Category: New media

The next UU app

I’ve been talking with some people I know, and we’ve been brainstorming about the next UU app for Android and/or Apple iOS. Since some of these folks have experience in software and app development, this is not just a pipe dream. At the moment, we’re talking about really basic stuff, like an app for your congregation that lets you know the sermon topic for the week, then on Sunday provides you with an order of service so you don’t have to kill trees by taking a paper order of service. But I’m seeing this as just a first step.

So here’s my question — what UU app do you really want to see on your smartphone and/or tablet?

Anniversary

Back on February 22, 2005, I wrote the first post on a blog I called “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog.” And here I am, eight years later, still writing.

The online world has changed drastically in those eight years. In 2005, blogging was still cutting edge social media, Facebook was still restricted to users with a .edu email address, and the big social networking site was MySpace. In the first few years of this blog, there were so few UU bloggers that we’d go out of our way to visit one another so we could have face-to-face meetings, and there were even UU blogger picnics.

For a few years, a lot Unitarian Universalists paid a lot of attention to the few Unitarian Universalist blogs. There were only about fifty of us, and we all had a wide audience. I still remember a meeting at General Assembly where members of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees sat a bunch of us bloggers down and asked how they could get their message out on our blogs.

Twitter came along. Youtube took off. Facebook got big, then huge, then ridiculously ginormous. Many of the conversations that were happening on blogs went over to other social media platforms. These days, the best bloggers are typically paid, or they’re professional writers blogging for exposure on commercial or paid sites. The transformation of Chris Walton, perhaps the best UU blogger ever, can be taken as a representative case: he wound up running UU World, the UUA’s official periodical; moved UUWorld into blogging; dropped his long-running personal blog “Philocrites”; and now he posts his personal thoughts on Facebook.

While the social media field has grown ever larger, ever more dominated by bigger and bigger players, I have kept on with this tiny little blog, with its tiny readership of ten thousand unique visitors a month (the Huffington Post gets more than three times that many unique visitors in one hour), many of which appear to be meaningless visits from questionable IP addresses in Russia and China. While more and more people turn to social media to carry on their online conversations, I stick with the outdated blogging format.

But then, I started my publishing career back in the 1980s, writing a fanzine that had a circulation of less than twenty people. I’m still a zine writer who wound up writing a religion blog by mistake. A zine writer is always looking for readers beyond his or her narrow social circle, which means Facebook will always feel restrictive. A zine writer is, by definition, long-winded, which means that Twitter will never offer enough space. A zine writer feels fondness towards outmoded publishing techniques, like cut-and-paste photocopying and hectographs, and by contrast feels little fondness for the newest and shiniest social media platform.

Finally, a zine writer publishes because he or she is expecting readers to write back. And you, dear readers, do write back — you write comments, you send email, sometimes you send me notes and books and dogtags and old magazines with interesting articles. Blogger and author John Scalzi sneers at tiny blogs like this (he really does; I went to a presentation he gave and heard him do so). Whatever. You, the readers, make this all worth while. Thank you for eight great years.

Your Web site on different devices

Carol pointed me to the Screenfly tools on QuirkTools, which allows you to preview any Web site as it appears on various devices, including Android and Apple smartphones and tablets, desktop computers, and televisions. To try this out, try comparing our congregation’s main Web site with our religious education blog; I just updated our congregation’s religious education blog with a “mobile-first” responsive Web design, while the main Web site does not have a responsive design, and there’s a big difference in the way each appears on phones and tablets.

(1) First, open the Screenfly tool in a new window by clicking here.

(2) Next, enter the following URL, and try viewing it as desktop, mobile, tablet, and television:
http://paloaltocre.wordpress.com

(3) Now enter the following URL, and notice how it responds differently to a desktop, mobile, tablet, and television, displaying legibly (and differently) on each):

Home

Isn’t QuirkTools’s Screenfly great fun?

UU kids and politics

I’m often impressed by Unitarian Universalist kids. They have this tendency to take our values seriously, and actually try to live out our values.

Here’s a video about the presidential election, from a second grader whose family is part of our church here in Palo Alto (her family gave me permission to share this on my blog). Whether or not you share her political opinions, she is articulate, personable, and fun — able to express her views politely and respectfully — just the way we want our UU kids to be. Nor is it surprising that a UU kid would get involved in politics at a young age — after all, we do encourage our kids to live out their values in the real world.

Classical music video no. 2

Today’s classical music video is a collboration between Ben Frost (b. 1980) and Daniel Bjarnason (b. 1979). Frost is both a performer, primarily heavily modified electric guitar, and a composer; he has worked with Nico Muhy, Bjork, and Brian Eno, among other musicians. Bjarnason has also worked with classical and rock musicians in his native Iceland.

This is another meditative piece: “Cruel Miracles” is part of a longer work titled “Solaris,” which was inspired by the brilliant 1972 film of the same title directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The visuals are in fairly standard music video format, but I do like the way the videographer emphasizes the computers and sound boards necessary for this performance: this is not nineteenth century classical music.

Classical music video no. 1

“Classical music” — an imprecise term for art/concert music in the Western tradition — has been getting a bad name in liberal religious circles. Its primary defenders promote classical music written in the nineteenth century. Its detractors rightly point out that nineteenth century music is outdated, but then typically go on to advocate commercial pop musics which are distinctly lacking in musical or intellectual depth.

