Companies get into weblog act

Companies have begun to recognize the potential power of what buffs like to call ''the blogosphere.'' Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste -- because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars -- just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.
Rock Regan, chief information officer of the state of Connecticut and a guest at last week's conference, is deploying a weblog in his office to get the techies talking. But he's trying to keep the conversation focused.
''We're not saying, `We're going to give this to you, now go off and talk about whatever you want to talk about,' '' Regan said. He tells his bloggers to focus on computer and networking topics, so they can share information about the problems and solutions they've found throughout the state's computer systems. ''So far we're pretty happy,'' Regan said.
Businesses are also looking at blogging to their customers. Companies like the software maker Macromedia Inc. encourage employees to set up public weblogs to provide information to users of the companies' products. The travel website biznettravel.com uses a blog to post links to the latest travel-related news, complete with snarky commentary. It's a clever way to give Internet companies a human face. But is it really blogging? Sure, the corporate weblogs use the same technologies, but their hearts are not really in it. The best blogs don't just deliver authoritative information; they resonate with the personalities of their creators.

A church leader I know refuses to read blogs of the staff it serves with "out of principle". Okay, let me get this straight. You refuse to read the blogs because it isn't face to face. You ignore the growing collections of stories, wisdom, and ideas growing out there because the person doesn't speak them out loud? In addition to that you ignore the words and stories of the introverts who may never speak those stories but because they can communicate more effectively online you are punishing your entire organization by ignoring them? Quite the principled stance.

Typing along

So Leighton is an ENTP. Interesting. Most coders from what I have been told are S types. That being said, LT is a great big picture thinker too. That's why we are friends. That and I seriously think that somedays he could be the next Bill Gates if he ever went rogue.

I am a combination of a INTJ and an ENTJ which explains my occasional boughts about sharing my thoughts in public.

Here is me as an ENTJ

ENTJs have a natural tendency to marshall and direct. This may be expressed with the charm and finesse of a world leader or with the insensitivity of a cult leader. The ENTJ requires little encouragement to make a plan. One ENTJ put it this way... "I make these little plans that really don't have any importance to anyone else, and then feel compelled to carry them out." While "compelled" may not describe ENTJs as a group, nevertheless the bent to plan creatively and to make those plans realiity is a common theme for NJ types.
ENTJs are often "larger than life" in describing their projects or proposals. This ability may be expressed as salesmanship, story-telling facility or stand-up comedy. In combination with the natural propensity for filibuster, our hero can make it very difficult for the customer to decline.

Combined with my strong salesmanship and cult leader tendancies, I wouldn't go near me if I am offering Kool-Aid (and Wendy's from Guyana... co-incidence, I think not)... Here is me during more introverted times. My life as an INTJ

To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know.
INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.

Here is my blogging personality

You aren't as openly affectionate as some of you NT counterparts, and this may cause other bloggers to assume you aren't as friendly. Your ideas and actual applications for these ideas are brilliant, however, and you might be more likely to create something masterful on your journal.

Wendy is a INTP

INTPs are pensive, analytical folks. They may venture so deeply into thought as to seem detached, and often actually are oblivious to the world around them.
Precise about their descriptions, INTPs will often correct others (or be sorely tempted to) if the shade of meaning is a bit off. While annoying to the less concise, this fine discrimination ability gives INTPs so inclined a natural advantage as, for example, grammarians and linguists.
INTPs are relatively easy-going and amenable to most anything until their principles are violated, about which they may become outspoken and inflexible. They prefer to return, however, to a reserved albeit benign ambiance, not wishing to make spectacles of themselves.

I made it

into Daniel Miller's parody of his a-list bloggers. Way more fair then I like to admit.

Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers

Very funny and very true...

Blogs Claim Another Victim

A proliferating band of independent writers known as �bloggers� (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.

Dan on Wifi in Church

Dan replied to my post about Fellowship Church and their WiFi. He basically mentioned it sucked and they didn't have enough range and bandwidth but goes on to say this about what wifi in church could be...

a mini-revolution ensues when IP is open and abundant in spaces of teaching and worship. when this happens the competing monologue effect comes into play. all of a sudden the possessor of the bully pulpit is accountable to the dozen bloggers and curious fact checkers in the audience. Clies and IPaqs, laptops and cellphones at the ready these hyper-literate parishioners are verifying historical claims, sending comments across the room on IM and publicly rough blogging the sermon/lesson warts and all.
a capability like this would be a tangible sign within the church of something akin to Dan Gillmor's WeMedia (http://www.cjr.org/year/03/1/gillmor.asp). though a phenomenal way for leaders to learn and a metric for gauging response my guess is that the lack of control would be a show stopping issue in many churches.
pity.

Exactly.

