Tag Archives ⇒ Yahoo

Offers not refused

February 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Microsoft­’s Steve Ballmer is the God­fa­ther of our age. His let­ter to Yahoo’s board in their unso­licit­ed takeover attempt is the twenty-first cen­tu­ry white col­lar rewrite of The God­fa­ther’s “I’ll make him an offer he don’t
refuse”:

“Depend­ing on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right
to pur­sue all nec­es­sary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s share­hold­ers are
pro­vid­ed with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to real­ize the val­ue inher­ent in our
proposal.”

Are the chills going up your spine? Flickr, Del​.icio​.us, Yahoo Pipes, heck half my uni­verse would sud­den­ly be run by the boys from Red­mond, coders not par­tic­u­lar­ly known for their Web 2.0 sleek­ness or social ingenuity. 

Hey who am I to decide anything

April 9, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on Non­the­ist Friends web­site, there’s an arti­cle look­ing back at ten years of FGC Gath­er­ing work­shops on their con­cern. There was also a post some­where on the blo­gos­phere (sor­ry I don’t remem­ber where) by a Pagan Friend excit­ed that this year’s Gath­er­ing would have a work­shop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of inter­est­ing to look at the process by which new the­olo­gies are being added into Lib­er­al Quak­erism at an ever-increasing rate.

  • Mem­ber­ship of indi­vid­u­als in meet­ings. There are hun­dreds of meet­ings in lib­er­al Quak­erism that range all over the the­o­log­i­cal map. Add to that the wide­spread agree­ment that the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty with the meet­ing is not required and just about any­one believ­ing any­thing could be admit­ted some­where (or “grand­fa­thered in” as a birthright member).
  • A work­shop at the Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing and espe­cial­ly a reg­u­lar work­shop at suc­ces­sive Gath­er­ings. Yet as the very informed com­ments on a post a few years ago showed, the­ol­o­gy is not some­thing the plan­ning work­shop com­mit­tee is allowed to look at and at least one pro­po­nent of a new the­ol­o­gy has got­ten them­selves on the decid­ing com­mit­tee. The Gath­er­ing is essen­tial­ly built on the non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chau­taqua mod­el and FGC is per­fect­ly hap­py to spon­sor work­shops that are in appar­ent con­flict with its own mis­sion statement.
  • An arti­cle pub­lished in Friends Jour­nal. When the the Quak­er Sweat Lodge was strug­gling to claim legit­i­ma­cy it all but changed its name to the “Quak­er Sweat Lodge as fea­tured in the Feb­ru­ary 2002 Friends Jour­nal.” It’s a good mag­a­zine’s job to pub­lish arti­cles that make peo­ple think and a smart mag­a­zine will know that arti­cles that pro­voke a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sy is good for cir­cu­la­tion. I very much doubt the edi­to­r­i­al team at the Jour­nal con­sid­ers its agree­ment to pub­lish to be an inoc­u­la­tion against critique.
  • A web­site and list­serv. Fif­teen dol­lars at GoDad​dy​.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are prob­a­bly oth­er mech­a­nisms of legit­i­ma­cy. My point is not to give com­pre­hen­sive guide­lines to would-be cam­paign­ers. I sim­ply want to note that none of the actors in these deci­sions is con­scious­ly think­ing “hey, I think I’ll expand the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er the­ol­o­gy today.” In fact I expect they’re most­ly pass­ing the buck, think­ing “hey, who am I to decide any­thing like that.”

None of these decision-making process­es are meant to serve as tools to dis­miss oppo­si­tion. The orga­ni­za­tions involved are not hand­ing out Impri­maturs and would be quite hor­ri­fied if they real­ized their agree­ments were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a com­menter on my last post, on this sum­mer’s reunion and camp for the once-young mem­bers of Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, had a very inter­est­ing comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those pre­vi­ous­ly involved in YFNA have tak­en lead­er­ship with FGC … with both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the lega­cy we are cre­at­ing: do we like it?

I have the feel­ing that the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er lead­er­ship does­n’t quite believe it’s lead­ing lib­er­al Quak­erism. By “lead­er­ship” I don’t mean the small skim of the pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er bureau­cra­cy (whose mem­bers can get _too_ self-inflated on the lead­er­ship issue) but the com­mit­tees, clerks and vol­un­teers that get most of the work done from the local to nation­al lev­els. We are the inher­i­tors of a proud and some­times fool­ish tra­di­tion and our actions are shap­ing its future but I don’t think we real­ly know that. I have no clever solu­tion to the issues I’ve out­lined here but I think becom­ing con­scious that we’re cre­at­ing our own lega­cy is an impor­tant first step.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

February 27, 2007
· Martin Kelley

When­ev­er
I talk with fel­low web design­ers, the issue of “SEO” invari­ably comes
up. That’s techie slang for “search engine opti­miza­tion,” of course,
that black sci­ence of mak­ing sure Google lists your site high­er than
your com­peti­tors. Over the years a small army of shady char­ac­ters have
tried to game the search engine results.

