Even I’m a bit shocked by the title of this post. Have I really been blog­ging for fif­teen years? I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In Novem­ber 1997 I added a fea­ture to my two-year-old peace web­site. I called this new entity Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront and updated it weekly with orig­i­nal fea­tures and curated links to the best online paci­fist writ­ing. I wrote a ret­ro­spec­tive of the “early blog­ging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some con­text about the proto-blogs hap­pen­ing back in 1997.

But I could arguably go back fur­ther than 15 years. In col­lege, my friend Brni and I started an alter­na­tive print mag­a­zine called VACUUM. It came out weekly. It had a mix of opin­ion pieces and news from all over. Famil­iar, huh? Columns were made up from a dot matrix printer and pasted down with scotch tape, with head­lines scrawled out with a sharpie. The ethos was there. Next April will mark its Sil­ver Jubilee.

What’s most strik­ing is not the huge leaps of tech­nolo­gies, but the single-mindedness of my pur­suits all these years. There are cross-decade echos of themes and ways of pack­ag­ing pub­li­ca­tions that con­tinue in my work as edi­tor of Friends Jour­nal.

The first photo on the web photo turns 20 next Wednes­day and its story is more inter­est­ing that you’d think:

The first pho­to­graphic image ever uploaded to the Web was a Pho­to­shop dis­as­ter. It was cre­ated to sell some­thing, and fea­tured attrac­tive women in a come-hither pose. In short, photo-uploading was born with some orig­i­nal sins that have never quite washed away.

Bonus Youtube: Les Hor­ri­bles Cer­nettes perform “Collider”

Henry Jenk­ins (right) mixes up the names but has good com­men­tary on the Susan Boyle phe­nom­e­non in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I’ve been quot­ing lines over on my Tum­blr blog but this is a good one for Quaker read­ers because I think it says some­thing about the Con­ver­gent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cos­mopoli­tanism, we are most often talk­ing
about Amer­i­can teens doing cos­play or lis­ten­ing to K-Pop albums, not
church ladies gath­er­ing to pray for the suc­cess of a British real­ity
tele­vi­sion con­tes­tant, but it is all part of the same process. We are
reach­ing across bor­ders in search of con­tent, zones which were used to
orga­nize the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent in the Broad­cast era, but which
are much more fluid in an age of par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture and social
networks.

We live in a world where con­tent can be accessed quickly from any
part of the world assum­ing it some­how reaches our radar and where the
col­lec­tive intel­li­gence of the par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture can iden­tify
con­tent and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that
sense is a sign of big­ger things to come — con­tent which wasn’t
designed for our mar­ket, con­tent which wasn’t timed for such rapid
global cir­cu­la­tion, gain­ing much greater vis­i­bil­ity than ever before
and net­works and pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with
the rapidly esca­lat­ing demand.

Susan Boyle’s video was pro­duced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that bor­der. In the Con­ver­gent Friends move­ment, we’re dis­cov­er­ing “con­tent which wasn’t designed for our market”–Friends of all dif­fer­ent stripes hav­ing direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost imme­di­ately. In this con­text, the “net­works and pro­duc­tions com­pa­nies” would be our yearly meet­ings and larger Friends bodies.

On a recent evening I met up with Gath­er­ing in Light Wess, who was in Philadel­phia for a Quaker-sponsored peace con­fer­ence. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great din­ner, Wess and I tested some tes­ti­monies,
and a revolv­ing group of Friends ended up around a table in the
conference’s hotel lobby talk­ing late into the night (the links are
Wess’ reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp
account).

Of all of the many peo­ple I spoke with, only one had any kind of
fea­tured role at the con­fer­ence. With­out excep­tion my con­ver­sa­tion
part­ners were fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadel­phia, yet I sensed a per­vad­ing sense of missed
oppor­tu­nity: hun­dreds of lives rearranged and thou­sands of air miles
flown mostly to lis­ten to oth­ers talk. I spent my long com­mute home
won­der­ing what it would have been like to have spent the week­end in the
hotel lobby record­ing ten minute Youtube inter­views with as many
con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as I could. We would have ended up with a
snap­shot of faith-based peace orga­niz­ing circa 2009.

Next week­end I’ll be burn­ing up more of the ozone layer by fly­ing to Cal­i­for­nia to co-lead a work­shop with Wess and Robin M. (details at Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more peo­ple in!) The par­tic­i­pant list looks
fab­u­lous. I don’t know every­one but there’s at least half a dozen
peo­ple com­ing who I would be thrilled to take work­shops from. I really
don’t want to spend the week­end hear­ing myself talk! I also know there
are plenty of peo­ple who can’t come because of com­mit­ments and costs.

