What's the Difference?

Is there a significant difference between Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America," and what Rev. Billy Graham has often said: "If God does not judge America for its sins, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."?

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama,Billy Graham,Jeremiah Wright

The greatest criminal ever?

For those of you who haven't heard of Jeffery Manchester, you may want to check out his story on Wikipedia.

Manchester hid inside a Toys-R-Us store for over 2 months before venturing out into an adjacent abandoned building where he created an apartment equip with A/C, electricity, and a complex surveillance system made out of stolen baby monitors. Manchester had been in isolation for over four months and despretaly needed companionship. In an attempt to re-start his life, Manchester performed one last robbery on the Toys-R-Us before escaping through his secret door connecting the two buildings. Manchester then watched his surveillance system as police and SWAT cleared and searched the area to no avail. With the money he needed, Manchester now integrated himself into a church community where he became involved with his soon to be girlfriend "Leigh"

I don't know if he is the greatest criminal ever but part of me is impressed by his nerve.

75 Skills Every Man Should Master

28. Play go fish with a kid.

You don't crush kids. You talk their ear off, make an event out of it, tell them stories about when you were a kid this or in Vegas that. You have to play their game, too, even though they may have been playing only for weeks. Observe. Teach them without once offering a lesson. And don't be afraid to win. They can handle it.

The full list is from Esquire

P.J O'Rourke

Politics won't allow for the truth.

Manufactured Landscapes on The Hour

Edward Burtynsky was on The Hour back in April of 2007.  Here is a clip of his appearance on the show.  Here he is accepting his TED prize and here is the trailer for Manufactured Landscapes

Technorati Tags: Edward Burtynsky,Manufactured Landscape,The Hour,environment

Al Gore's Updated Presentation

Al Gore's new presentation of An Inconvenient Truth that was recently given at TED.

Technorati Tags: Al Gore,An Inconvenient Truth,TED

Why I no longer care about the Olympics

It's funny, despite my hometown hosting the Olympics in 1988, I am not that big fan of the Olympics.  I don't see the Olympic ideal any different than any other professional sport so I don't feel that much affinity with it.  Dan Wetzel puts it.

As the news pours out of China about the latest round of murdered monks and slaughtered nuns, as crowds around the world protest the Olympic torch, the prevailing wisdom now is that the Beijing Olympics are looking like, if we're lucky, merely a redo of the 1936 Berlin Games. And that's only in the unlikely event the bloodshed ends.

And so the International Olympic Committee's apologists are claiming the ridiculous decision to award this summer's games to China in the first place was a worthwhile gamble to modernize the host country even though it appears to be a bet that they will lose.

But this was no gamble.

No person with even a modicum of sense could have believed the Olympics would cause China to reverse course on human rights, democracy, freedom and the environment. To believe it overnight would turn into Switzerland is not gambling, it's insanity.

Nor would anyone think that freedom seekers in Tibet, their cries mostly ignored for the last 50 years, would decide to just stand down as world attention finally turns to them just because they didn't want to embarrass the very government they believe persecutes them.

No, this was a straight sellout, not a gamble. The IOC willingly purchased the unholy bill of goods China was peddling so its sponsoring corporations could, in turn, sell stuff to the Chinese people.

Maybe they offered up a prayer that it would work or maybe they just cashed the checks. Either way it's a decision that gets more shameful each day and, as we go past the point of turning back, the ultimate example of how the reality of the Olympics is at the polar extreme of its supposed "spirit."

And it's the people in charge's fault.

Technorati Tags: IOC,Olympics,China,Tibet

jordoncooper.com vs. warrenkinsella.com

Warren Kinsella posted about the Top 25 Political Blogs yesterday and mentioned what I said here. My comment was that I think his ranking is hurt by bloggers who are still linking to www.warrenkinsella.com/musings.htm which was his old web location instead of linking to www.warrenkinsella.com which is his new one (it took me a couple of months to change my link so I am not judging anyone). A quick look at Technorati shows 1,213 links (or as Technorati says, "blog reactions") to his www.warrenkinsella.com and another 530 links to www.warrenkinsella.com/musings.htm. Google's algorithm shows 2,010 links to his site from both blogs and other websites. (of course those numbers will be one behind as soon as I hit publish)

On the other hand, jordoncooper.com has 1414 total incoming links on Technorati and oddly enough I beat him with 2,050 links on Google.