Quite a few people have e-mailed and asked about my trip to Los Angeles. Here are some of the highlights...
The time at Hope International University was a lot of fun. It is in the city of Fullerton and right across the street from Cal-State Fullerton. The class went well, the students were sharp, and the campus is very nice. Hope put me up in a very nice hotel with a jacuzzi in each room and a giant screen television in the lobby. If all hotels were that nice...
Thursday night I took my spiritual pilgrimage to Newport Beach and to the worldwide ministry headquarters of TheOOZE. The drive to Newport Beach was amazing and Spencer's beach shack was beyond cool. After meeting Lisa and the Burke kids, Spencer and I headed north to Huntington Beach to connect with Next-Wave's publisher and fellow blogger Charlie Wear. We had a couple of hours to kill so we grabbed supper at Ruby's at the end of the Huntington Beach pier. While that may not seem that cool to people from southern California, Saskatoon and the western Canadian prairies don't have a lot of piers. While Saskatoon does have one, it extends maybe 8 feet out onto the South Saskatchewan River. While we were eating supper (blue cheese on a hamburger is a fine choice), you could see dolphins swimming off the pier. In case you were wondering, Saskatoon's pier doesn't have dolphins either.
After eating, we met up with Charlie at the Huntington Beach Beer Company, a brew pub on Main Street where I was there for the signing of the Independent Alliance (if you have never heard of the IndyAlliance, you will in the future). We had a great talk about our journey, the future, the church, and Christ. Charlie said some great things about permission giving structures that had me thinking the entire time I was down there. It was a great evening.
After I was done teaching on Friday, I met Todd Olthoff for lunch at a Mexican place near Hope. Apparently it had a live Mariachi Guitar band at nights (if I ever become a billionaire, I am going to have a mariachi guitar band follow me around and be the soundtrack for my life). As a side note. Americans in Saskatoon have complained that you can't get good Mexican food in most of western Canada. Apparently Taco Time is not really Mexican food. They are right. The Mexican dish I had was some of the spiciest food I have ever had. Later on that day I laid in the state between life and death, not really knowing which way this thing was going to go. Back to Todd. I have know idea where we ran onto each other online but it has been a while. I think it was on Stephen Shield's now legendary Faith Maps mailing list but we had a great couple of hours talking. Todd was at Calvary Chapel and is now the Pastor of Married Couple's Small Groups at Saddleback. Todd is also the first person that I have met that has an iPod and if my memory served me correct, left a comment on here once that made me finally go out and get a MP3 player.
Saturday after I was done teaching, I decided to head into Los Angeles and check out the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels which is right downtown. I was a little stressed about going downtown because I was meeting Jason, Brooke, and Paige Evans later in the day and I didn't want to be late but traffic wasn't that bad and I had a lot of time at the Cathedral.
The Cathedral was a big disappointment. First of all, considering what was spent on it, it really isn't that attractive. It feels cold and really never instilled much awe. I was kind of saddened by the constant reminders of asking for money. This sounds bizarre but there was a wedding on while I was walking through the sanctuary and it was so far away, the tourists didn't disturb it. The Cathedral was designed to emmanate power but it doesn't really do that. Sadly feeding and programs to the poor were cut to build it and in the end it is just a big square monument not to Christ but to the Cardinal and the cynical side of me wonders if that wasn't its purpose. Even the little official guide book I bought suggests the same. The only really cool part was the gift shop was selling 5 inch high Pope John Paul II dolls which I bought for me and one for the person that appreciates that stuff even more than I, Cathy Johnson.
While I was down there, I took a look at the slums of L.A. and it was really an eye opener. The women at the hotel warned me about entering those areas so as one not to listen to wise counsel, I drove into them on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Saskatoon does not have poor sections of town compared to places like Watts and South Central Los Angeles. I wonder of the essential strength of a society where whole people groups get left behind.
Later Saturday night I had supper with Jason, Brooke, and Paige Evans. It was good to see all of them. Jason is leading an Etrek module for church planters this fall. I will be promoting that stuff later this summer.
While I was glad to be coming home, I have to admit that I really felt home when I was in Southern California this time and could really be a place where I would love to live. (ahem, job offers anyone?)

The List

now has 25 Saskatchewan bloggers... what have we started?

Salam Pax Is Real - How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me.

The day after I returned to New York, reunited with my cable modem, I checked out a friend's blog that linked to an Austrian interview with Salam Pax. I clicked to it. Salam Pax mentioned an NGO he had worked for, CIVIC, and this caught my attention. I knew the woman who was in charge of CIVIC; she stayed at my Baghdad hotel, the Hamra. Salam Pax mentioned that he had done some work for foreign journalists. We traveled in the same circles, apparently. He also mentioned that he had studied in Vienna. This really caught my attention, because I knew an Iraqi who had worked for CIVIC, hung out with foreign journalists, and studied in Vienna. I clicked over to his blog.

His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading�mine. Poolside at the Hamra�with me. The 24 pizzas�we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about.

Fixing some missing archives... this could get ugly What a pain in the neck. If you ever lose your archives with Blogger or Blogger Pro, make sure you save your site template and then switch to another template that Blogger offers up that lists templates (not all do). Then publish it. Your archives will generally reappear. If they don't republish your archives. If they appear, then go back to your original template publish. Republish your archives after that and all should be good.

