Recently in delicious Category

On a recent evening I met up with Gathering in Light Wess, who was in Philadelphia for a Quaker-sponsored peace conference. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great dinner, Wess and I tested some testimonies, and a revolving group of Friends ended up around a table in the conference's hotel lobby talking late into the night (the links are Wess' reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp account).

Of all of the many people I spoke with, only one had any kind of featured role at the conference. Without exception my conversation partners were fascinating and insightful about the issues that had brought them to Philadelphia, yet I sensed a pervading sense of missed opportunity: hundreds of lives rearranged and thousands of air miles flown mostly to listen to others talk. I spent my long commute home wondering what it would have been like to have spent the weekend in the hotel lobby recording ten minute Youtube interviews with as many conference participants as I could. We would have ended up with a snapshot of faith-based peace organizing circa 2009.

Next weekend I'll be burning up more of the ozone layer by flying to California to co-lead a workshop with Wess and Robin M. (details at ConvergentFriends.org, I'm sure we can squeeze more people in!) The participant list looks fabulous. I don't know everyone but there's at least half a dozen people coming who I would be thrilled to take workshops from. I really don't want to spend the weekend hearing myself talk! I also know there are plenty of people who can't come because of commitments and costs.

So we're going to try some experiments--they might work, they might not. On QuakerQuaker, there's a new group for the event and a discussion thread open to all QQ members (sign up is quick and painless). For those of you comfortable with the QQ tagging system, the Delicious tag for the event is "quaker.reclaiming2009". Robin M has proposed using #convergentfriends as our Twitter hashtag.

There's all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live blogging via Twitter, anyone?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract us from whatever message the Inward Christ might be trying to give us. But behind all this is a real questions about why and how we should gather together as Friends. As the banking system tanks, as the environment strains, as communications costs drop and we find ourselves in a curious new economy, what challenges and opportunities open up?

• Asterisms Pam on community as road block to spirituality
  I've met and interacted with too many Quakers that engage in community out of a sense of obligation, "because that's what Quakers do." Surprisingly, that does not lead to remarkably profound spiritual community.
  (tags: quaker quaker.community)

• Shelley's narrated slideshow on annual community-building event
  "I've been wanting to do some kind of image-oriented promotion for this amazing Quaker event for at least two years now. Hope folks enjoy it!"
  (tags: quaker.videos quaker.parenting quaker)

• Quaker Monasticism and emergent and convergent Friends
  Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone;
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent quaker.christianity comment)

• FAQ about the new plastics
  What's safe, what isn't
  (tags: products.misc)

• Brent Bill wants to be an Amish rock star
  Many of their youth have formed clandestine rock and roll bands and have rocked forth. Many of these songs were discovered by "the English," given slightly different lyrical phrasing, and been recorded by rock and roll stars as diverse as "The Beach Boys,
  (tags: comment)

• Tree of Life Jennifer looks for Quaker-friendly homeschool methods
  [We use] a holistic method and its worldview has much in common with a Quaker worldview (from my perspective), it is a nice complement to our faith, but how exactly do I blend the truly Quaker bits of our faith into our learning?
  (tags: quaker)

• Small Biz Survival: Got a Home Office? How deductible is it?
  Basically, if you can reach the standard, then you calculate the percentage of the home office/storage area to your total house square footage. This percentage is then applied to the various expenses of running your house that would normally be considered
  (tags: business homeoffice)
• YouTube: A personal introduction to Conservative Friends
  Having nothing to do with the political definition of the Rush Limbaugh conservativism, Conservative Quakers are one of the 3 branches of the Religious Society of Friends. The speaker considers herself a "rowdy Conservative Friend".
  (tags: quaker quaker.conservative quaker.videos)
• Joe G watches the Dems implode
  Bored beyond Belief podcast even includes a brief comparison to Quakes.
  (tags: comments)

• New blog from Brent Bill: Sacred Compass: The Spiritual Discernment Blog
  The divine compass points us the mind and love of God. This blog is a place of theological hospitality and sharing experiences of spiritual discernment.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)

• Micah checks in on the recent youth gathering (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  As one of the organizers of this conference, it was a very different experience for me than if I had been solely a participant. I felt a strong sense of needing to ground the gathering, particularly the worship sessions, and worked with the pastoral care
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth)

• Dual Boot or Run Windows in a Virtual Machine?
  Great discussion on Mac/Windows virtualizations
  (tags: Tech)

