About the Name and Icon:
I have always loved the propaganda poster artform, especially as it existed in the middle third of the 20th century. As a precursor to the modern bumpersticker, the design of the propaganda poster is usually quite minimalist, as it had to quickly and unambiguously convey the message. While Soviet propaganda is among the best known, American, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and North Korean are all quite notable. The name "Agitprop" is from the word "agitprop" which itself is a word formed from the combination of "agitation" and "propaganda". Seeing as I was attempting to move my blogging from iBlog and my laptop to a more flexible web-based system, and that blogs are often bits of things that the authors feel strongly about, I felt that it was quite natural for me to select an propaganda related name and icon for my application. The icon comes from a bit of 1940's American propaganda, a Jean Carlu poster entitled "America's Answer! Production!", produced for the Division of Information, Office for Emergency Management in 1942. The poster is shown below:
(Detail and historical information can be found by visiting the collection of posters at the Smithsonian Institute.
The strong graphics of the poster included another key element for me: the wrench is almost identical to that of the current MovableType 3 logotype.
That cemented the selection in my mind, and what remained was simply to clean up the image and remove the text.