I’ve always thought such tricks were pathet­ic and bound to lose over
the long term. Search engines want to fea­ture good sites. It’s in their
best inter­est to make sure the sites list­ed are the ones peo­ple want to
see. A search engine that returns unsat­is­fac­to­ry results quickly
becomes a has-been in the search engine com­pe­ti­tion. So as soon as a
site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skew­ing the rank­ings they tweak their secret search algo­rithm to fix the SEO loop­hole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In the­o­ry it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the oth­er big search engines hap­py: give poten­tial vis­i­tors site
they’ll want to vis­it. For­get the tricks and spend your time putting
togeth­er an amaz­ing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write. 

I’m look­ing to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
inter­view­ing with slick web devel­op­ers late­ly and when­ev­er they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolute­ly true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure con­tent. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web sys­tem can achieve many
of the same results – blogs are just the eas­i­est way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to peo­ple about start­ing a cor­po­rate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Hum­bug – your
com­pa­ny’s life is prob­a­bly already filled with blog­gable material! 

I used to work in a book­store where I did most of the customer
ser­vice, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing query and would spend a lit­tle time researching
an answer (most­ly by look­ing through the index­es of our books and
search­ing the arcane sites of our niche). This research did­n’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our book­store as a place to get
answers and gave us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over Ama­zon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have eas­i­ly been refor­mat­ted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the vol­ume com­ing from these
obscure search­es would be quite high (see yes­ter­day’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the Hit­Tail blog for an account of how atten­tion to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a wide­spread key­word dominance).

When­ev­er some­thing new hap­pens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s blog­gable. At the book­store, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten min­utes talk­ing about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen peo­ple at most. In that same ten min­utes we could
have writ­ten up a blog post say­ing much the same thing.

Last Spring a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle appeared in the local newspaper
that tan­gen­tial­ly involved my employ­er. That morn­ing my workmates
gath­ered togeth­er in the recep­tion area for the bet­ter part of an hour
trad­ing opin­ions and wise­cracks. After about five min­utes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opin­ions and wise­cracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the recep­tion area – to find my
work­mates still blath­er­ing on, natch. My post reached hun­dreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the recep­tion pontifications.

Humans are social ani­mals. We’re always blog­ging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it ver­bal­ly around the water cool­er with
three oth­er peo­ple. Learn to type it in and you’ve got your­self a
high-volume blog that will add invalu­able con­tent and SEO mag­ic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Last­ly, a point to web­mas­ters: it usu­al­ly pays to think about ways
to re-package your con­tent. My most recent­ly expe­ri­ence of this was
tag­i­fy­ing my per­son­al blog over at “Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org.” Every time I
post there a Mov­able Type plu­g­in fish­es out the key words in the
arti­cle and lists them after­wards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like cat­e­gories except they pick up every­thing we talk
about (when we use them aggres­sive­ly at least, and espe­cial­ly when we
auto­mate them). We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know the cat­e­gories that our
poten­tial audi­ence might be search­ing for and tag­i­fy­ing our sites
increas­es our key­word out­reach expo­nen­tial­ly. My per­son­al blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages accord­ing to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged con­tent that accounts for all of
this extra vol­ume. This does­n’t increase traf­fic by that near­ly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google vis­its came from these tag
index­es. More on the mechan­ics of this on my post about the tag­ging.

The Gorillas and Chimps of the Social Networking Scene

September 18, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Over on the New York Times, an arti­cle about a new Nickolodeon-created web­site for parents

now in the final stages of beta testing. 

In a non­pub­lic test of the site over the sum­mer by about
1,000 recruit­ed par­tic­i­pants, exec­u­tives learned that these users
want­ed to blog; now, every user with a pro­file can, Ms. Rep­pen said.
Through the beta test, which is now open to new mem­bers, Nick is
learn­ing that par­ents want spaces to sell their crafts, a separate
Chris­t­ian home-schooling dis­cus­sion and big­ger type on the Web site.
Local dis­cus­sion boards will also be added, as will user-generated
video.

They also quote a Nis­san mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive, who says that
“com­mu­ni­ty sites are one of the big phe­nom­e­non hap­pen­ing on line this
year.”

There is a big shift going on.

It’s star­tling to real­ize that my three year tod­dler is almost the same age as Myspace and old­er than Face­book.
In just a few short years they’ve come to dom­i­nate much of the online
world, espe­cial­ly with under-25 users. The kind of inde­pen­dent blogs
that dom­i­nate a sites like Live­jour­nal and Blogspot don’t have the web
of cross-connections – what I called the “folk­so­nom­ic den­si­ty” – of the new
social net­work­ing sites. It seems appro­pri­ate that Myspace was found­ed by spam­mers: who knows more about suck­ing peo­ple in?

