solution may lie in souped-up blogging tools, which by design simplify content publishing.

Speaking at the Blog Business Summit earlier this month, DL Byron, principal at TexturaDesign, a blog design and consulting company, said blogging tools are very effective ECM systems in certain environments.

"What is happening on corporate sites is companies are looking at blogging tools as an alternative to [Microsoft's (Profile, Products, Articles)] SharePoint, especially when they combine a blog engine with a wiki," Byron said.

New business blog tools include Version 3.2 of Six Apart’s Movable Type, rolled out earlier this week, and SurgeBlog 1.0, an enterprise-class blog server being released next week by newcomer NetWin.

Dad is on board and will be moving his site to a WordPress based site, Architel is moving their blog from MT and their website to WordPress (Dan is doing the redesign), and my blog and website will be redesigned and moved to WordPress too. 

We are humbled by Peter Cooper‘s latest link to our blog.  Peter has been blogging since 1999 and is considered to be the formost Ruby on Rails expert in the United Kingdom.  He runs two cool companies:  Feed Digest and BigBold.  I will have to admit I had never heard of Peter, but our developers sure have.  Our past projects are primarily LAMP, but our new stuff is all RoR and AJAX.

Techcrunch has a new profile of Weblogs Work, in which they say:

"Weblogs Work, based in Dallas, Texas, is a web 2.0 consultancy, incubator and overall cool group of people. I’m finding that I spend more and more time talking with these guys about new ideas, and we are linking to each other so often that people are starting to talk."  Awesome.  

This evening I caught an episode of The Turnaround with Ali Velshi.  The program profiled a company called Independent Fabrication that builds custom bikes (very custom).  The company is owned exclusively by the employees – an interesting group of 13 people.

I checked Technorati and found two blogs closely associated with the company.  The first, Riding Independent, is written by Team Green who races IF bikes.  The second is by the Woman’s Mountain Bike Team (who ride IF Singlespeed bikes).  As far as I can tell there is no corporate blog.

Check out the website for the company here.  We would love to see them start blogging; really interesting people with a very interesting story.  If you are with IF click here. 

Our prayers are with our friends in the path of Katrina.  If we can do anything to help please let us know.  Oh and if you are hanging around, I would recommend getting out ASAP!

Update: Brian set up the Slidell Hurricane Katarina Damage Blog – check it out.    

I read an interesting post from Dennis Kennedy detailing the most common mistakes made by legal bloggers (and bloggers in general).  Check out his post here, but here is a short version of his list:

• Launch a blog without trying to understand the blog culture or the blogging world.
• Don’t post on a topic that you clearly got from another blogger without crediting that blogger for pointing out the link, article or resource to you.
• Falling for the common advice about getting reciprocal links and treating prominent bloggers as if they offer a free search engine enhancement service.
• Being overly-familiar with existing bloggers or taking pot-shots at existing bloggers to make a name for yourself.
• My Pet Peeve: Being a New Blogger Who Lectures People About the One True Path of Blogging
• Think Carefully About This Anonymous Thing.
• The Biggest Mistake: Not Using Full Text Feeds in 2005.
• Bonus: Not Treating Your Blog Launch Like the Launch of a Publication.

Good points for anyone considering blogging!  Thanks Dennis.