May 2009
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First thoughts on abortion doctor shooting in... →
Religion and politics collide in an ugly brew again with the shooting death of Dr George Tiller in the lobby of his Wichita church this morning. Tiller’s long been protest target for anti-abortion activists and has been shot at before. My prayers go out to his family and church. I’m also sending some prayers for the the principled nonviolent activists on both sides of the abortion...
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“You don’t test it because, at the point of being about to buy it, you’re in...”
– Edward Dolnick on the psychology behind art forgeries. Interviewed by Errol Morris in Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2).
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“My experience in my room is one of countless examples of how teens use their...”
– Hillary Kilos, a student of @henryjenkins, looking back at the formation of her teen identity in “Bouncing Off the Walls: Playing with Teen Identity”
Train robberies back in vogue in Mexico? →
Using intelligence gathered from employees either intimidated or paid off to leak transport routes, the well-connected groups can hijack a truck making a pit stop, empty out the cargo and dump the driver on an abandoned road.
In a series of hijackings late last year, bands of dozens of people, armed sometimes with machetes and rocks, sacked entire trainloads of corn and beans.
Martin...
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WatchSome Days / Thinking about Quaker outreach approaches
Looking at some of my various Quaker sites and thinking about how to kick-start some more outreach with younger seekers. Quakerquaker.org, my most prominent community site, actually gets around half the visitors of my quakerranter.org blog and has an audience that skews quite a bit older. Quakerquaker.org: 509 weekly people, median age: 50+...
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W00t! Another cultural archeology series from... →
Part one of “Bamboozling Ourselves” in the New York Times promises to be about the Nazi-era Vermeer forgeries. Peter Schjeldahl looked at some recent books about this October in a New Yorker article called Dutch Masters and it’s a fascinating topic, almost Indiana Jones-esque the way the art and politics come together.
I was mesmerized by Errol Morris’ last series back...
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Via @EagleTheatre: “Hammonton’s Got Talent” Show Saturday Night. 7pm at the Hammonton High School Performing Arts Center. $10 a ticket general admission.
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Sat, 5/30/09: Star watch at Atsion Field
Public Star Watch at Atsion Field Saturday, May 30, 2009
Weather permitting, a free public star watch will be presented by the Willingboro Astronomical Society at Atsion Field in Wharton State Forest, NJ, on Saturday, May 30, 2009. Atsion Field is on the east side of Route 206, just north of the lake and Atsion/Quaker Bridge Rds. It is roughly midway between Route 70 (the Red Lion Circle) ten...
Watch“Last Day Dream,” a life flashing by. Don’t let the screenshot fool you, it’s worth watching!
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Is Real-Time Really Relevant? @avinashkaushik →
An oldie but goodie from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s “Analytics Evangelist”. It’s from 2006, but he referenced it today in a Twitter message but the big idea is still very useful:
The thought being that with the fast pace of the web and everything changing all the time getting real-time data is mandatory to being able to take advantage of all that the web has to offer from...
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The difference between marketing & selling (via... →
From Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing:
“How do you accomplish those results?” And here’s where most make the mistake of explaining the “process” of how you do what you do. Don’t do that!!! Instead, you want to tell a story. “A client I worked with recently kept getting bogged down on projects and his job was on the line. We worked together and...
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WatchSome Days Video: Who is the Quaker audience?
Quickie video, really just poses the question than give any sort of answer. This video is mostly prep for next month’s Conservative Friends Gathering, thinking about Thomas Clarkson again and wondering who the QuakerQuaker.org target audience might be. NYTimes | Video Director talks about their videos: bit.ly/ND3e1 NYTimes | The only Oscar...
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Mashable: Is Social Media Making Corporate... →
Adam Ostrow looks at the successful Facebook campaign by the makers of Vitamin Water.
Although there are a few risks of building a campaign that directs users to a social media site versus your own property, the benefits are likely to far outweigh them if you can successfully get people engaged. Not to mention – what’s the last memorable corporate website you visited? Vitamin Water’s site –...
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How to Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds
Nothing ground-breaking in this article on Mashable but useful for the newcomer. The most important take-aways for designers:
use a large background image to avoid unwanted tiling on high-resolution monitors (1600 by 1200 pixels works for most scenarios);
restrict your left-hand column to a 200 pixels width so it doesn’t slip underneath the main twitter column.
My own Twitter profile...