• Videobox: Lightbox for videos
  Gives the javascript "Lightbox" effect for Youtube, etc.
  (tags: tech tech.youtube)

• Save St Mary's Malaga
  Campaign to save historic St. Mary's Catholic Church in Malaga NJ from completely unnecessary closure. Blog, articles, history and soon video about the campaign.
  (tags: catholic)

• New version of Better Gmail 2
  An essential Firefox extension, now supporting Firefox 3 and including HTML Signatures.
  (tags: tech comment)

• Bill Samuel is an evangelical but not an Evangelical
  Evangelicals also proclaim Christ is Lord, but their emphasis on the written word as the sole determiner of Truth tends to contradict that. I am not an Evangelical because I’m not sure that Evangelicalism is really centered on Jesus Christ.
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical quaker.christianity)

• sIFR
  Flash/javascript rich fonts for websites
  (tags: tech.design)
• Google Maps adds geotagged photos
  But only from their own service, Panoramio. Yahoo's Flickr is snubbed. Does Google really need to use it's dominant mapping service to wrest control from one of the few well-known services it doesn't own?
  (tags: comment tech)

• Who's making a business from social media?
  You have a mountain of communications companies hoping to adapt quickly [and] you have businesses who aren’t as motivated to change their internal processes. But will there be a point where businesses take back their external arms for outreach to their
  (tags: comment tech)
• A painful story from a Friend wanting meeting help & accountability in homeschooling
  A member said "I oppose K-, her vision, and everything she stands for." I was stunned. The meeting was silent. No one responded, and I said, somewhat choked, that such a response made me want to take my children and never come back. I was in tears when I
  (tags: comment quaker quaker.parenting)
• Homeschooling Blog: The Feather and the Harp
  family’s Quaker homeschooling journey * Home A personal blog about a Quaker homeschooling family.
  (tags: quaker.parenting)

• Former Friend talks of Pagans, Quakers and a self-centered Christian identity
  While Quakerism is (still) Christian, it often comes over as a separate religion, a law unto itself in a sense. They talk primarily about the Quaker heritage, while the Christian character is not adequately covered.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.influences)
• One reader of CT article things Paganism is official Qr outreach effort
  The Quakers are finding a new strategy for church growth: Merge with paganism! From “Pagans find a sometimes uneasy home among Quakers”, referring to “a small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach quaker.in)
• Mega Catholic church opens in Round Rock Texas
  (tags: catholic galante)
• Breakaway liberal Catholics claims closed churches=lost adherents
  FutureChurch, no study cited.
  (tags: catholic)

• Quakers going Pagan? A Firm and Loving "No"
  This may be a somewhat new phenomenon to Streib, but it's not to Evangelical Friends. So how do I answer Streib's question? As Evangelical Quakers in Evangelical Friends Church Southwest, the answer is a firm and loving "No".
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical)
• Quakers Engaging Jon signs off (for now?)
  Originally I created this blog to be a non-threatening discussion board for people in the Tacoma community. It turned into a forum for unprogrammed and semi-programmed and programmed Friends to interact, share perspectives, and learn from one another.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• Twittering a backchannel live feed of a city council meeting!
  I quickly learned that there was a video feed (which I’m working on finding an archive of), and others were watching from afar. And before I knew it…my twittering turned my timeline into a back channel for the Philadelphia City Council Public Hearing
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture comment)

• Skitch and Twitter combo
  Skitch lets you take easily take screenshots. Now with Twitter support! "Combine the power of email, image creation/capture devices and micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and you can communicate & collaborate with a powerful visual voice."
  (tags: tech tech.web2.0 comment)

• Wess on two (Possible) Roles of Religion In A Global World
  The abstractions within modern globalized religious movements.
  (tags: comment)
• Help wanted. « The Quaker Agitator
  The Quaker Agitator is looking for help writing a small grant. Any Ranter readers able to lend a hand?
  (tags: comment)
• Paul L thinks Orwell's got us pegged
  "Socialism" draws with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal comment)
• LizOpp on the different kinds of pride
  That said, there is a quiet pride that lends itself to being low, and then there is another sort of pride that lends itself to being high, to pushing God out of our lives because we mistakenly take up the belief that there is no more room.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)

I'm a big user of both Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system (it powers QuakerQuaker and the daily posts of links) and Twitter, the "micro-blogging" system that puts mini-messages into Quaker Ranter (currently with a brown woodsy boxes). They both serve different purposes for me and have different styles. Well, I just realized I had written a Deli.icio.us post in a Twitter style.