What's the point of this? 1) It shows how flawed most web data analysis is because the number of readers or linkers does not equal influence. A better metric would be how far does ones ideas travel and who is reading one's blog instead of how many. Also my links come in from areas a long ways away from politics in Canada, mostly from church leaders and pastors with some sports blogs tossed in for good measure. Another way to look about it, when I write something brilliant, Mike Duffy doesn't hang on every word.

Of course links and clicks are often used out of context and even if they were, I liked what Warren wrote here.

Here’s one of Warren’s truisms, then: legitimacy is not found in numbers. Rightness does not equate with popularity. You can be entirely, utterly alone, as Jesus Christ was in the end – as the other prophets were, like Mohamed and Moses, at key moments in their lives – and still be irrevocably right.

So how does all of this relate to web stats? Because, for me, this blog stuff is worth doing because (a) it is truly DIY punk rock journalism, and (b) it is a literal extension of diary writing. Personally, it permits me to write in a way that newspapers and magazines – having quit or been fired from not a few – never permit me to write. It allows me to write as I am writing right now – and then, three inches later, link to a hardcore punk band I currently adore. I do it, too, because I am – when you distil me down to my base elements – a diarist. I am alleged to have been writing 1,000 words a day since I was eleven years old: it is as fully part of me as is breathing, or Slurpees.

This made me ask why I keep this site going. It isn't a money maker. Despite my bluster, there is no jordoncooper.com media empire coming. I find myself using Twitter more and more which doesn't have stats and I have no idea if anyone is reading my most random and random thoughts. Yet at the same time I enjoy writing complete thoughts in 160 character or less and find it even more fun reading political campaign coverage in 160 character or less.

I think the reason I keep this blog is it is a place that I can explore new ideas that I am thinking about and a borderline extrovert, it allows me to process and get feedback. The random links here and there get formed together later on and occasionally become and idea worth caring about.As I have written before the person who probably influenced my thinking and writing this blog is Thomas Homer-Dixon and his book, The Ingenuity Gap which is the idea that the problems and issues affecting us are far more complex than we often understand. I think my keeping this blog is my part of exploring and understanding the world around me (which does at times include sports).

I'm Not Running for President, but...

Michael Bloomberg's op-ed in the New York Times. He gives a pretty good (but sad) explanation of why change won't happen

The changes needed in this country are straightforward enough, but there are always partisan reasons to take an easy way out. There are always special interests that will fight against any challenge to the status quo. And there are always those who will worry more about their next election than the health of our country.

These forces that prevent meaningful progress are powerful, and they exist in both parties. I believe that the candidate who recognizes that the party is over — and begins enlisting all of us to clean up the mess — will be the winner this November, and will lead our country to a great and boundless future.

The question is the President of the United States powerful enough to take on the special interests and a Congress and Senate that is worried about re-election more than the country. When I hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bash NAFTA to appeal to Ohio voters, and John McCain suck up to the right wing of the Republican party, I start to lose faith that anything will change.

The Death of Suburbia

This video is from TED and is one of a long series of videos I am downloading off of YouTube and converting to my PSP for viewing again later.  I am a big fan of Kunstler's view of the future (although I think he underestimates the power of capitalism and innovation a bit) but the video is one that you will want to watch.

In James Howard Kunstler's view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about. Reengineering our cities will involve more radical change than we are prepared for, Kunstler believes, but our hand will be forced by earth crises stemming from our national lifestyle. "Life in the mid-21st century," Kunstler says, "is going to be about living locally."

Technorati tags: James Howard Kunstler, TED, urban, suburbia, energy

What's New Around Here?

A couple of weeks ago I posted about The Blind Side which generated some good discussion in the comments.  What caught me off guard were a couple of e-mails that were sent about the post and the hypocrisy in me posting it and advocating the position that I did.  Apparently because I haven't raised any NFL prospects in my house, I ought not speak of such things.  Even if that made sense, it is ignorant of the fact that Wendy and I have had someone living in our home for a couple of years after a particularly brutal time in their life.  While I never did get a NFL tryout for him or even a scholarship to a major U.S. college, it has been a big change for all of us.  It also suggests that perhaps a blog doesn't tell everything about a person or maybe a search of the archives may be helpful.

