Tuesday, August 19, 2003

David Hoggard: “I agree with Councilman Phillips.” Phillips is one of the guys he’s running against. You can say stuff like that on a weblog. Hoggard’s also got a rich, dynamic website, which sets him apart from his opponents. I could find a web presence of any sort for just one other at-large candidate for City Council, Jason Arispe, who has a static site with scant useful content. No websites for mail-list wizard Bill Burckley, who has already sent me some paper, or incumbents Yvonne Johnson, Tom Phillips, and Don Vaughan. Even when they’re not campaigning, shouldn’t the incumbents have websites, and preferably weblogs, to tell us what they’re up to? Among the mayoral contenders, Tara Sue Grubb has a weblog, which she’s focusing more on the campaign and the people she meets along the way than she did during her groundbreaking run for Congress last fall. As a tool for organizing, fund-raising, and articulating ideas, it’s still not in Hoggard’s league. The other challenger, Bruce Ashley, has an OK static site. I could not find a website for incumbent Keith Holliday, who like the incumbent Council members gets some free pixels just for being in office. In short, this is a surprisingly unwired race. That may say something about our candidates, or the state of our fair city, and what it says is not very inspiring. 3:04:16 PM    comment []

I used to think that furniture was too bulky and heavy to import in large quantities. Wrong. The US furniture industry is getting creamed. Here are some numbers from an article I wrote for my day job: “Almost half of the wood furniture sold in the U.S. is made in China…the dollar value of imports from China has nearly doubled since 2000 and increased by another billion dollars in sales in 2002 alone…Nationwide, employment at furniture and fixtures companies declined by 73,000 in the two years ended December 2002.” It’s like textiles all over again, and the job losses are hitting many of the same communities in North Carolina and Virginia already hit by the migration of the mill economy.  John Bassett is a great interview, and it was fun to write about his company’s low-tech strategy for a tech mag, but the whole thing was a little depressing. 2:41:21 PM    comment []