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December 6 is a sad day

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. It was 11 years ago today that Marc Lepine strode into the Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering school at the Universite de Montreal, and proceeded to separate the men from the women. Then he shot and killed 14 of the women before taking his own life. Since then, many people have observed a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

Marc Lepine wasn’t simply a madman – he was a calculating killing machine on that day, bent on punishing “feminists” for his failures in the world.

But don’t remember him on this day, remember his victims: Genevieve Bergeron, 21: Helene Colgan, 23; Nathalie Croteau, 23; Barbara Daigneault, 22; Anne-Marie Edward, 21; Maud Haviernick, 29; Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31; Maryse Leclair, 23; Annie St-Arneault, 23; Michele Richard, 21; Maryse Laganiere, 25; Anne-Marie Lemay, 22; Sonia Pelletier, 28; Annie Turcotte, 21.

And remember the horrible toll that is taken by violence against women throughout our society.

Famous dates in Marxian

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history, part I: On November 16 1842, Marx first met Engels at the offices of Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, where Marx was an editor. They would become friends two years later when they met again in Paris, following which they became life long collaborators.

Marx, edited by Engels: […] “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).

And now it’s 2:15

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and it’s all weird. I wasn’t at home to change my clocks, so they’re all an hour slow, and anyhow I’m 3 hrs behind due to this wonderful Canadian invention, the Time Zone. I did find it interesting to note down which websites I visited first – this being my first look at any weblogs in a few days. I looked at mostly serious issues-oriented sites first – PeterMe, Zeldman (to whom I’ve neglected to send my condolences), CamWorld, and Evhead. Next were Montrealers – Ed’s nicely redesigned Calebos.org, Aaron’s site, and David’s. Last were honourary/former Montrealer Heather’s Harrumph and Derek Powazek‘s site. And now to bed. Because I have a very big meeting tomorrow with a man who might win a Nobel Prize for medicine soon – a huge figure we’re doing some work with. Nope, not intimidated at all.

Is a lesson

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starting to be apparent coming out of some of the spectacular dot-com failures? Soundbitten’s article on the failure of Verde and the possible contribution Scient made to the failure is instructive. Verde was trying to be a web-only content site, with e-comm built in at the ground level. OK, fine. But they outsourced the very lifeblood of the company – the platform on/in which it was to live!

Maybe it’s just me, and my biases (the company I work for does its own design, programming, editorial, hosting – everything) but I think that if you’re going to live on the web, you have to develop for the web in-house. That’s the real challenge for marketing and sales types with an idea – to figure out how to work with developers – and developers who themselves are radically different from one another (i.e., programmers and designers are different from one another in dozens of ways, in general). But if you’re a retail bookseller, you don’t farm out your retail sales staff to a consultancy – that’s what you’re about, to a great extent.

There may be a place for consultants in all of this, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a net company, you have to have to develop your own internet infrastructure – you can’t get around it. Doesn’t mean you can’t purchase products that will help you do this – a company doesn’t have to invent everything from the ground up.

Maybe the real lesson is that new dot-coms try to separate back end from front end too much. It isn’t enough to be good marketers, writers, strategists. To split form (content or marketing) from function (CMS, design, UI) is to tie one hand behind your back as you try to get a dot-com off the ground.

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