Category Archives: Culture: new media

3rd anniversary

On February 22, 2005, this blog went live. Three years and 1,132 posts later, where the heck are we?

The blog continues to be reasonably healthy. Last month, this site saw just under 4,000 unique visitors; during calendar year 2007, the site received approximately 38,000 unique visitors. By the standards of the Big Blogs, these are tiny numbers — the Big Blogs get tens of thousands of unique visitors each day. But for a personal blog on liberal religion, over a hundred unique visitors a day is fine and dandy.

Of greater interest is the current healthy state of the liberal religious blogosphere. UUpdates, a site that aggregates Unitarian Universalist blogs, now tracks some 323 blogs. Many of these blogs are well worth reading — in fact, there are so many good ones that I can’t keep up with all the blogs I like. I’m also finding more and more liberal Christian, humanist, liberal Jewish, and Pagan blogs out there that are worth reading.

What I continue to miss about the liberal religious blogosphere is the lack of face-to-face contact. Here in Boston, Unitarian Universalist bloggers have managed to gather for an annual picnic; and Unitarian Universalist bloggers typically meet a couple of times at General Assembly. As we see more and more Unitarian Universalist bloggers, my hope is that we start building regional networks — ideally, we’d include not just bloggers, but those who read the blogs as well; and not just Unitarian Universalists, but other religious liberals, too. And ideally, we will become more place-based, instead of being place-less.

Just the facts, ma’am

As the United States news media focuses on campaign minutiae — like the ongoing New York Times in-depth coverage of campaign advertisements (who cares?), and the fluffy personality pieces about candidate spouses — it’s hard to find solid factual information. So I turn to the BBC news Web site, which now features US elections map: state-by-state guide, an interactive map which shows who won (or is projected to win) how many delegates in which states.

Speaking of terrible election coverage, our local daily newspaper, the New Bedford Standard Times, never seems to have reported the result of many of our local elections last fall. They give us in-depth coverage of the Patriots (which is covered far better by the big regional papers like the Boston Globe), but ignore such important news stories as who won the New Bedford school committee race. I learned who was elected to the school committee from the local freebie paper, The Weekly Compass.

No wonder newspaper readership is rapidly declining in the United States. They feed us pundits and pablum, and expect us to suck it down and like it. When readers like me turn to the Web for our news — because that’s where we can get the facts we’re looking for, instead of pundits and pablum — the newspapers howl that blogs don’t provide “real journalism.” As it happens, blogs like Justin Webb’s BBC blog have given me more real news and factual information on the U.S. election than the New York Slime or the Wall Street Urinal.

Too bad, because I’m actually very fond of newspapers. But it seems to me they’re doing the damage to themselves, by not providing the facts readers want.

My narrow and ill-informed view: best UU blogs

The amazing UUpdater has begun to get ready for the annual Unitarian Universalist (UU) blog awards, and you can follow the process at the UUpdater blog. Last year, I said that I was completely incompetent to vote for the best UU blog, and that goes double this year — not only are there more UU blogs out there this year, I have even less time to read all the blogs I’d like to read. But this year, I decided that in spite of the fact that my views are narrow and ill-informed, I’m going to tell you my choices for best UU blogs whether you want to hear them or not. Here goes nothing:

— I have long thought that Colleen at Arbitrary Marks offers the best theological writing out there. I don’t always agree with Colleen, but I consistently come away from reading her blog with challenging new insights and new ideas for challenging books I really want to read. If I need a sermon topic, this is the blog I read.

— Speaking of UU blogs which challenge me, most UU bloggers occupy a political position between John Edwards and Bill Richardson, which is to say, not very challenging really. But two UU bloggers do challenge me and make me think: Bill Baar on the right, and Will Shetterly far to the left. In the end, I have to give the nod for best UU political commentary to Will — sorry Bill, but after all Will is a professional writer and I promise it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m as far to the left as he is and agree with him about most everything except his analysis of racism and capitalism.

— When it comes to the “Best UU Themed Blog,” for me there is only one choice. Aside from being witty, urbane, and loving local food, Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands is the best UU blogger when it comes to Universalism. Universalism is what keeps me going when the going gets tough, and I often find myself turning to Scott for my Universalism fix.

— As for the best UU blog written by a minister, after all these years I still like Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie. I like his ideas, I like his prose, and I like his emphasis on religious education.

— When it comes to best writing overall, I kinda wanted to vote for Henry David Thoreau’s blog. Except that you could argue convincingly that Thoreau wasn’t really a Unitarian, and he’s dead. Besides which, if I’m honest I have to say I read Hafidha Sofia at Never Say Never more often than I read Thoreau; I consistently enjoy reading her prose, no matter what she writes about.

— Can we do Best U.S. Presidential Campaign Blog by a UU? No? Oh well, I guess there wouldn’t be that many contestants.

— And my final vote is for The Blue Chalice / El Caliz Azul, in the category of The UU Blog I Will Miss the Most Now That It’s Gone. Thanks for a great four years, Enrique.

And there you have it: my narrow and ill-informed views on the best UU blogs for the past year, views which you would do well to ignore completely.

It’s cute!

When I got to church today, I discovered that my XO laptop had arrived on Friday, which was my day off. I got home from lunch carrying the cardboard box from the One Laptop Per Child foundation. “Look what I got!” I said to Carol.

