Tag Archives: blogging

May 13

Bits and pieces, remembering blogging

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I really should blog here more. I really should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing other people’s ideas. Most recently, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that ended my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he started with a Quaker fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sional Quak­ers. There is a real­ity behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tual adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

Theo writing for his class blog (seriously)My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s really only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain ironic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the bucket for my inter­net curations–videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.

Mar 03

Blogging for the Kingdom

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Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.

It’s always fas­ci­nat­ing to watch the ebb and flow of my blog­ging. Quak­er­ran­ter, my “main” blog has been remark­ably quiet. I’m still up to my eye­balls with blog­ging in gen­eral: post­ing things to Quak­erQuaker, giv­ing help­ful com­ments and tips, help­ing oth­ers set up blogs as part of my con­sult­ing busi­ness. My Tum­blr blog and Face­book and Twit­ter feeds all con­tinue to be rel­a­tively active. But most of these is me giv­ing voice to oth­ers. For two decades now, I’ve zigzagged between writer and pub­lisher; lately I’ve been focused on the latter.
When I started blog­ging about Quaker issues seven years ago, I was a low-level cler­i­cal employee at an Quaker orga­ni­za­tion. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a cer­tain free­dom. More impor­tantly, blogs were a nearly invis­i­ble medium, read by a self-selected group that also wanted to talk openly and hon­estly about issues. I started writ­ing about issues in among lib­eral Friends and about missed out­reach oppor­tu­ni­ties. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hind­sight, the archives give me plenty of “told you so” cred­i­bil­ity. But where’s the joy in being right about what hasn’t worked?
Things have changed over the years. One is that I’ve resigned myself to those missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Lots of Quaker money and humanly activ­ity is going into projects that don’t have God as a cen­ter. No amount of rant­ing is going to dis­suade good peo­ple from putting their faith into one more staff reor­ga­ni­za­tion, mis­sion rewrite or clever program.It’s a dis­trac­tion to spend much time wor­ry­ing about them.
But the biggest change is that my heart is squarely with God. I’m most inter­ested in shar­ing Jesus’s good news. I’m not a cheer­leader for any par­tic­u­lar human insti­tu­tion, no mat­ter how noble its inten­tions. When I talk about the good news, it’s in the con­text of 350 years of Friends’ under­stand­ing of it. But I’m well aware that there’s lots of peo­ple in our meet­ing­houses that don’t under­stand it this way any­more. And also aware that the seeker want­ing to pur­sue the Quaker way might find it more closely mod­eled in alter­na­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. There are peo­ple all over lis­ten­ing for God and I see many attempts at rein­vent­ing Quak­erism hap­pen­ing among non-Friends.
I know this obser­va­tion excites some peo­ple to indig­na­tion, but so be it: I’m trust­ing God on this one. I’m not sure why He’sgiven us a world why the com­mu­ni­ties we bring together to wor­ship Him keep get­ting dis­tracted, but that’s what we’ve got (and it’s what we’ve had for a long time). Every per­son of faith of every gen­er­a­tion has to remem­ber, re-experience and revive the mes­sage. That hap­pens in church build­ings, on street cor­ners, in liv­ing rooms, lunch lines and nowa­days on blogs and inter­net forums.We can’t get too hung up on all the ways the mes­sage is get­ting blocked. And we can’t get hung up by insist­ing on only one chan­nel of shar­ing that mes­sage. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to man­i­fest this in our world: his king­dom come and will be done on earth.
But what would this look like?
When I first started blog­ging there weren’t a lot of Quaker blogs and I spent a lot more time read­ing other reli­gious blogs. This was back before the emer­gent church move­ment became a wholly-ownedsubsidiaryof Zon­der­van and wasn’t dom­i­nated by hype artists (sorry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great blog­gers out there talk­ing about faith and read­ers want­ing to engage in this dis­cus­sion. I’ve been intrigued by the his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of Thomas Clark­son, the Angli­can who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker per­spec­tive using non-Quaker lan­guage. And some­times I geek out and explain some Quaker point on a Quaker blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an expe­ri­enced Friend who had never been pre­sented with a clas­sic Quaker expla­na­tion on the point in ques­tion. My track­ing log shows seek­ers con­tinue to be fas­ci­nated and drawn to us for our tra­di­tional tes­ti­monies, espe­cially plainness.
I’ve put together topic lists and plans before but it’s a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with Quak­erQuaker (plus work, plus fam­ily). There’s also ques­tions about where to blog and whether to sim­plify my blog­ging life a bit by com­bin­ing some of my blogs but that’s more logis­tics rather than vision.
Inter­est­ing stuff I’m read­ing that’s mak­ing me think about this:


Nov 23

Focused blogs and side trips

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Over on Eileen Flanagan’s Imper­fect Seren­ity, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­ity, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­nity build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­nity orga­nizer and my searches are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many people’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuaker​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tally outed a few begin­ning blog­gers who hadn’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sional blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­sonal blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ever I like. Most reg­u­larly read­ers would say it focuses on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­ally. Quaker plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The con­ven­tional wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real com­mu­nity means know­ing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of other Quaker blog­gers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tainly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­sonal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­ity is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­ested in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­ally get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.

Oct 10

Two Years of the Quaker Ranter and Quaker Blogs

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An amaz­ing thing has hap­pened in the last two years: we’ve got Friends from the cor­ners of Quak­erism shar­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences, our frus­tra­tions and dreams through Quaker blogs. Dis­en­chanted Friends who have longed for deeper con­ver­sa­tion and con­so­la­tion when things are hard at their local meet­ing have built a net­work of Friends who under­stand. When our gen­er­a­tion is set­tling down to write our mem­oirs — our Quaker jour­nals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chap­ter about becom­ing involved in the Quaker blog­ging community.

Con­tinue read­ing →