Scholars Who Blog

To a remarkable degree, blogs also appear to bring full professors, adjuncts, and students onto a level field. With no evident condescension, senior faculty bloggers routinely link to the political-affairs blog maintained by Matthew Yglesias, a senior at Harvard University. "Nobody knew my name when we started this," says Josh Chafetz, a current Rhodes scholar whose OxBlog, written with two fellow Americans at Oxford, has made him a well-known figure among academic bloggers. "In many ways it really is almost a pure marketplace of ideas. You can build up a readership. You just have to write things that people like."

"You do see some of the barriers of rank and hierarchy break down," says the woman who blogs pseudonymously as the Invisible Adjunct. (She granted an interview on the condition that her identity not be revealed.) "An undergraduate and an adjunct can speak to someone with tenure on a more or less equal footing."

Cool...

Worship Freehouse last night

What I liked...
- the free Root Beer that the Bassment gave me (I sound like Snoopy)
- meeting fellow Saskablogger Randal Friesen
- The G-Force Visualizer working and realizing that I haven't scratched the surface on it at all.
- Amanda Johnson's $6000, 6 megabtye professional camera. Can't wait to see the pics.
- Chester's valour suit.
- Mark going around and eating nachos, popcorn, and pop from every table at the Freehouse
- Leighton and Gloria's teaching
- Mike and Todd's music.
- Darren Friesen's mullet
- Lorne Cornish was down there and not a single fight broke out. (which is odd if you know Lorne)
- a lot of blogger's in a small space (Lorne, me, Wendy, Jadon, Mike, Gloria, Leighton, Jeremy, Randal Friesen, John, Cathy, Jackie, Mike and I am probably missing someone else.
- Cool talk with Alan Creech as I was leaving over Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Reminded me how cool and how small this world is.

What I didn't like-
- I was really tired.
- The fact that it didn't fully click in on how much cooler that G-Force could be until half way through.
- The dill dipping sauce that they gave with the nachos (what's up with that?)
- We had that many bloggers in one room and no internet.

Cathy Johnson has her thoughts on the Freehouse here.

Not quite my last Blogger Pro post

I am really enjoying FusionPublisher but it has a couple of formatting things that I need to work out. I like it a lot and it will probably be back here very soon but it isn't quite ready for a page layout control freak like me yet. We'll keep working at it.

My last Blogger post.

This is my last post with Blogger Pro. My one year subscription is coming to an end and it is time to say good-bye. Here is my list of good and bad things I like about Pro.
The Good...
Faster than Blogger.
File Upload
Spellcheck (which I never use but when I do...)
Automatically pings weblogs.com
The Bad...
File Upload (feature included in w.blogger)
w.blogger has all the features I used in Pro except for the title field.
I don't think it was any more reliable then Blogger. It just went down at different times.
Lack of integrated commenting.

In the end I was glad I upgraded to Blogger Pro. It offered me some enhanced functionality in addition it let me give back to Pyra and help out in the development of Blogger. In the end, the future of Blogger was kind of uncompelling for me so the choice came down to Moveable Type, Radio Userland or using Fusion Publisher which will eventually be a commercial product of PrairieFusion. I leaned toward Moveable Type for a while but eventually decided to run Fusion Publisher. I'll let you know how the transition goes but from that platform.

changes coming to the site

As most of you know, I work with Leighton Tebay and Jeb Runquist at PrairieFusion. To put it simply, we build amazing Cold Fusion powered sites. One night I was talking to Leighton and he mentioned something about building a blog client for ColdFusion. A couple of weeks later it was running on his own personal blog and has been improved on continuously since then.

I have resisted temptation to move over to Fusion Publisher (homepage for it coming soon) because I was very hopeful about what Blogger Pro was going to morph into. After looking at Danno (the new Blogger version, I was kind of disappointed after realizing it wasn't all that different. The one thing it has that Fusion Publisher does not have yet is RSS. I don't have a RSS feed yet but I wonder how important it is to my readers. Would RSS make this blog that much better and is RSS worth having these brutal and slow comments.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Update: Uncle Dave has written an overview of what RSS is.

Blogging along

I spent an hour tonight reading a lot of blogs. Many of them by people in the church but many outside the church. I was really struck by how much more I enjoy the blogs outside the church. They seem to be full of so much more... well... life and joy. Is the church the only interests many Christian bloggers have? Is that their entire life? What about extended circle of friends and interests? So many blogs that from people inside the church are devoid of these. Of the church blogs, that is what they are preoccupied with. Church, structure, and that fun stuff. The pursuit of Christ has been reduced to the study of the ideal church. Especially with many postmoderns.

Where are the great stories of what God is doing? or that we are doing? or that someone close to us is doing? Are there none or is it that we just can't see it? Just thinking aloud.

FusionBlog

Several months ago Leighton was over and said it would be easy to create a blogging software in Cold Fusion. I was bugging him that I wanted to move to Moveable Type and Leighton used MT as a guideline for features. He was over the other night and showing me what he had come up with and I was amazed. While it is still rough I think he has come up with not only a great blogging tool but a content management system for bloggers that goes beyond MT in some ways. It is really cool.