The accusations also got to me because one of the things that I have been working on/obsessed with is setting up a safe house for 10 or so teen boys in Saskatoon who need a place to figure out life.  We have some emergency facilities at work for keeping youth on an emergency basis.  While we are doubling that capacity, it isn't enough and there are youth who are either on the street or in really awful home situations. It is a complicated and long process which is a ways away an official start let alone finish but I think it is the right thing to do.

While speaking of work, I have some interesting stuff going on right now that will help guys with the transition out of the shelter and into their own place.  Saskatoon has a tighter housing market than New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary at 0.4% and if you aren't making much money, are illiterate, or just feeling overwhelmed, guys tend to end up at flophouses which are called, "shooting galleries" for a reason.  I have been in some of them and I almost threw up.  My first apartment was a small studio apartment but it was a charming shoe box sized studio and was safe to roam the hallways.  The goal is to help guys find safe places they can afford to live on.  Having a little extra money in the bank makes a world of difference.  I was reading an article from the New Year with the mayor who pointed out that people making $40,000 can't afford a home in the city which is true.  I can't fix that but I hope to help those making around $20,000 a year a decent apartment.

Outside of work, a group of us is taking some small steps toward create an alternative seminary in Saskatoon.  We met Monday and those there had some excellent ideas.  It was good.  For those of you who have no idea what is so alternative about theological education, check out the Disseminary which was the inspiration for the idea as was the Invisible College in Kingston. 

So now you know.

Technorati tags: Disseminary, The Blind Side, The Invisible College

Collapse of the emerging church?

Kester Brewin has some predictions for 2008. This one stuck out for obvious reasons.

...the collapse of the emerging church as a popular project.

He expands in the comments

It's just a hunch, but I sense that some of the key players are less and less willing to work with that particular language. I think that, whereas a few years ago people were excited by the prospect, people are getting used to/bored/fed up with 'emerging church' as a concept, and will thus leave it behind.

Not that I think that that means 'game over' for all that people like Emergent stand for - far from it actually - but I think people may increasingly assimilate those ideas into their practice without taking the name. (I think for some time this has been foreseen in the collapse in usefulness of the term 'emerging church', which is so tired as a phrase it has begun to mean nothing.)

I think people have become tired of a whole lot of talking, and want to see things actually happen... and when stuff actually happens, it tends to be quieter and create less internet hum than the talking about it.

I agree with what Kester is saying. For some the term, "emerging church" has become meaningless for many reasons. I am both tired of the term "emerging church" which I agree means nothing now to many people but at the same time I am excited about some of the projects that I am a part of but at the same time don't feel the inclination to talk (or blog) about them, partly because we are in the middle of trying to make them happen and many people in the church dismiss anything with the emerging church out of hand. As I am in an environment which includes the old and new, the label "emerging church" carries a lot of baggage (much of it isn't fair or accurate). I think it is also an evolutionary process where one is confronted with new ideas and as time passes we move forward with those ideas which in turn help our ideas evolve further.

As has been said, the term postmodernity is a description of what we are not, not what we are becoming. Even the term, "emerging church" is based partly on the past, not the present or the future. So while the "emerging church" as a phrase is kind of worn, the ideas that are behind it are more and more a factor in how I live and think.

Disclosure: I am a member of the Emergent Coordinating Group and Resonate which means that I am more than a little biased.

Technorati tags: Emergent Village, emergence, Resonate

Steven Johnson on The Ghost Map

Technorati tags: London, Steven Johnson, TED, books

Why Can't We Grow New Energy?

Juan Enriquez at TED speaking on creating new energy sources.  Like most TED sessions, it is worth watching.

Technorati tags: Juan Enriquez, TED, energy, bio fuel

Five Overlooked Web Tools for Churches and Non-Profits

Despite all of the hype about Facebook (which I find invasive), there are some other web apps out there that are worth a look at to help a church or non-profit connect with people online.  Below are five of my favorites and some ideas on how they could be (better) used.

