Hold onto your broad­brim hat! After 58 years of black and white, COLOR is on the way to Friends Jour­nal start­ing in AUGUST 2013.  To announce it, FJ’s first Vine video:

This was what we were work­ing on last week, when I tweeted out ask­ing how many Quak­ers does it take to shoot a seven-second video!

The impromptu FJ video team: yours truly, Gabe, Gail, and Sara.

As you might all expect, I’m really happy with the move. Color won’t add very much to the over­all bud­get  just 1.5 per­cent!) but it should help us reach new read­ers. I’m also hop­ing it will give lapsed read­ers a rea­son to open the mag­a­zine again and see what we’ve been doing the last few years. Sub­scrip­tions start at a very rea­son­able $25. If you sign up before July 8, you’ll get August’s very first color issue!

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.

Google+: View post on Google+

The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employee who has largely freed him­self from email by con­sciously using what­ever social net­work­ing tool would be bet­ter at mov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for­ward, whether it’s IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the tele­phone. This line stood out for me:

I have had con­tin­u­ing sup­port from my man­age­ment in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accom­plish by answer­ing a ques­tion, and post­ing it on a blog, for exam­ple, than I can by answer­ing the same ques­tion over and over. I still help peo­ple, but in a more open and col­lab­o­ra­tive fash­ion. Other peo­ple can join in the dis­cus­sions — maybe they will have a bet­ter idea than mine.

This is exactly how I try to describe the blog­ging phi­los­o­phy in the busi­ness world. Don’t think of the blog as another chore that needs to be added to your already over­whelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as another com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool so it becomes a seam­less part of your ongo­ing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an hon­esty and approach­a­bil­ity it wouldn’t have if you thought of it as sim­ply another mar­ket­ing piece.

We are mak­ing some big behind-the-scene changes at Non​vi​o​lence​.org over the next few days. There will almost cer­tainly be fea­tures of our site that are affected. We apol­o­gize in advance for dis­rup­tions and hope that the changes will be worth­while. If you’d like to help us build the new fea­tures we have planned, “please con­sider mak­ing a dona­tion today”:www.nonviolence.org/support. Thanks!

I usu­ally think cyber-pranks are just silly. But I have to laugh at this one.
enough blog­gers have linked to Pres­i­dent Bush’s offi­cial bio with the words “mis­er­able fail­ure” that if you now type that phrase into Google our Pres­i­dent comes up as the very first return. More on this “Google­bomb” from “this News­day article”:http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzgoog1206,0,2339508.story?coll=ny-business-headlines. And just to help the results along, I’ll con­cur that I think he’s a “mis­er­able failure”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.

I’ve run up a lot of Non​vi​o​lence​.Org expenses over Iraq War II–the flood of vis­i­tors have eaten up the band­width. Help keep the site going by buy­ing a fundrais­ing t-shirt, only $22 while sup­plies last!