I love Blogger and I am torn because I they have set the bar so low for people to get their blogs online but LT has created a tool that I would love to use.

Management by Blog?

Currently the theoreticians are more excited about internal blogging systems than are the people who actually have to implement them. Earlier this month, on his widely read weblog, Biz Stone predicted that "blogging in the business community is about to be a big deal. When Google bought Blogger, a record skipped, the music stopped, and business folks turned their heads toward the blogging phenomenon." Stone says he thinks the most immediate uses of blogging in corporations will be in the area of knowledge management: "Companies are going to want to capture people's experiences so when they leave the company they don't take everything with them."

Shopping

I went shopping today for my friend Mike Gingerich's birthday present. He is turning 30 tomorrow so I decided I would go and out and buy him a gift. While I hate shopping for myself, I enjoy shopping for my friends and I think I got him a pretty cool gift. I can't wait to give it to him tomorrow. Mike is a brand new blogger and I thought as the second part of his gift would a call out to all of my reader to head over to his site and leave him some birtday greetings in his comments and if you want, add http://mikegingerich.blogspot.com toyour blogroll. I would love to see Mike's comments and hit counter working overtime over the next 36 hours.

If you are wondering, Mike and I worked together at Lakeview Church and now we are a part of the Worship Freehouse.

Kevin Sites Blog

CNN asked Kevin to stop blogging while working for them which I think is fair even if I don't like it. I saw him on CNN last night and he is one of my favorite reporters. To bad CNN won't allow him to be one of my favorite bloggers as well.

You're in, you're out

Rachel Cunliffe posted about blogs4God's decision to exclude anonymous bloggers. The discussion that followed made me think of some things that Richard Florida made about the industrial age and modernity and how important conformity is. Our industrial culture has made a strong influence in that way on Christianity. We have that same problem and doesn't know what to do with people who have no intention of conforming to our ideas of what is acceptable Christian behaviour. I think we see that online and offline.

As the institution, whether a church, a small group, or a website, we make the rules and then it is up to the later people to conform to them. Of course it is about control and we justify/spiritualize it to make the institution a safer place for those who are conformists. No wonder why Len Sweet talks of the great spiritual awakening happening outside of Christianity and the church can't see out of its box far enough to see it.

Some ideas

Okay, here are some ideas that we could do about the HIV crisis in Africa...
What if I set up a PayPal account on this site so that people could donate to, oh, let's say, God's Golden Acre online. $5, $10 at a time. We could post the code online so other bloggers could put it on their sites and e-mail zines and stuff like that. I would post my PayPal statement online so we could see what we were raising together. Hopefully a bunch of other blogs could do the same. I am in Canada so I can't use Amazon's system (and they take a huge chunk) but maybe someone down south could do that. Leave your feedback below on what you think of the idea.

The soup was spicy...

The spicy soup today was pretty much run of the mill. Mike, Jeb, and John were all there and just as I was going to pull out my camera and take some pictures to document this blogger summit, John goes, "wait a second and I'll just lick Jeb's ear".

You will notice the smile on Jeb's face. I think we can all give Jeb some grace and just chalk it up to pure and complete shock. No one expects that to happen over lunch. You have to feel sorry for the guy.

It is John's birthday tomorrow. Make sure you leave a comment on his blog or at least e-mail him a card at jcampea@yahoo.com. You may also want to e-mail Jeb some sympathies at jeb@jebrunquist.com. There is an old saying by Mark Twain that goes something like this. "It takes two people to betray you. One friend to grab you and lick your ear, another to post it to his weblog."

Updated the blogroll

The blogroll grew by a couple of sites tonight. I am adding Jackie Reimche to the list which is rare for me as she has only been blogging for two days but I worked with Jackie at Lakeview and saw he drink more coffee than humanly possible during Tim Horton's Roll Up The Rim To Win contest so I know she has some obsessive compulsive behaviour in her which makes her a perfect blogger. Plus, I was at Lakeview today and she was almost going crazy because Blogger was down (what else is new).

I haven't been posting at Hockey Pundits for a couple of weeks. Apparently after I took some time off, so did everyone else. Anyways I am back blogging there.

Brooke Graham

blogs too... Brooke is in the Dominican Republic right now with her husband and noted blogger, Kelly.

Ideas to Blog to...

I was talking to Dennis Camplin today and as he was talking to me about what to blog about, I had to run. I decided to post a list of topics Dennis can write about on his blog.
1) How Jordon's preaching changed my life (or that have had to been rebuked)
2) Funeral wreaths I have tied to Gloria Reimer's car.
3) Inappropriate comments that made Gloria angry.
4) Church porches I have tied to my car to and then torn down.
5) Several ways to avoid making food for myself when my wife is away.
6) Bloggers I have worked with.
7) Ways Johnny Maxwell has changed my life.
8) Coffee Shops I have loved
9) V.E.T. meetings I have enjoyed
10) Cars I have bought and sold before Wilda even knew I had them.