• Upcoming :: It used be Upcoming.org but it was acquired by Yahoo! and is now at upcoming.yahoo.com.  What's so great about it?  Well it's local.  As you submit an event and a venue, it lists the event locally.  When someone from your town or city logs into the site, whether they are logged in or not, they are shown what events are coming up in their area.  It also allows you to great sub groups for a church, club, or network that you can subscribe to.  Of course it also provides you with RSS feeds for yourself, your city, and any groups you are a part of.  And since it is owned by Yahoo!, it also is "taggy" and also allows you to cross post to Google Calendar.  How would I use it?  I would set up a Upcoming group for my org and then post the big things that are coming down the pike.  For a church I would post things that would be of interest to the entire community but I would be careful not to spam it (posting your weekly worship service or prayer meeting for example).  Within my organization and on my website, I would give the occasional shout out to Upcoming.  Why?  The more people who use it locally, the better the site becomes for the entire community.  Already Wendy and I have gone to a couple of events that we would never have heard about unless it was posted to Upcoming.  Other people have said the same thing. 
• Craigslist and Kijiji ::  Both a different expressions of the same thing but they are local community bulletin boards where you can buy, sell, barter and list events.  Saskatoon has both and of the two, saskatoon.kijiji.ca seems to get more traffic but saskatoon.craigslist.org has sent more traffic to the Church of the Exiles when we have used it.  I would use both of them in a similar way that I would use Upcoming.
• Flickr :: Not a lot of communities and organizations are using Flickr and I am not sure why.  Those that do, tend to ignore it after a while.  I was cleaning out my RSS feeds the other night and there was a lot of local church Flickr feeds that hadn't been updated in a couple of years.  On the other hand, I look at how much more I check out the John Edwards or Barack Obama photostreams.  Probably the best examples of how to use Flickr would be Grace's photo pool (which features excellent photography from Jonny Baker and Steve Collins among others).  The Church of the Exiles has a photo pool as well which features some shots from Nathan Pederson, Wendy, and myself.  On a network level, Resonate has created Resonate Stories for showing what the emerging church looks like in Canada.
• Wiki's :: Now one of the coolest wiki's I have seen is Ikon's website which is entirely a wiki.  There are a lot of wiki options... jordoncooper.com used Media Wiki at wiki.jordoncooper.com but perhaps the easiest solution comes from Wikia which will host your wiki for you and cost is free.  While local church wiki's are cool, I keep thinking bigger like church planting wikis, the wiki of the emerging church, or denominational history wiki could be a tremendous contribution to a movement.
• Twitter :: A couple of youth pastors I know use Twitter to keep parents and kids up to date with what their youth group is doing.  Twitter can send notifications via IM or SMA which makes it easier to keep people current.  Now CNN, the NY Times, and other media organizations are using Twitter to share breaking news.

That's my list.  Add some of yours below in the comments.

Technorati tags: Upcoming, Craigslist, Kijiji, Flickr, Wiki, Twitter, Google Calendar, Saskatoon, Church of the Exiles, Grace, Jonny Baker, Steve Collins, Resonate, photography, wikia, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Facebook, Web 2.0

Contextless Thoughts

• Mark is sick tonight. He announced it by throwing up all over my leg while we were in the mall and I had sandals on. While at the time he was more focused on being sick and getting to a washroom, later on he thought that was funny. Me, not so much.
• Thanks for the suggestions on passports. I went out today and bought a neck passport holder/wallet which I should have had before because I hate juggling my ID, wallet, boarding pass, carry-on bag and coffee while boarding the airplane. I was also told to get some luggage locks to protect my luggage while it is in a hotel room which I have never thought of before but others told me horror stories.
• Interesting article on how the web isn't making an impact in Iowa for Democratic and GOP presidential candidates. I would say the same thing could be said for the church in rural areas.
• Just once I would like to hear a politician honestly talking about how tough it is going to be to stop climate change. Instead we hear how easy it will be. From what I have read, California is the only jurisdiction I know of in North America who is talking about taking BIG steps to tackle climate change. Even Saskatchewan (the continent's largest carbon sink) is taking pretty small steps with lots of rhetoric. Despite Saskatchewan's emissions are 62 percent above 1990 levels. Or as the Sierra Club sees it, "an environmentally regressive premier and cabinet whose NDP orange verges on brown."
• It's October, the month I care only about baseball which means I re-read Moneyball. The more times I read it, the more tempted I am to recommend it to church leaders who complain about a lack of resources. The big idea in the book is that there are other ways of doing things, including scoring runs which until sabermetrics, was kind of stuck in a rut (as a note, as J.P. Ricciardi's payroll has gone up, I wonder if his philosophy of baseball hasn't drifted away from his roots with the A's). It is a helpful book in the process of reimagining, as that is exactly what the situation (low payroll in a high payroll world) forced Billy Beane to do and it is exactly what many franchises which continue to struggle, refuse to do.
• Update: Mark made Wendy and I sick as well. We all are at various stages of the 24 hour flu. Mark woke me up this evening (after he slept almost all day) with, "Why is it dark?! Where did the sun go?" So much for seeing Transformers tonight at the cheap theatre.