The ques­tion: will the net have room for inde­pen­dent niche sites?
Myspace is chang­ing its archi­tec­ture to dis­able key link­ing fea­tures of
third-party embed­ded plug-ins like the from the pop­u­lar video site Youtube. The big search sites also want a piece of this mar­ket – new fea­tures on Yahoo local and the geo­t­agged maps
on Yahoo’s Flickr are impres­sive). It all reminds me some of the
debates about local food co-ops ver­sus enlight­ened super­mar­kets: is it
a good thing that organ­ic pro­duce and soymilk can be pur­chased at the
local Acme, even if that cuts into the inde­pen­dent co-op’s business?
Don’t we want every­one to have access to every­thing? In the end,
phi­los­o­phy won’t set­tle this argument.

Quaker Youth Ministry

August 9, 2004
· Martin Kelley

h2. Incre­men­tal vs. Prophetic
Since I’ve writ­ten a lot about “young adult minstry among Quakers”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/young_adult_friends.php I feel oblig­at­ed to post the address of a new “Yahoo group”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QuakerYouthMinistry/ about the top­ic, focused on high school youth. I real­ly don’t feel led to con­tribute. No one there is look­ing at root caus­es for the cri­sis in youth reten­tion. The sug­ges­tions for improve­ment offered so far are incre­men­tal when what’s wrong is fun­da­men­tal: deep-rooted insti­tu­tion­al ageism and a fear of a robust and chal­leng­ing prophet­ic min­istry. There is hope for youth min­istry among lib­er­al Friends but I don’t think it will come from this quar­ter. Still, it’s worth check­ing out and some Quak­er Ranter read­ers might want to join in the discussion.

Souping up the Firefox Browser: My Tips and Tricks

June 17, 2004
· Martin Kelley

It’s ‘Tech Thurs­day’ here at Quak­er Ranter. I try not to get over­ly excit­ed by soft­ware and I attempt to stay neu­tral in the var­i­ous sil­ly tech wars con­stant­ly rag­ing (the old Mac vs Win­dows being the grand­dad­dy of them all). But the newest ver­sion of the Fire­fox brows­er is so much supe­ri­or to Inter­net Explor­er that I have to sing its prais­es and talk about how to soup it up with cool features.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Plain Dress Discussion on Yahoo

April 19, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Julie, my wife, has just start­ed a Yahoo group called PlainAnd­Mod­est­Dress.
Here’s her description:

This group is for Chris­tians inter­est­ed in dis­cussing issues of reli­gious plain and mod­est dress. It is not nec­es­sary to have grown up in a plain or mod­est­ly dress­ing group. We are espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in the expe­ri­ences of those who have come to this point as a sort of con­ver­sion or a “recov­ery” of tra­di­tion that has been lost. Tra­di­tion­al Catholics, Anabap­tists, con­ser­v­a­tive Quak­ers, and oth­er Chris­tians wel­come here. The­o­log­i­cal points and demon­i­na­tion­al dif­fer­ences are open for dis­cus­sion (not argu­ment), as are the specifics of what type of plain dress you have been called to. Dis­cus­sion of head­cov­er­ing is also allowed here, as are gen­der dis­tinc­tions in dress. We may also share prayers for one anoth­er, as well as the chal­lenges we face in try­ing to live in obe­di­ence to the Lord. This is not a forum in which to dis­cuss the valid­i­ty of Chris­tian­i­ty – no blas­phem­ing allowed. 

There is much to be said about plain dress. This is not an easy wit­ness. It forces us to deal with issues of sub­mis­sion and humil­i­ty on a dai­ly basis – just try to go to a con­ve­nience store and not feel self-consciously set apart. Explain­ing this new ‘style’ to one’s more world­ly friends can be quite a chal­lenge. These are eter­nal issues for those adopt­ing plain dress and I laugh with com­rade­ship when I read old Quak­er jour­nal accounts of going plain.
Even so, I have a bit of trep­i­da­tion about a news­group on plain dress. I don’t want to fetishize plain dress by talk­ing about it too much. The point should­n’t be to for­mu­late some sort of ‘uni­form of the right­eous,’ and adop­tion of this tes­ti­mo­ny should­n’t be moti­vat­ed by peer pres­sure or ambi­tion, but by a call­ing from the Holy Spir­it – this is the crux of what I under­stand Mar­garet Fell to have been say­ing when she called pres­sured plain­ness a “sil­ly poor gospel”. (I should say that some non-Quaker do dress more as an iden­ti­fy­ing uni­form, which is fine, just not nec­es­sar­i­ly the Quak­er rationale).
But like any out­ward form or tes­ti­mo­ny (peace, Quak­er process, etc.), tak­ing up plain dress can be a fruit­ful course in reli­gious edu­ca­tion. I think back to being sev­en­teen and buck­ing my father’s wish that I attend the Naval Acad­e­my – my “no” made me ask how else my beliefs about peace might need to be act­ed out in my life. It became a use­ful query. Plain dress has forced me to think anew about how I “con­sume” cloth­ing and how I relate to mass mar­ket­ing and the glob­al cloth­ing indus­try. It’s also kept me from duck­ing out on my faith, as I wear an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of my beliefs.
So join the plain dress dis­cus­sion or take a look at the ever-growing sec­tion of the site called Resources on Quak­er Plain Dress, which includes “My Exper­i­ments with Plain­ness”, my ear­ly sto­ry about going plain.