NY Times Profile on Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds

With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot

Being a law professor, author, husband, father, part-time record producer and space policy wonk would have been enough to keep most people busy. But Glenn Reynolds needed more. So in August 2001, he began a Weblog - a rolling online commentary and collection of Internet links - to fill up the few minutes that wiggled free in his hyperkinetic life He began to write. And write. And write. All the time - as many as 30 updates a day. And on every conceivable topic, it seemed: gun control, nanotechnology, barbecue, campus intolerance, fears of terrorism, diet fads, war with Iraq, civil liberties, Hollywood blockbusters, electronic music, cloning cults, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the 2004 presidential race, to name a recent few. As the postings piled up, Mr. Reynolds's omnivorous curiosity began to attract an increasing number of kindred spirits to his site, called InstaPundit (www.instapundit.com). Now it regularly attracts 50,000 people a day - uncommon traffic for a blog (as the journals are commonly known) not connected to a media giant. After decades of pivoting among a dozen occupations, avocations and obsessions, Mr. Reynolds, 42, had finally found the perfect medium for his seemingly infinite interests.

His blogging patterns make us all look a lot healthier.

"When I cook dinner, if there's something I can leave on the stove, I'll post an item and come back," he said. "I haven't burned anything yet." While his daughter plays games on her computer at night, Mr. Reynolds will sit with her, updating InstaPundit on a machine of his own. When she and her mother - Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist, author and budding documentarian - go to bed, Mr. Reynolds is back to InstaPundit again. "It's gotten to the point where if I go four or five hours without posting, I get e-mails asking where I am," he said. But it's not just readers' expectations that keep Mr. Reynolds blogging. He has warned many people thinking about starting a blog that it can quickly become an addiction. He seems to know from experience. "Today, I was in the gym, on the treadmill, watching CNN," he said. "And as I was watching it, I was composing a blog entry in my head. Then I thought, 'This really isn't normal.' " Money doesn't seem to be a motivator, either. While another prominent blogger, Andrew Sullivan, recently held an online "pledge week" that he says brought in about $85,000 for his site, Mr. Reynolds says he will not make a similar move, although he does have an online tip jar that has netted $1,800 since InstaPundit's introduction. Money would turn the blog into a job, he said. He doesn't want to spoil the fun. "The Internet's just a big playground for guys like me," he said. "I've got all these ideas, and now there's a way to act on them."

PrairieFusion

Every once in a while I get an e-mail or phone call that asks me, "what are you doing now that you left Lakeview?". I am still pastoring at Lakeland Community Church and am also partnering with fellow bloggers, Leighton Tebay and Jeb Runquist in a tiny web media company called PrairieFusion. Jeb is the Creative Director, Leighton is the President and an extremely talented programmer, and I am the Director of Client relations. I was hoping to have the website redesigned and up but we have some other clients and projects that are a higher priority so we haven't redesigned the site yet but I decided to let the cat out of the bag.

PrairieFusion specializes in dynamic database driven sites that allow the client to update and change from any computer anywhere. In many ways we are extending the functionality of software like Blogger and MoveableType to the entire website. I have been good friends with Leighton and Jeb for a couple of years so we are all excited about working together. I'll let you know when we redesign PrairieFusion, post some pictures of our office, and I'll post some links to our clients pages once we get them online.

The Atkins Diet?

Anyone have any thoughts on the Atkins Diet. A lot of bloggers have talked about it and liked it but then some media talking heads have really bad mouthed it.

How to create a new blog

A lot of people have e-mailed me and told me that they wanted to start blogging this year. Perhaps the easiest way to get started is to use Blogger. I found this "how-to" while surfing a while ago and it gives you the steps to start your blog. Once you start it, let me know and I'll give you a hand announcing it to the world.

UPDATE: Mike Todd e-mailed about his blog. Here it is.

We came, we saw, we had some great soup...

Hmm, sweet wonderful spicy soup. It wasn't your usual pilgrimage to the hot soup. First of all, fellow blogger, Tim Gonyou was back from Toronto for a couple of days. Tim is not without his prejudices. He doesn't like people from Indiana. Apparently people from Indiana are hicks. Even people living in Indianapolis. Of course, Tim is from Illinois. Tim is the only person I know of that has been dunked on by Kendall Gill. CORRECTION Tim Gonyou has posted a clarification statement in my comments. "I don't hate people from Indiana. I've met some fine people from Indiana. Sure many of them were quite hick like, but what's so wrong with that anyway. Some would describe it as "country charm"." Sorry for any confusion.



Kelly and Brooke Graham are back from the Dominican Republic. Kelly is the chaplain for a private school there. For some reason the entire grade one class calls Kelly, "Anna Kournakova". He doesn't know why either.



It was a big day for Brooke, she had the soup today and was inducted into the Spicy Soup Hall of Fame. Congratulations! Brooke and Kelly are up for another week and then it is back to the Dominican Republic for another five months and then back to Saskatoon for a while (we hope). Brooke is tutoring kids down there while Kelly does some teaching and handles the chapels for the kids. I guess that means that she is Mrs. Anna Kournakova. If I had some blogging advice to give to Kelly, never post on your blog that your nickname is Anna Kounikova. Either way, it was good to see Kelly and Brooke. They looked a lot better than the rest of us who haven't had the opportunity to lay on a beach all winter. Whatever people say to you Brooke, they can't take away your place in the Soup Hall of Fame.

