I thought I’d try an experiment

November 8, 2011

My life is now such that I don’t have the time to do long-form, thought­ful blog­ging. When I have time to think about big ideas expressed in well-chosen words, it’s as edi­tor at Friends Jour­nal. I have a rather long com­mute but it’s bro­ken up with trans­fers, I often have to stand and I usu­al­ly don’t have a lap­top on me. What I do have is a smart phone, which I use to keep up with Quak­er blogs, lis­ten to pod­casts and take pictures.

Despite this, I can usu­al­ly write a few para­graphs at a time. Kept at steadi­ly those could amass into blog posts. But the finishing-up effort is hard. I have a 2/3rds com­plet­ed post lav­ish­ing high praise for +Jon Watts’s new album sit­ting on my phone but haven’t had the chance to fin­ish, pol­ish and pub­lish. So what if I seri­al­ized these? Write a few para­graphs at a time, invite com­men­tary, per­haps even alter things in a bit of crowd-sourcing?

Any feed­back I’d get would help keep up my enthu­si­asm for the top­ic. This infor­mal post-as-chat was actu­al­ly the dom­i­nant ear­ly mod­el for blogs, one that fell away as they became more vis­i­ble. It’d be nice to get back to that. The medi­um seems obvi­ous to me: Google+, which allows for extend­ed infor­mal posts. So I’ll try that. These will be beta thoughts-on-electron. If they seem to gell togeth­er, I might then pol­ish and pub­lish to Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org, but no promis­es. This is most­ly a way to get some raw ideas out there.

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A walk around the Occupy Philly encampment

October 25, 2011

There’s a dif­fer­ent feel since I last vis­it­ed – it’s qui­eter and more lived-in. Less a protest and more a small town. Ser­vices are orga­nized and there’s less peo­ple stand­ing with signs and tak­ing each oth­er’s pictures.

I briefly sat in on the Quaker/Interfaith tent, where a meet­ing was going. I could­n’t hear much but the main issue of busi­ness was how open an inter­faith speak­er’s series should be. I did­n’t have too much time so I qui­et­ly slipped off after­wards to take more pic­tures of Occu­py.

In album Occu­py Philly, 10/25 lunchtime #occu­pyphilly (7 photos)

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Part of the “Idea Wall”

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