Importance of Theological Thinking

More Tim Keller and he is talking about the importance of theological thinking.

 

Technorati tags: theology, Tim Keller

Land a Rover on the Moon

... and Google will give you $30 million. Sounds like a good deal.

On The Take

I finally read On the Take by Stevie Cameron the other day. I had bought the book years ago at a used book sale and had never felt motivated to read it before but I wish I had.

As Amazon.ca says about the book

When On the Take came out in 1994, it made author Stevie Cameron a household name in Canada. Her book's revelations about the rampant corruption and petty greed of Brian Mulroney's decade in the prime minister's office reverberated for many years in the Canadian political landscape and helped destroy his Progressive Conservative Party. (The party, one of Canada's most venerable, never recovered from Mulroney's stewardship and eventually merged with the Canadian Alliance Party.) Cameron, one of the country’s leading investigative reporters, was one of the few reporters to consistently question and probe the corruption of the Mulroney years. She has a wonderful ear for storytelling, which helps make On the Take a page-turner. Cameron seems to rejoice in recounting the numerous unseemly episodes of the Mulroney administration and depicting all its seedy characters and hangers-on. Mulroney comes across as having been most comfortable in a powerbroker's backrooms, surrounding himself with dodgy bagmen and devious lobbyists. Cameron suggests that the country was "open for business," with a "for sale" sign on the front lawn. She writes that even in their final official act, as the Mulroneys departed from office in disgrace amid record-low popularity ratings, they tried to stiff taxpayers into buying their used furniture.

I am not sure why I read it but I kept thinking of Larry Lessig's change in focus from intellectual property issues to the larger issues of corruption in culture. It made me ask three questions

1. How did Mulroney find the nerve to do the things he did.
2. How did he get away with it. (some of it made Adscam look minor league)
3. How does a government pretend to represent all Canadians (or Americans) when only those that have money have access or influence on the decisions that are being made.

In the end I am torn. I know some very good people in public life. People I respect and like on both sides of the political spectrum who don't believe in the political spectrum as much as they believe in solutions and helping people but at the same time they are generally footnotes to history. As Will Ferguson says, "the boneheads" while the country is often ruled by "bastards" and at the end of On the Take, you see which one of them was Mulroney.

Alternatives

to living in the McMansion. The micro-compact home or the Tiny Tumbleweed Housing Company which are not much smaller than my house :-) Of course another option to sprawling burbs is living in a shipping container. I link to these because a couple of years ago Wendy brought home a magazine and it hard a feature on a family of four who decided to purchase and live on a house boat all year long in Toronto. Two teen boy and two parents and not a lot of space. The mother talked about the discipline it brought to them in regards to materialism because for everything that made it's way on board, something had to be tossed. Everything they bought cost them twice. First for the purchase and then the loss of something else. Wendy and I are working on that right now and I think it is a good idea.

Living in an over inflated housing market like Saskatoon does change the way we live. If we were to sell, we would get between twice and three times what we paid for our home but to purchase again, we would have to leave the city for a rural outlying area and commute in (thanks but no thanks). The alternative is to change the way we live being changed as opposed to the container we live in.

Simplicty

Eugene Peterson has asked the question, "If we know so much, why do we live so poorly" and he isn't thinking financially. It's a question I have been thinking a lot about lately with the kind of dualism that life has working in a homeless shelter and the community here and with many of our friends being more affluent.

The other day I was over at a friends place for coffee and he had all of the toys. A great smart phone, large flat screen television, new thin notebook computer, and two nice cars. My notebook (which is a 650 mhz Pentium III with a dead battery) was booted up and he was using mine to take a look at something online. The discussion started that my $100 notebook does everything his new $2500.00 Vista powered notebook does at about the same speed (I am running Windows 2000) which turned into a discussion about how despite all of the toys that he had, is life really any better with them. Now sports is a wonderful thing in HD but baseball is amazing on AM radio as well and Arrested Development is funny on a $150 20" television as it is on the flat screen.