For those of you who don't know, I worked with both Kelly and Brooke at Lakeview. Kelly is the one that introduced us to the soup. He is kind of a mix between the patron saint of the soup and the soup Godfather.

Lott and the Blog

Wired has an article about how the blogosphere brought down Trent Lott. It is the same blah, blah, blah of some of the earlier articles but it had these interesting quote in it.

"Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books."

heh, funny. This part kind of ticked me off.

"There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting."

It makes me wonder if she has actually read some of the blogs out there. Do you know Larry Lessig's credentials? Dan Gilmour's?
This phone interview must have been done over the phone because I imagine the net is a strange place to her. Has she never heard of news section of Google or that other news sources print online? Or does she mean that without resources means we don't get paid for it and therefore we don't have value if we aren't professionals? She doesn't understand that blogs are not replacements for traditional papers. They do supplement regular media sources and act as a sort of filter. When the mainstream media gave up on Trent Lott, the blogs did not and kept the story alive long enough until the mainline media picked up on it again. We did not break the story, we just never gave up on something that struck a chord with many people.

Pledge Week at Andrew Sullivan.com

Andrew Sullivan is asking for donations to keep his blog alive and pay some staff. So here's my plea. You're the reason I'm writing this blog, and I'm turning to you for help. We're working hard for ad dollars, but the landscape is still bleak. Many of you have been real generous in the past, for which I'm eternally grateful. But a fraction of 1 percent of our regular readers send us donations, and I hate interrupting the site all the time to beg. So we came up with the idea of a pledge week - like reader-supported public radio and television. All this week, we're going to nag you to donate something. Then we promise we'll leave you alone for 6 months. What's a fair request? I figure that our regular readers, who visit us a few times a week or more, could completely transform the prospects of the site if they gave us $20 a year - a few cents a visit for some. If only one or two percent of you did that, we'd be completely financially secure. I could get a salary and focus on the blog more; I could hire an assistant to help with email, editing, the Letters Page and the Book Club (currently our interns get a piddling stipend and I get nothing); we could add more features to the site; and we could plan for the future securely. If you think of the $20 as retroactive payment for two years of daily work as well as the upcoming year, it's a bargain.

I have always enjoyed his blog even though last week a couple of readers wrote to tell me that they were removing me from their blogrolls because I added Andrew to mine (I am assuming it is because he is gay and they are closed minded but I didn't bother to ask). Send him $20 and keep the blog rolling! Time will tell if this is an effective way to make blogging and micro-media a little more commercially viable.

UPDATE: I have been delinked from a couple other blogs today for posting this and flamed to a crisp (funny, the last two times I have been flamed had to do with linking to the CNN story about Nickelodeon's special for kids of gay parents -- I should have expected it). Some people find it wrong to link a site like Andrew Sullivan. That's their opinion. Here is my reasons for linking to him.

Well, there are a couple of reasons. First and foremost because I read his blog daily and enjoy it tremendously (except for the times he ticks me off but that is usually his political views). In October 2002, he had 25,701,543 hits so I am not alone. He gives excellent political commentary and is a far superior blogger and author then I am. I don't have to agree with his lifestyle to read his point of view on the world.

Secondly, Sullivan is better educated on American politics then I am and I learn a lot from reading his blog. Sullivan has a Harvard Ph.D in Political Science and was the editor of the New Republic. I don't agree with everything I read of his (I think I am more centrist then he is but even that is up for debate) but even the stuff I don't agree with, I learn from.

Thirdly, I don't care if he is gay or what his sexual orientation is. I get tired of the fundementalist elements of Christianity being horrified that ABC shows Ellen as being gay, or upset about some other moral topic of the week. The web is a conversation. I have conversations with people all the time and I am confident enough in myself and in my readers (I guess some of that confidence was misplaced) to be able to have a conversation with those that may not share identical viewpoints. I am not an expert on this but I don't think you can catch gay by reading a weblog or talking to someone. This may be news to some but it is true. If you are looking for a place to hear what to think, you have come to the wrong weblog.

That's all I have on the subject. If you want to delink, go ahead. You aren't alone. I will link to Andrew Sullivan until his writings bores me or I get tired of blogging, not because of him being gay.

UPDATE: The folks over @ Blogroots have some other reasons why not to give money to Sullivan. Interesting discussion.

Did they miss the Afghanistan war?

