keyword search Posts

• 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)

In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.

The FGC Gathering is coming up in a few weeks. I'm taking the workshop on James Nayler led by David Neelon.

Regular readers will know that I have a concern that Friends have become so generic with our spiritual language that we have lost the vocabulary to talk about our faith experience. Read any random page from an old Quaker journal and you'll come across half a dozen beautifully-rich metaphors for the Divine. Early Friends knew that human language could trap the Spirit and they vigorously challenged the human institutions and creedal statements that encrusted the organized religion of their day. They responded with a kind of poetry (in fact, one of Walt Whitman's influences was Elias Hicks and an argument can be made that Hick's impossible-to-pin-down theology was a poetical response to the Quaker stand against creeds). Today most Friends deal with this mandate not with poetry but with a sanitized political correctness. We strip our discourse of any language which is too evocative and limit ourselves to increasingly tamer metaphors for the divine.

So when it came time for me to choose a Gathering workshop, I decided to take an organized approach. I picked all the theological words I could think of and cross-referenced these with the extended workshop descriptions. I then picked the workshop with the most evocative language. I realize that a methodical keyword search of the workshops is not a particularly "poetic" way to make a choice, but as I'm interested in both protest and prophecy, I thought it might be a good match. I'll let you all know!

An Atlantic County Methodist Episcopal Meetinghouse. Picture from NJChurschape

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com--that's New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It's a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there's a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month's feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.