So we’re going to try some experiments–they might work, they might not. On Quak­erQuaker, there’s a new group for the event and a dis­cus­sion thread open to all QQ mem­bers (sign up is quick and pain­less). For those of you com­fort­able with the QQ tag­ging sys­tem, the Deli­cious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has pro­posed using #con­ver­gent­friends as our Twit­ter hashtag.

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blog­ging via Twit­ter, any­one?), wacky wacky stuff that would dis­tract
us from what­ever mes­sage the Inward Christ might be try­ing to give us.
But behind all this is a real ques­tions about why and how we should
gather together as Friends. As the bank­ing sys­tem tanks, as the envi­ron­ment
strains, as com­mu­ni­ca­tions costs drop and we find our­selves in a curi­ous new econ­omy, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties open up?

It’s up on the side­bar and fea­tured on Quak­erQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas’ post “Why I bother with reli­gion.” I’ve writ­ten about the Emer­gent Church / Quaker exper­i­ment that Kevin-Douglass is help­ing to orga­nize down in Bal­ti­more. Check out their new’ish web­site, http://​www​.seton​hill​friends​.org/
Here’s a snip­pet of today’s post:

Orga­nized reli­gion is based in com­mu­nity. Being in a com­mu­nity chal­lenges me. Sim­ply hang­ing out with my friends and engag­ing my fam­ily isn’t enough. The risks of such an inten­tional com­mu­nity and the sup­port avail­able therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes eas­ily or go along with what exists around me. I’m chal­lenged in com­mu­nity. I’m held account­able. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an eth­i­cal soci­ety, the truth is that in a reli­gious com­mu­nity, we all seek to go much deeper than the psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tional lev­els. We seek to under­stand that Mys­tery — God. We seek to under­stand that trans­for­ma­tive and heal­ing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas orig­i­nally posted it to Face­book ear­lier today and I asked if he would sign up to Quak­erQuaker and post it there. There’s a lot of great stuff that goes up on Face­book and it’s a use­ful tool for keep­ing in touch with friends, but most posts are not vis­i­ble beyond your own Face­book friends list (it depends on your pri­vacy set­tings). If you post some­thing really good about Friends or belief on Face­book, seri­ously con­sider whether you might repost it some­where more pub­lic. If you don’t have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on Quak­erQuaker, where every reg­is­tered user has blog­ging capa­bil­i­ties (it cre­ates a bit of a meta­phys­i­cal con­nun­drum for the Quak­erQuaker edi­tors, as it means we’ll be link­ing QQ posts to the QQ site, but that’s fine).

I was recently work­ing with a client who has a large Google Adwords cam­paign, with an annual ad bud­get in the low six fig­ures. He’s been very care­ful about the key­words he’s cho­sen and we’ve both poured over the Google Ana­lyt­ics fig­ures to see how the cam­paign progressed.

It took a third party key­word track­ing sys­tem to dis­cover that many of the ads were being served up to wrong key­words in the Google searches. I want to keep the client’s iden­tity pri­vate, so let me use an anal­ogy: say you’re a boomerang maker and you’ve bought a cam­paign intend­ing ads to show up for those who search “boomerang” in Google. What we dis­cov­ered is that Google was serv­ing up a large per­cent­age of these ads for searchers of “fris­bees” — close, but not close enough for searchers to care. Few peo­ple clicked on the mis­placed ad. We’re talk­ing seri­ous money wasted on ads served up to the wrong tar­get audience.

How did a care­fully con­structed ad cam­paign get on so many poorly-targeted searches? Google allows fuzzy match­ing under their broad match guide­lines:

For exam­ple, if you’re cur­rently run­ning ads on the broad-matched key­word web host­ing, your ads may show for the search queries web host­ing com­pany or web­host. The key­word vari­a­tions that are allowed to trig­ger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords sys­tem con­tin­u­ally mon­i­tors your key­word qual­ity and per­for­mance fac­tors. Your ads will only con­tinue show­ing on the highest-performing and most rel­e­vant key­word vari­a­tions.

You can dis­able these broad searches using neg­a­tive key­words (i.e., “-fris­bee”) and with spe­cific key­words (“boomerang”).

But Google does not make it easy to see just where your ads are going. You have to set up a spe­cial Search query per­for­mance report. It’s really essen­tial that any­one doing a large Google Ad cam­paign set up one of these searches and have it auto­mat­i­cally emailed to them every month. Google clearly wasn’t track­ing the “per­for­mance” of its broad search on this client’s ad. I’m par­tic­u­larly dis­turbed that we didn’t see these mis­di­rected key­words listed in the Google Ana­lyt­ics track­ing reports. It is dan­ger­ous to use the same com­pany to both sell you a ser­vice and to report how well it’s been doing.

Credit where it’s due: it was the excel­lent long-tail blog con­tent ser­vice Hit­tail that gave us the infor­ma­tion that Google was mis­di­rect­ing its ads. See my pre­vi­ous Hit­tail cov­er­age.