Blogs May Pierce the Fogs of War CNN owned the story of the first Gulf War -- blogs and the Internet may carry the day if there is a sequel. Just as the 1991 conflict was the testing ground for 24-hour cable channels like CNN more than 10 years ago, a second conflict there may serve as a trial by fire for the news and commentary sites known as blogs. Blogs -- short for Web logs -- are pithy, opinionated collections of links to other news coverage, accompanied by the author's commentary. Since a blog can be created by anyone with an Internet connection, however, readers should take what is written there with a grain of salt. A war in Iraq could be a blog watershed. Just as CNN made its reputation with live coverage from Baghdad, blogs may be uniquely suited to help cut through the fog of war by showcasing diverse accounts and opinions. "The chief role of bloggers, judging by the Afghan war, is to draw together obscure reporting that didn't make the mainstream, and also to second-guess dumb news analysis, pointing out what people said that was wrong," said Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog (http://www.instapundit.com) is one of the most well-established and widely-read. Blog creators are usually candid about their ideological leanings. But it is ultimately up to readers to decide which blogs are worthy of trust. "It's based on their track record more than anything else," said Reynolds.

Blogs of Note 2002

Okay, this may not be the Bloggies or SXSW or even the bloggies but here is my list of favorite blogs of 2002.

Best Aestetic Design
This one is close. Alan Creech and Kevin Rains site with a honorable mention towards Howlers Update (except his blog is rarely updated these days). When Alan redesigned his site a couple people actually came into my office to tell me about it. When I saw Kevin Rains' site I loved the clean design and really excellent adaptation and tweak of a Blogger template. If I wasn't involved in it, I would mention Hockey Pundits as well. Jeb did a great job on the redesign.

Favorite Stories
Tim Gonyou. Who else has stories of being dunked on by Kendall Gill and walking into a gay bar only to find it full of men in underwear watching the Ten Commandments. Stories like that don't come along every day.

Best Community Blog
Is there even any doubt about it? MetaFilter is the best place to find great websites, breaking news, and some interesting comments. Over 15,000 members. Lots of new content. MetaFilter is the first blog I check every morning and the last I check before I go to bed. I will also point out the Kingdom Space blog as being really cool as well. Leaders all over the world sharing stories bigger than themselves.

Most Missed Blogs
mybluehouse was well written, nicely designed, and really funny most days. I appreciate the postcards but I do miss the blog.

Best Links
Dan Hughes wins this hands down. No one expands my mind with more great posts than Dan and he has honed the ability to say more in a link than most of us do in a paragraph. I am not a warblogger but Nick Denton constantly points to things that make me go hmm. Both shame and expand my limited North American worldview often.

Best Writing
Karen Neudorf at Beyond Magazine's blog puts most of us to shame. Kevin Barbieux writes The Homeless Guy. He has often wondered why his blog is so popular but it comes down to the guy can write really well. I wish my prose was a 1/4 as elegant as Karen or Kevin's.

Favorite Blogs You May Not Be Reading
Steven Johnson. Johnson wrote Emergence which was one of my favorite books of 2002. He recently launched his own blog which brings his writings to life daily. In just a couple of weeks, it has become one of my favorite destinations on the net. Larry Lessig is best known for his work in Eldred vs. Ashcroft but he has a blog as well. If you are interested in digital and creative rights, his blog is great. Mark Riddle's blog is funny, pointed and educational.

w.bloggar

w.Bloggar is a nice client-side blogging app that supports publishing to Blogger and other multiple blog formats, including Movable Type. The only downside is that the editor isn't WYSIWYG, although it does include a preview pane where you can view your formatted posts and Blogger's API doesn't support Pro features yet. The best part is that it's freeware. Kudos to the developers.

blogs4God

The day that blogs4God first launched, I was among those that referred to it as a potential Christian ghetto. The kind of places where American Christians went to avoid the real world. Part of it was the name "semi-definative list of Christian blogs" but the other part of it was I was thinking that the last things we needed was to create a Christian sub-culture for blogs. I didn't know who was behind it but I had some pre-concieved notions of what they were like (I am a cynical Canadian, what can I say?) As soon as I started to deal with Bene Diction, Rachel, Dean, and others I realized that while we may not share the same worldview all of the time, they really cared about other people online and are all wonderful people. They even proved my charges wrong and shamed my preconceptions. blogs4God is not a ghetto but a cool place to see what is being talked about all across the Kingdom. We may not agree with it all of the time (a little conservative for me -- or I could just be a little to liberal for them) but I do appreciate it - a lot. In addition to that, I have seen Bene Diction leave probably a hundred comments on mine and other sites across the net. Even when he disagrees with the post, I read it and feel encouraged. The same thing could be said about the rest of the team. They build people up as they go along. That is one of the reasons that I was kind of irritated by what Russ Mayes wrote today about blogs4God. Mainly that they weren't using the name Jesus enough. He said the following,

Am I the only one who thinks blogs4God has lost its focus? Don't get me wrong, I still think it is a good resource. I'm just not sure how much different it is from other metablogs out there in the blogosphere. It seems to me that if it wants to be "a semi-definitive list of Christian blogs" then the writeups that occupy the main page should regularly focus on Christianity. That doesn't seem to be the case. For example, open the page in a new window and use your browser's "Find" feature to search for a few words. Search for "Jesus." It will come up a couple dozen times, but all but one of those is within a reprint of an article on evangelizing to Jehovah's Witnesses. That is a worthwhile article, and I'm glad they printed it. But there are a weeks worth of writeups on the home page, and there is only 1 other place where Jesus is mentioned (and that is for Jesus Action Figures?!). Do some other searches: "God," "Lord," "Bible" and see how few times these words appear.