Ohio Protests Open National Debate on War

February 19, 1998
· Martin Kelley

Pro­test­ers in Colum­bus, Ohio upset a pro-war pro­gram with top Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials Wednes­day after­noon, ask­ing them tough ques­tions at a live CNN “Town Hall” meet­ing and giv­ing the anti­war move­ment its first seri­ous nation­al publicity.

Sec­re­tary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Sec­re­tary William S. Cohen were in Colum­bus to gain pop­u­lar sup­port for the war and to build the myth of a nation­al con­sen­sus for a U.S. attack on Iraq. They were both sur­prised and embar­rassed by the jeers and tough ques­tions they received from audi­ence mem­bers. Some audi­ence mem­bers held up signs and chant­ed “We Don’t Want Your Racist War” while one ques­tion­er asked why the U.S. was­n’t con­sid­er­ing force against oth­er coun­tries vio­lat­ing human rights such as Indone­sia in it’s slaugh­ter of East Tim­o­rese (when Albright start­ed hem­ming and haw­ing, her accuser shot back “You’re not answer­ing my ques­tion, Madame Albright.”)

The Colum­bus dis­senters are the top sto­ry in the major news­pa­pers and media pun­dits are start­ing to pub­licly doubt polls show­ing over­whelm­ing sup­port for mil­i­tary action.

Sam­ple Let­ter to Media

To the Editors,

With today’s sto­ry about an Ohio audi­ence jeer­ing Sec­re­tary of State Madeleine Albright, it’s time for MS-NBC to give some cov­er­age to the groundswell of grass­roots oppo­si­tion to anoth­er Gulf War. If you had been mon­i­tor­ing the “Iraq Cri­sis Anti­war Home­page,” the events in Colum­bus would not have been a sur­prise. In fact, 82 oth­er demon­stra­tions are cur­rent­ly list­ed here.

In addi­tion to events list­ings, the Anti­war Home­page has analy­sis, action alerts, ideas for orga­niz­ing and links to major non­vi­o­lence groups. A project of the Non­vi­o­lence Web, home to dozens of U.S.-based peace groups, it is a cen­tral source for anti­war organizing.

Please con­sid­er pro­fil­ing all the great work being done around the coun­try to stop anoth­er sense­less war.

In peace,
Mar­tin Kelley
Non­vi­o­lence Web

Reporters vis­it­ing the “Iraq Cri­sis Anti­war Home­page” would not have been sur­prised by the turnout in Colum­bus. A huge grass­roots anti­war move­ment has grown in the past month. The Non­vi­o­lence Web’s email box is being flood­ed with great state­ments, let­ters to Clin­ton, action ideas and just plain wor­ry about anoth­er war. The Anti­war Home­page’s list of upcom­ing protests spans the world, list­ing the Colum­bus event along with over sev­en­ty others.

But lit­tle of this orga­niz­ing has got­ten the nation­al media. Most of the online media have put togeth­er sec­tions promis­ing “com­plete cov­er­age,” and sport­ing bravu­ra titles like “Show­down with Sad­dam.” But look at the cov­er­age and you’ll see only fluff pieces about the brave boys on the air­craft car­ri­ers or furrow-browed analy­sis of U.N. Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Kofi Annan’s doomed search for a diplo­mat­ic settlement.

fter Ohio, the nation­al media will have to start rec­og­niz­ing the wide­spread dis­sent among Amer­i­cans. Some progress is being made. YAHOO, the most pop­u­lar site on the net, has list­ed the Anti­war Home­page in its list of Iraq Cri­sis resources. And a top news orga­ni­za­tion is work­ing on a pro­file of the Non­vi­o­lence Web to appear with­in a few days (keep­ing look­ing for an announcement).

But we must all do more. Write and email the nation­al media to include cov­er­age of anti­war actions. Demand that a link to the Iraq Cri­sis Anti­war Home­page be includ­ed in their “Com­plete Cov­er­age” of the cri­sis. A sam­ple let­ter to MS-NBC is includ­ed here, but please write your own and show them that dis­sent has spread past the Colum­bus audi­to­ri­um and is fol­low­ing them across the internet!