McWorld tells me something different. It tells me my television stinks, my cell phone is a fashion accesory and needs to be updated, 5 megapixels will never be enough, nor will a small house. I need more stuff and I need to make more money to get that stuff. I had a long chat with a drug dealer the other night (it's part of the job) and he was justifying why he needed to deal drugs. iPods for kids, flat screen televisions for their rooms and so on and we all know that isn't possible on most wages.

At coffee today, Darren told me of a nine year old getting a iBook for her birthday. I asked him if at nine, he could be trusted with an iBook and not breaking it (I couldn't have been) and he replied, "I wasn't even allowed to use real glass at that age!" Of course when does it stop. A former family members I know was nice sports car as a gift one year, the next year it was to ride in a pace car at an IndyCar event and later it was an exotic six figure sports car. So what comes after that? The Bugatti Veyron? A Mig 21? I know those are weird examples but just because we can do something, do we need to do it?

The other question that I have is this a good use of the income that I have coming in? I have noticed lately that many people I know have expanding lifestyles. At one time the small house that Wendy, Mark and I live in, would have been quite spacious for a family our size. Now we lament the lack of closet and storage space to keep our assorted possessions. This summer we have literally been going through room after room and getting rid of things that we have accumulated over the years as purchases or gifts (anyone want a cappuchinno maker that has been used once?). The funny thing is that we aren't making any sacrifices. We have a coffee and a tea maker and a coffee/tea press but all take up space in our kitchen (in addition to the cappuchinno maker). I keep looking at my options. There is a great 8x12 shed at Costco that I can store things in and we could also build a small garage to park the car in and store all of things that we never use. Someone I know has a mansion. Not a McMansion but an actual mansion. What do they complain about, not enough stuff to store their stuff so I know more storage space isn't the solution. Affluenza tells a story of a guy with a four car garage, not to store his cars but to store all of the stuff that accumulates over time.

The problem isn't 1930s architecture. It is us and how we our lives are defined by McWorld. The church can't speak against it because in many ways our organizations are just as materialistic (when was the last time you heard the church call for sacrificial giving for something outside of its walls... it may happen but it doesn't happen very often). The other day I was looking at the Palm Foleo. A notebook computer except it isn't a notebook computer. It is a notebook computer for when you can't bring along your notebook computer. Got that? Good, there will be a test at the end of this. I started to think how cool that was and how that would work for me when it hit me how insane this all starts to get after a while. Why would I need a notebook to carry when I can't carry a notebook around with me and when would those situations arise?

The other night at work I was chatting with a former (I hope) drug dealer who use justifying selling drugs, partly to take care of his families needs. He talked about how expensive kids are with them needing television sets, iPods, and computers in their rooms and yet I grew up with none of that stuff. I had a $20 Walkman that did a good job, I had a ghetto blaster but no television and I had a paper route to buy the other things I needed in life and I don't remember being particularly unhappy in life which gives me the overwhelming reason to believe that I don't need stuff stuff to be that happy and not only that but with less stuff I would actually be happier.

Those are some of the ideas that I am going to be exploring over the next couple of months here. I know a lot of people have written on simple living but I think the temptation is to reduce life to a lower common denominator or from an earlier age and say, "That's the ideal!" which ignores our current context and living within that which for many includes too much debt, too little time, and trying to keep up with the Jones with no way out. So I guess I am trying to answer, how do I live well without falling into those traps. I guess we will see how I fare in answering those questions.

ODEO to Google

I logged into draft.blogger.com recently and saw that Google is offering a video upload feature for Blogger (which makes little sense to me as they own YouTube/Google Video but whatever). What I and many Blogger users wouldn't mind is a hosted podcasting service tie in. I have been a long term fan of ODEO but with it for sale, I think it would be a great fit for Google since it already has the infrastructure in place to host and serve that kind of bandwidth. Also, since aquiring Feedburner, they have aquired the company that made it easier for users of Blogger to start podcasting (Blogger used only Atom which didn't have the enclosure feature of RSS 2.0). With the advertising technology that Google is developing and selling for YouTube, the same thing could be created for ODEO and Google becomes not only the leader in video but also has some really good tools to take on and popularize the podcasting market. Will it happen, probably not but who predicted Google's purchase of Blogger?

Technorati tags: Blogger, ODEO, Google, podcasting, Obvious