publicity Posts

Well the Department of Justice must be a Quaker Ranter reader because they followed yesterday's advice and confiscated the private papers of actress Anne Hathaway, ex-girlfriend, board member and business partner of con man Raffaello Follieri.

But yet again her publicity machine rolls on. Most news outlets are calling the papers her "diaries" in oblique reference to her appearance in the 2001's "Princess Diaries" movie. One tongue-in-cheek headline read "The FBI knows whether Anne Hathaway dots her 'I's with hearts." Financial papers, photos, documents, etc., are reduced to "diaries". Boy oh boy. I wonder if the celebrity blogs will start describing the D.A. as a "fire breathing dragon." Poor little Anne bilking millions of dollars from investors, how was she to know?

The NY Daily News article says the papers included photos of Follieri with the Clintons, Pope John Paul II and John and Cindy McCain. Down here in South Jersey we can't help but wonder whether a few chummy shots of the Italian con man with pal Bishop Joseph Galante. Such pictures certainly exist somewhere, whether in Anne's collection or in the photo shoebox of some South Jersey priest. I would love to see them.

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 QuakerQuaker.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.

Over on my design blog I've just posted an article, Banking on reputations, which looks at how the websites for high-profile cultural institutions are often built without regard to natural web publicity--there's no focus on net culture or search engine visibility. The sites do get visited, but only because of the reputation of the institution itself. My guess is that people go to them for very specific functions (looking up a phone number, ordering tickets, etc.). I finish by asking the question, "Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?"

I won't belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It's kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer's blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting's report on Friends United Meeting. Johan's post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan's piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It's been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It's fun but it's about as serious as you might expect. It's getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan's piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it's a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I'm happy to link to it but I have to think there's a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan's post.

Here's the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I'm as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting sessions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gatherings are lucky if they get three to five percent attendance. The governing body of my yearly meeting is made up of about one percent of its membership; add a percent or two or three and you have how many people actually pay any kind of attention to it or to yearly meeting politics. A few years ago a Quaker publisher commissioned a prominent Friend to write an update to liberal Friends' most widely read introductory book and she mangled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication--even insiders don't care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most contemporary Friends post-institutional? The percentage of Friends involved in the work of our religious bodies has perhaps always been small, but the divide seems more striking now that the internet is providing competition. The big Quaker institutions skate on being recognized as official bodies but if their participation rate is low, their recognition factor small, and their ability to influence the Quaker culture therefore minimal, then are they really so important? After six years of marriage I can hear my wife's question as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the religious authority of these bodies come from? As someone who sees the world through a sociological/historical perspective, my question is complementary but somewhat different: if so few people care, then is there authority? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when a schism might mean the loss of control over a beloved school or campground--factor out the sentimental factor and what's left?

I don't think a diminishing influence is a positive trend, but it won't go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in committees). How are today's generation of Friends going to deal with changing cultural forces that are threatening to undermine our current practices? And how might we use the new opportunities to advance the Quaker message and Christ's agenda?

Update from yesterday's post. The new FGC Quakeryouth site is now effusively thanking QuakerQuaker for development of the "quaker.youth" tag and for extensive use of content on the site that was compiled by yours truly.

For the record: everyone that wants to share QuakerQuaker material is warmly encouraged to do so. I really want this to be an open standard and a way for us to easily share content. But please do the courtesy of contacting me first and please make sure that every page that includes materials compiled by QuakerQuaker says so and has a link.

I'm archiving yesterday's post (those wondering what the fuss was about can read it here) but I'll copy a few paragraphs below since they talk about how Quaker institutions have been working cooperatively with QuakerQuaker. I'm happy to add FGC to the list.

QuakerQuaker co-editor C. Wess Daniels and I worked with the staff of Britain Yearly Meeting to cover May's annual sessions and support their official sessions blog (Wess himself wrote for it). BYM helped publicize the QuakerQuaker tagging system ("quaker.britain-ym" in that instance) and we re-wrote the system to pull in their blog.

I'm currently working closely with staff of Friends World Committee for Consultation to cover their upcoming Triennial in Dublin. This has included my programming a custom feed with javascript support so that they can pull the QuakerQuaker material into a special page on the FWCC site itself. I've done this publicity work for Britain Yearly Meeting and FWCC for free, in the interest of sharing Friends' good news with the world.

All this work is more than just whipping up a computer-generated feed. I have a sophisticated series of searches that allows me to scan the internet daily for Quaker posts and I watch what items are being added to the feed (by trouble-makers, spammers or automation) and take out inappropriate links.

If you think of the Quaker blogosphere as a garden, I'm nurturing new plants by finding new bloggers, encouraging them with links, attention and a lot of behind-the-scenes friendly emails. I'm also weeding out the latest spam attacks and bringing human intelligence to a semi-automated process so that the material is focused, relevant and interesting. Computers don't create communities: caring, thoughtful and selfless people do. And it's not just me, it's the half dozen QuakerQuaker co-editors and the extended family of Quaker bloggers who routinely gather together from our separate traditions to swap stories, visions and faith around the metaphorical campfire that is QuakerQuaker.

Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush's Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she's all but resigned from the protest movement. She posted the following on her Daily Kos blog

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party... However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it's claimed.

Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush's outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they authorized his war of aggression anyway. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November's elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton's repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.

Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.

I feel for Cindy. She's been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it's the work of a movement. Sheehan's witness has touched people she'll never meet. It's made a difference. She's a woman of remarkable courage who's pointing out the puppet strings she's cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

---

Nonviolence.org's fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we've raised $150 which doesn't even cover that period's server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. It's up to you now.

Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.

Just the quickest of posts to announce that Quaker Gatherings are now being covered on QuakerQuaker. Each event page tries to list all blog posts that refer to the event in question.

Past events covered: February's Young Adult Friends Gathering in New Jersey and FUM Board Meeting in Kenya, and the Quaker Heritage Day in Berkeley California last week. Upcoming events are FWCC Americas Meeting in Rhode Island (it includes a panel on Convergent Friends featuring Robin M and C Wess Daniels, May's Britain Yearly Meeting Sessions that will feature an official blog, and this summer's FGC Gathering whose damnably attractive advance program went up today.

I'm pretty excited by this development, which is really just a reflection of the growth of Quaker blogging. Too much of the public news from Quaker events has been barely-conceal boosterism, a publicity fluff piece for the sponsoring organization. In other words: dull and trite. The growing Quaker blog culture is very different from that of mainline Quaker institutions. There's a much greater transparency and openness and less of a sense that we have to identify and defend a particular Quaker tradition. We're much more willing to tell stories and wrestle with controversies.

Quaker events (at least in networked North America) are now being covered online in real time with more depth and opinion that we've previously seen. I think this is a good kick-in-the-pants for the bureaucratic dinosaurs of institutional Quakerism and an exciting opportunity for getting new voices and opinions heard.

As I see events unfolding in the Quakerosphere, I'll add more pages. They won't be limited to U.S. and British events except that we seem to be dominating this realm still. If too many events start being covered (which is only a matter of time) I'll have to figure out some way of breaking them down more.

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.