While I was taking off my coat, she finished getting the box open, and we took out the cute litte green-and-white laptop. “It’s cute” she said.

It is cute. To open it, you unfold two little ears (which serve as antennas for the wifi) and that releases the screen, which then folds up to reveal the child-sized keyboard. The whole design is brilliant, including both the hardware and the software. And it comes with amazing software: a varitey of educational software including measurement programs, a calculator, etc.; photo- and audio- and video-editing software; music-creation software; a text editor; a simple Python compiler; a paint program; and much more.

The XO does have distinct limitations. No printer drivers yet (a low priority, according to the One Laptop Per Child Web site, in part because they are committed to cutting down on paper use for ecological reasons). A tiny, child-sized keyboard (I’m typing this entry on my new XO, and my big hands definitely do not fit the keyboard well). Some holes in the software (the Flash player on the Web browser does not work yet). A small screen (not so good for middle-aged eyes). It’s pretty slow compared to my Mac Powerbook. And it is clearly designed to be an educational tool, not a general purpose computer.

But overall, I’m very impressed with the XO — and I’ve just begun to explore its capabilities and possilities. As I learn more about its capabilities, I’ll let you know more about it — maybe I’ll make a video so you can see it in action.

On the road again

My laptop is still being repaired, and I’m about to head up to Cambridge for a couple of days where I won’t have access to my computer. Instead of the usual blog posts, I’ll post micro-blog entries to Twitter using my cell phone, and these will magically appear (if everything works as promised) as daily digest posts. Or you can follow along in real time under “Micro-blogging” in the sidebar.

Micro-blogging

Most of you won’t care, even though you probably should, but I’ve just linked to Twitter on the sidebar.

I’ve become facinated with the phenomenon of “micro-blogging” — Twitter allows posts of up to 140 characters, meaning you can read or post Twitter messages (called, rather unfortunately, “Tweets”) on your cell phone using text messaging — begging for haiku-like posts….

Podcamp Boston 2

Podcamp Boston 2 is over, it was inspiring, and here is one reflection on Podcamp (ban Powerpoint presentations!) along with a little about three inspiring sessions I attended.

Oh, and I really mean it about the non-linearity. (3:46)

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Podcamp Boston 2: day one

Today I went to Podcamp. I learned a lot. People wore lots of black. At lunchtime, I went to a peace really. Then I went back. There were laptops everywhere. There was a lot of cheering going on. Tomorrow I get to go back to Podcamp. Woo, hoo! (0:26, wicked short)

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Worth watching

Peter Bowden of UU Planet sent me a link to a video of Seth Goodin talking to Google employees. Seth Goodin is the marketing guru who wrote the book Purple Cow. (I wrote about Purple Cow back on November 9, 2005.)

One of Goodin’s key points in the video lecture is that the whole landscape of marketing has changed in the past twenty years. It used to be that the way you did marketing was first to come up with a whole bunch of money. Then you took out as many ads as you could, trying to grab people’s attention to tell them about your product. When you made a profit, you poured that money back into advertising. Goodin calls this approach the “TV-Industiral Complex.”

But a new way to do marketing has emerged. First, you create “something worth talking about,” and “if you can’t do that, start over.” Next, you find people who want to hear from you, and you tell them about that “something worth talking about.” Then those people tell their friends about that “something worth talking about” — you don’t tell people about that something worth talking about and you don’t spend lots of ad dollars promoting yourself — you rely on enthusiastic users, not on ads, to tell others. Then there’s a last key step: get permission from those first people to tell them about whatever new things-worth-talking-about that you come up with.

Goodin’s second approach to marketing should be easy to use to spread the word about Unitarian Universalism. Unitarian Universalism is something worth talking about — it’s a religion that provides all the wonderful aspects of a warm religious community, but it’s also a religion where you don’t have to swallow unswallowable doctrines or creeds. We have something worth talking about, and Unitarian Universalists do tell their friends — “No, no, you have to check out my church, it’s this cool religious community where you don’t have to believe in God unless you want to.” Thus while other churches are losing members, Unitarian Universalism is slowly growing, because we Unitarian Universalists are willing to talk to our friends.

Now along comes the new marketing campaign from the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The UUA is buying print ads in Time magazine, which is probably a waste of money, because the old marketing approach of spending lots of money on ads just doesn’t work any more. But the UUA also came out with a cool ten-minute video. It captures who we are — it captures that warm feeling you get when you go to your Unitarian Universalist church — it captures that lack of creed or dogma — it makes you feel good about being a Unitarian Universalist, so you want t o show it to your friends to help them understand who you are. You can get a DVD of the video to give to your friends so you can sit there and watch it with them — or you can tell your friends to watch it on YouTube.

Plus, without being heavy-handed, the video captures the cutting edge of who we are — we care about the environment, we welcome gays and lesbians, we have racially mixed churches (OK, maybe your church isn’t racially mixed, but ours here in New Bedford is, and yours could be someday soon). This new video is worth talking about! And some of us are already talking about the video, and showing it to our friends. And maybe — just maybe — we need to do lots more new media, because I suspect the future of our religion has to add a new-media component to our traditional face-to-face churches.

That what I got to thinking about as I watched the Seth Goodin video. There’s lots more food for thought there. Definitely worth watching. Link.