Russ, you may be right (but I am pretty sure you are not), they may not mention the name of Jesus a lot on the blog but for anyone that has dealt with them, they have showed a lot of His love and encouragement. Give them some slack. I know of a couple of bloggers who felt ignored and unheard have their views changed when they were linked to or just contacted with a cool comment or note by these guys and girl. I don't know what their official stated goal is but if they said it was to build up other Christian bloggers, I wouldn't disagree with them. There is more to building the web than saying "repent" and "love Jesus" all the time. They may not "talk the talk" all the time but they "walk the walk". I can say that online, they embody a lot of what is good about the Internet and I think that is more important. These are some of the people who have moved beyond saying it all of the time to doing it. I appreciate there dedication, committment and ability to encourage a lot of people to "find their voice and speak their mind". blogs4God may not say certain things enough for some people but they are encouraging hundreds of other bloggers to speak their mind and share their journey. Instead of one blog, there is thousands of voices. Not be stupid but it seems like a pretty Biblical approach. In the end, I realize that I can't and don't support them enough. They are some of the people that make the web cooler and need to be thanked for that!

More of the same...

I heard some more feedback about this post. Some people thought I was too hard on Lakeview and was comparing them to the Crystal Cathedral. I wasn't comparing them at all. I was posing the question that the Crystal Cathedral was one of the most innovative churches in North America at their peak (if I remember correctly their numbers are in decline somewhat) and took some real unheard of steps to communicate the Gospel. Here they are years later still using the same strategy and have grown into an older congregation and are thinking in terms of endowments funds just to keep the building in place. The question I have and I asked was, what stops larger contemporary churches today from going down that same route? What is stopping Lakeview or any other church from going down that same route? I don't know if too many larger churches have thought of it. One of the things you hear from around the country is that many formerly young vibrant megachurches aren't so young anymore. The people have aged with the Sr. Pastor, similarly to churches that have gone before them. Church growth specialists tell us that churches generally attract people like them so when a church ages, they just keep getting older. From looking around North America, it has happened all over.

I feel bad for the amount of angst that the question and post have brought up. It is never my desire to take shots of Lakeview or anyone else I know here. My blog is me thinking outloud. Occasionally in draft form. Originally the post was supposed to be saved to the draft but got published and then Blogger crashed (doh). I went to sleep with the idea of correcting it the next moring and some people were really hurt by it. I am quite sorry if you were. The language of "command and control vs. chaordic" weren't meant to be part of the original post but got put down in a post framework (that's how I write, dump some ideas out and work them). To make a long story short, I wasn't trying to attack anyone or make a statement. It was a draft that got published. It was an accident. If you have any more questions about this, let me know. It is better to discuss it that was then through a second person.

A final note. When I read and even write about this stuff, I think about my own context. I think about Lakeview Church and Lakeland Church. I think we all do it. When a person from IBM reads Fast Company or the Wall Street Journal, they think of IBM. When a person working in Ford reads something, they think in context of their workplace. For good and bad. I don't think it is a bad or devisive thing to think aloud. When I post on the blog, it is not like a print publication, it is thoughts from that time and they are subject to editing, being deleted, or even radically changed when I change my mind. Doc Searls of Linux Journal defines them like this, I think blogs are too personal, too conversational, too interactive � too human � to be considered "outlets" for anything. The journals we call "blogs" and the journals we call "publications" are very different in kind. Blogs are totally native to the world of ends we call the Web. Publications are native to the physical world. They are adapted to the Web, but not native to it. One way they don't adapt is in the permanent nature of their output. Once published, it's done. Unlike publications, blogs are subject to subsequent editing and re-editing. They also welcome edits by others. The are alive in the sense that they are, like their authors, unfinished.

That kinds of sums up this blog. Unfinished, interactive, and a conversation. If you have problems with something published here, talk to me about it and chances are that if you are right, I will change my mind and my post. This isn't a magazine or a newspaper but thoughts written down. It is an online conversation. They can and do change. Lots.

Afterthought:

I don't often talk of the positive things that Lakeview and Lakeland does because I read some pastors blogs and I find that really annoying when they do it. It would like reading a Microsoft coders blog and hearing them talk about how great Office XP is. I don't think you would believe them. It doesn't mean I don't see lots of it, it just means I don't post about them. That is for other people to do.

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De-Innovation

I posted this last week and upset a bunch of people. It was meant to be a draft, had some half filled thoughts but it got accidently posted and then Blogger calved on me. Here it is again in a revised version. As many of you know, the church I work at is in transition. Churches transition (well some do). I think ours is moving from slightly postmodern back to modern (but that is just my opinion) I think it is a natural part of church life (transitions anyways). Lakeview is trying to figure out what it means to move from a modern church to a postmodern world and finding the right balance (for them). From where you need to go from where you are. For each one of these transitions a dedicated