I was bookmarking a new post by Dave the "Quaker Agitator," who's looking for help writing a small grant. I left a minor comment and bookmarked the post in Del.icio.us. I try to do that for most comments so that I can go back later and see if any interesting conversation took place in the meantime. This time though I made an appeal for readers directly through the Del.icio.us description: "The Quaker Agitator is looking for help writing a small grant. Any Ranter readers able to lend a hand?" I did this knowing that a few hundred sympathetic readers will see this tomorrow morning when the links go up. It's probably a moot point as the Quaker Agitator has a much larger audience of sympathetic readers.

But stylistically it's an example of a culture of a new media form starting to change an older form. This is a common phenomenon in this fast-moving Web 2.0 world. Whether my Del.icio.us style will adapt or not I don't know. It's just an observation for now.

Tags: twitter, del.icio.us, web 2.0, styles,

• Using Skype With Audio Hijack Pro
  And CamTwist
  (tags: camtwist tech tech.video)
• Ustream.tv Production tips
  How to make a professional show on Ustream
  (tags: tech.video ustream tech)

• St. Mary's Roman Catholic Shrine Church Parish Web Page
  Official website of St. Mary's parish in Malaga, NJ.
  (tags: savestmarys catholic)

• Video on Christian Quaker outreach
  A short video about the CQIM (Christian Quaker Internet Mission).
  (tags: quaker quaker.christian quaker.videos)
• YouTube: Quakers: Woolly-minded liberals?
  A British Friend gives a video response to a recent editorial.
  (tags: quaker quaker.videos quaker.conservative)

• Dust-to-Digital : Goodbye, Babylon
  In February 1999 a college radio disc jockey named Lance Ledbetter set out on a mission to compile rare and essential recordings of vintage religious music. Four and a half years later the result of this journey was released as a box set called Goodbye, B
  (tags: music wishlist)
• Dust-to-Digital : Art of Field Recording: Volume I
  Art of Field Recording Volume I is a four disc set with a 96 page book that contains essays and annotations by Art and over 100 illustrations and photographs by Art and his wife Margo.
  (tags: music wishlist)
• The Limits of History, II - Light and Silence
  Quaker history also presents a challenge to all of its modern tellers. Like the early Christians, early Quakers laid down their history after the initial flames had cooled, and re-told the stories in ways that reflected their comunity.
  (tags: comment quaker quaker.history)
• Max Hansen's new business cards
  B.L. Ochman has a nice post about a memorable business card. Prompts me to trot out the pre-release version of my newest card. It's a whole newspaper, with four articles about me. They say long copy sells... I sure hope so.
  (tags: comment)
• YouTube RSS Feeds
  YouTube offers several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed etc) as well as customized feeds for users and tags. To subscribe to categorized groups of videos, simply click on the orange 'RSS' button next to eac
  (tags: tech tech.rss)

My infrequency of posts over the last two weeks is the result of a dead laptop. I'm back up with a loaner but I've lost a lot of time trying to resuscitate the old one and configure the loaner so no extended posts for me. Over on MartinKelley.com, I took a moment to use the experience to talk about consumer-level "cloud computing." Because most of my e-life is online, surprisingly little is lost to me from the laptop that won't turn on.

• Floating on Clouds (MartinKelley.com)
  Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I've been putting more and more of my data "in the cloud," that is: with software services that store it for me.
  (tags: myposts)

• Small Biz Survival on DIY Websites
  Not every small business can afford to hire someone to create or maintain a website. So let's go over some relatively easy do-it-yourself ways to build your site, kind of two by two. It just so happens that these are all free, or nearly so.
  (tags: tech comment)
• Techcrunch: Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?
  My answer: no. But some argue that " keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns...As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data--keyword search--will one day break down."
  (tags: comment tech tech.seo)

• Doug Gwyn on class & Quaker worship via Chris M
  There is a popular notion, even among some Friends, that the Quaker "brand" of worship is not for everyone; that it requires a cool, detached, middle- to upper-middle class Anglo-American temperament. [This notion] constitutes a terrible misunderstanding
  (tags: quaker quaker.diversity)

See also the guest post here on Quakerranter from one of it's founders.

• Seton Hill Worship Group in Baltimore
  An "emergent Quaker" congregation
  (tags: quaker.convergent)