Neither nineteenth century classical music nor contemporary commercial pop musics do much for my spiritual life. But I have been getting a lot of spiritual sustenance from twenty-first century “classical music,” better known to its listeners as “new music.” This week, I’m going to post some videos of new music that do something for me spiritually. First up is this fabulous music video — music composed by Anna Clyne (b. 1980) and artwork by Josh Dorman — which I would love to use as a “reading” or meditation in a worship service:

 

Oops! Did something wrong, and this didn’t publish Monday as I meant it to do; so here it is on Tuesday.

New resource for music geeks

Scott from Boy in the Bands alerted me to Hymnary.org’s hymnal app for the iPad. They describe the app as follows:

Use our collection of over 140,000 page scans (and growing) as an enormous hymnal. Put your iPad or other tablet device on your music stand or piano, enter in a hymn title or use our melodic search engine, and music for just about any hymn you can think of is instantly available.

The average person in the pew will continue to use printed hymnals, or song sheets inserted into the order of service, or projected lyrics on the big screen behind the preacher. But this iPad app is going to be a major boon for worship leaders and musicians. Have a request for a specific hymn for a memorial service from the Army and Navy hymnal (as I did once)? — there it is on your iPad. Need to find the more traditional words for a Christmas carol? — just use the search function.

One final thought — I really hope the next Unitarian Universalist hymnal is also sold as an iPad app. I doubt many people will use it in Sunday services, but there are a fair number of people who keep a hymnal at home, and the iPad app would potentially be a lot cheaper, and easier to use.

2011 in review: the liberal religious blogosphere

The most important trend in liberal religious blogging in 2011 was the continued growth of other forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are obvious cases in point. Compared to blogging, it’s so much easier to post a quick status update to Facebook or Twitter, so much easier to let someone else manage the technical infrastructure, so much easier to stay in touch with your friends and family without juggling RSS feeds. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter (and Tumblr and Google Plus and LinkedIn and Pintrest and all the other multitudinous social media outlets) are different from blogs, they help to spread good blog posts to a wider readership, and they serve more to supplement blogs than to supplant them.

The second most important trend in liberal religious blogging: plenty of people are still writing and reading blogs. The main aggregator of Unitarian Universalist blogs, Uupdates.net, is now tracking over 500 blogs. This represents, I believe, a slight increase over last year, and on the order of a tenfold increase over five years ago. It’s impossible to keep track of that many Unitarian Universalist blogs, and I would say there is no longer a coherent UU blogosphere — there are just a lot of blogs, a lot of bloggers, and a lot of blog readers.

As an example of the ongoing strength of blogs, “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist” continues to rise slowly in readership; last time I checked, back in October, this site was approaching ten thousand unique visitors a month. (I’m not keeping track at the moment — my Web host got rid of their analytic tools, and I haven’t had time to install an alternative.) And there are plenty of other liberal religious blogs out there with bigger readerships.

And speaking only for myself, the third most important trend in liberal religious blogging has been my return to non-Unitarian Universalist blogs. In 2003 when I first started reading religious blogs regularly, there were only half a dozen Unitarian Universalist blogs; you were almost forced to read read non-UU blogs. Then for a while I tried read every UU blog at least a couple of times a year. I continue to look at uuworld.org’s UU blog round up, and I try to scan UUpdates.net periodically. But I I find myself going back to my 203 habits, and reading lots of non-UU blogs. I scan the blog of Steve Thorngate — he’s an associate editor at Christian Century — for religion news, and the intersection of religion and politics. I sometimes read Carol Merritt’s blog “Tribal Church,” mostly about young adults and religion, which is also on the Christian Century Web site. For leadership and growth issues, I regularly scan the weekly Alban Institute “Conversations” posts, which are linked to from their “Roundtable” blog. Recently, I rediscovered The Velveteen Rabbi, and am enjoying the personal take on spirituality there. So yes, I’m reading lots of non-UU blogs these days, and I’ve been enjoying the wider perspective that I’ve been getting.

Technology and the classroom (and youth group and…)

We were sitting in youth group today, talking about plans for a trip later in the year. One youth was checking his online calendar on his smart phone; I lent my laptop to another youth so he could set up a Google Plus group for the youth group to use. And a couple of us talked about how we spend way too much time use the Internet.

And this evening I happened upon a blog post by April DeConick, a professor at Rice Unviersity. She writes in part:

I guess what I am saying is that technology is ahead of us. We are enthralled with it. It has become essential to how we live and work. But we have yet to figure out how to control it. We are like that kid in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory who loves chocolate so much he jumps into the chocolate sea and nearly drowns.

Yeah. That would be me.

So I put this out into cyberspace as a kind of call, especially to other teachers. We need to get caught up with the technology and establish technology boundaries in our classrooms. We need to take back the classroom.

Anyway. If you work with young people, you might want to read DeConick’s post.

I hate Facebook (again)

Facebook has done it again: they have made their inefficient, poorly designed privacy system even worse. Obviously feeling some heat from Google Plus, they instituted something that looks a great deal like Google Plus’s “circles” feature. Except unlike Google Plus, their “circles” feature is hard to customize, and arbitrarily divides your Facebook “friends” into seemingly random categories.

Since I have an intense distrust of Facebook (their motto: “Have we done our evil quotient today?”), I’m assuming they have really just weakened their privacy yet again. So now instead of merely suspecting that everything you post on Facebook goes out to people you don’t want it to go out to, you can now be sure that everything you post on Facebook may be made completely public at any time without you knowing about it.

Not that Google Plus is any better: it still lacks important features that would make it worth while for me. The only thing social networking sites are good for is the purpose for which they were designed: to sell advertisements.