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Why Did the Neanderthals Cross The Road? →
From davidinindy:
Answer: Because our human ancestors thought they were tasty! Even though it technically wasn’t cannibalism (it would have to be the same species) it’s still rather gross and of course the genocide of a sentient species for food and trophies by our early Homo-Sapien ancestors. Sometimes, history is just weird.
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“The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those...”
– Reporter E.J. Dionne Jr. on the selling of the new Liberal Establishment. Obama and the limits of mastery
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WatchJust watched some Father Ted, “Entertaining Father Stone” from the first season.
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Reading myself? On Quaker chronicler Thomas... →
Alice Morningstar Yaxley keeps pulling old articles of mine out of the Quaker Ranter archives. I find myself reading these, an odd experience. Today she posted my Thomas Clarkson archives, calling it “fascinating stuff about the writings of Clarkson as an observer of a previous generation of Quakers.”
What does it mean to live a christian life (again, lowercase) in the 21st Century?...
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Ginny Christensen's Strategy for Growth school and... →
This was a site I recently designed for a client. Ginny does a lot of consulting work with Friends Schools. Her company Strategies for Growth, LLC, provides “strategic planning, board development, executive coaching, and leadership team development for independent schools and nonprofits.” Check out Ginny Christensen’s Strategy for Growth.
And of course, contact me at...
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Videos from the Vault (the summer Jumpcut had a...
It’s hard to imagine now but there was a time in 2006 when Youtube didn’t own the video world, back when it was an independent project from some of the Paypal kids. I preferred its competitor Jumpcut, which allowed you to do simple editing online—splicing videos with pictures, adding headlines, etc. Then came the feeding frenzy: Google gobbled Youtube and Yahoo scored Jumpcut and...
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“The “long tail” theory — which proclaimed a revolution in digital commerce — has...”
– Declaring the ‘Long Tail’ Dead
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New Jersey Pinelands Photo Contest
A Flickr user name Oceanpeg just left a comment on one of my recent pictures to let me know that the Pinelands Preservation Alliance is holding a photo contest! I’m a big fan of the PPA and try to get to a few of their events every year but didn’t see this in part because the announcement is only a PDF on their site. Here’s the relevant information about the contest, download...
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Kissing Quakers on CNN? →
Via Peggy Parsons here’s our second place listing on CNN’s Ten Most Important Kisses of History:
The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, is a small Christian sect best known for rejecting all forms of violence, embracing progressive politics, and dedicating themselves to simple, restrained living. They’ve promoted a more harmonious world by founding causes such as...
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Fascinating: NYTimes Dir of Video answers... →
Ann Derry answers readers questions as part of the “Talk to the Newsroom” series, and gives links to NYTimes videos from unlikely videographers, including a print journalist who carried a video camera into an Afghan firefight, a photographer shooting video about Somali pirates and The Daily Baggage, “the only Oscar video brought to you from a basement in New Jersey.”
...
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Via @dirkthecow, Social media marketing... →
From Zakazukhazoo via Dirkthecow:
“Social media is just another bunch of communication channels which work the same way as talkback radio and letters to the editor do. The only difference is that everyone gets to be Rupert Murdoch and the old people aren’t invited. It’s not rocket science, it’s just the way people communicate now. If you’re interested in it and you’re adept at expressing...
Peterson's Quaker joke →
A Quaker, a warthog and a palm tree walk into a pub. Looking up from behind the counter, the bartender shouts, “Hey, we don’t serve your kind here!”
The three look at each other.
The Quaker thinks, “What a pity and shame the injustice these two face in the world. I must organize a committee,” and the Quaker immediately leaves the pub.
The warthog snorts, “I have been kicked out of better...
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Social Networks Eclipse E-Mail in Feburary →
From NYTimes: “Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.”
See also: my recent articles: “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites” and “Nonprofits and Social Media.”
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Conservative Friends Gathering, 6/19-21, Lancaster... →
I just updated the QuakerQuaker listing with information cut and pasted from around the net, including links to last year’s photo gallery.
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“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes [in Pakistan]...”
– Death From Above, Outrage Down Below, co-written by David Kilcullen, Gen. David Petraeus’ former counterinsurgency advisor.
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The Follow Friday Manifesto and the gaming of... →
“Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients. This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media...
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NYTimes: The Economy Intrudes on a Haven of Faith →
The anecdotal evidence collected by the Association of Theological Schools, which covers 250 graduate institutions in the United States and Canada, has found job listings for ministerial positions down by about one-third at major seminaries serving both evangelical and mainstream Protestant denominations. The Jewish newspaper The Forward reported last month that Jewish seminaries accustomed to...