Results tagged “email” from The Quaker Ranter

I've been quiet on the blogs lately, focusing on job searches rather than ranting. I thought I'd take a little time off to talk about my little corner of the career market. I've been applying for a lot of web design and editing jobs but the most interesting ones have combined these together in creative ways. My qualifications for these jobs are more the independent sites I've put together -- notably QuakerQuaker.org -- than my paid work for Friends.

For example: one interesting job gets reposted every few weeks on Craigslist. It's geared toward adding next-generation interactive content to the website of a consortium of suburban newspapers (applicants are asked to be "comfortable with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube...," etc.). The qualifications and vision are right up my alley but I'm still waiting to hear anything about the application I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they're continuing to post revised descriptions to Craigslist. Yesterday's version dropped the "convergence" lingo and also dropped the projected salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actually got through to an interview for a fabulous job that consisted of putting together a blogging community site to feature the lesser-known and quirky businesses of Philadelphia. I had a great interview, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard nothing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up communications went unanswered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talking about and emailed that the site did launch, just quietly. It looks good.

Corporate blogging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years political campaigns have come to consider bloggers as an essential tool in getting their message out. User-generated content has become essential feedback and publicity mechanisms. My experience from the Quaker world is that bloggers are constituting a new kind of leadership, one that's both more outgoing but also thoughtful and visionary (I should post about this sometime soon). Blogs encourage openness and transparency and will surely affect organizational politics more and more in the near future. Smart companies and nonprofits that want to grow in size and influence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is little succor to the present. In the Philadelphia metropolitan area it seems that the rare employer that's thinking in these terms have have a lot of back and forths trying to work out the job description. Well, I only need one enlightened employer! It's time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

As will be obvious to anyone seeing this, the QuakerRanter has been seriously redesigned and moved off the Nonviolence.org server. I plan to talk about the technical underpinnings soon on MartinKelley.com. In the meantime email me if there's any horrifying glitches.

Update, 9/1/06:

My visitor logs picked up a very interesting new Google entry for my site that highlights the power of keywords and tags that are running on this new site. More over on Martinkelley.com in the immodestly titled post I am the King of Folksonomy.

John Paul Stephens has asked if I could help compile a list of online tributes to our Tom Fox, the fallen Christian Peacemaker for FreetheCaptivesNow.org'sTom Fox Memorials page. I've started a list, now up on QuakerQuaker.org, that I'll keep up for a few months. Any readers who know of something that should be included should either email me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org or tag it "for:martin_kelley" in Del.icio.us. Thanks. Here's my list so far:

See also:

• FreetheCaptivesNow.org
• Christian Peacemaker Watch over at Quakerquaker.org
• My posts on the Christian Peacemaker witness
• A really nice page on Tom over at Electronic Iraq

I've moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It's more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the same design but the project has become popular enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of making it more collaborative in the near-future.

You can subscribe to the QuakerQuaker Watch via Bloglines or to the daily email by following the links. If you're already following the Watch in a subscription reader, you should change the source of the feed to http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker if you don't want to miss out on any future innovations. If you have the Watch currently listed in your blog's sidebar you won't have to change anything.

At some point when the dust of the move has settled (and I have the new Quakerfinder.org launched as part of my FGC work), I'll take a moment to wax philosophical about the evolution of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the meantime, let me know if anything is broken, confused or grammatically mangled.

A kind of retrospective history of the project is available on the quakerquaker thread of the Ranter.

It started when I began bookmarking the more interesting Quaker posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the sidebar on the Quaker Ranter homepage, which then turned into the Quaker Blog Watch page. Now, as an experiment, I'm making it available as a daily email:

Enter your Email:

More info here: Quaker Blog Watch by email

I do recognize that this site has mutliple fan bases. While I was on paternity leave a colleague emailed me to ask when I would post more pictures of Baby Francis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last picture to my Flickr account. Aaayyee!, the danger of increasing expectations! Well, you can now get a daily email containing any new pictures of Baby Francis or Big Kid Theo: go to either of their homepages for the sign-up form (they share one subscription). One small step in self-indulgent parenthood, ain't technology great?

I've just discovered that the reason there haven't been any recent comments is that the commenting system is broken. Ack! The dangers of downloading beta software the day it's available. Working on it... Working: they should be back now. Email me if you have any continuing problems.

Here's an email from Danny, a new friend who I met at last week's FGC-sponsored "Youth Ministries Consultation." I liked his observations and asked if I could share this on the blog. I'm glad he said yes, since it's a good perspective on where one convinced 19 year old Friend is at.

Update: Here's Danny's new blog, Riding the Whale

A recent email correspondence confirmed that all of our wonderful websites aren't always reaching the people who should be hearing this message. Self publishing a book is almost as easy as starting a blog so why not put together a booklet of a website's essays? You can order the first edition of the Quaker Ranter Reader for $12.00 through Cafepress (a few dollars of each sale comes back to me to support the website). The Reader is also available from Quakerbooks of FGC.

Regular readers of Quaker Ranter will be familiar with Liz Oppenheimer's frequent comments. My replies and email correspondence with her have inspired more than one blog posts. I've long known her through Friends General Conference work and through the workshops she often leads at the FGC Gatherings. She's been exploring the conservative Quaker tradition over the last few years and is now writing a blog called The Good Raised Up.

Quaker Jane has been a regular on the Plain and Modest Dress group and now has beautifully-designed website that includes some interesting plain dress resources.

Alice Morningstar is another Plain group regular who's now the "Public Friend" (site since closed), writing about both Quakerism and biology; see her post Why It is Essential to Publish Now (via archive.org) for why she's public.

Lorcan is starting to get worried that I've never mentioned him here. He's part of a flourishing New York City Quaker blogging group that includes Amanda's Of the Best Stuff and Rich the Brooklyn Quaker, who's coined the term The New Plain to describe the renewed interest in Quaker plain dress that I've been trying to catalog on this site.

A poster to an obscure discussion board recently described typing a particular search phrase into Google and finding nothing but bad information. Reproducing the search I determined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actually quite accurate. I've been hearing an increasing number of stories like this. "Cause Googling," a variation on "vanity googling," is suddenly becoming quite popular. But the interesting thing is that these new searchers don't actually seem curious about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford has a lot of involved, weighty Friends (some of them past yearly meeting clerks!) and I think they appreciated a fresh take on an introductory course. The core question: how might we teach Quakerism today?

Got an email in the bookstore today from a potential customer who chose Amazon over my employer, a niche independent bookstore, because of their cheap cheap prices. I got a bit inspired by my reply, included here.