Beth Kantor on the G+ Nonprofit Brand pages:

November 9, 2011
· Martin Kelley

“I’m try­ing to avoid being seduced by Shiny Object Syn­drome. It makes non­prof­its and indi­vid­u­als to adopt the lat­est cool social tool based on peer pres­sure, buzz, or a strange desire to be one of the first. It can also dis­tract you from your pri­or­i­ty to do list.”

Seems sen­si­ble advice.

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Google + Non­prof­it Brand Pages
Why does Google +  launch new stuff when I’m on a book dead­line!!   The long await­ed brand pages on Google + are here.    I put a post out on Google + 

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Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a page devoted to issues of faith and next…

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Pew Forum on Reli­gion and Pub­lic Life has a page devot­ed to issues of faith and next year’s pres­i­den­tial elections.

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2012 Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­dates Reli­gious Back­grounds | Pew Forum on Reli­gion & Pub­lic Life
Inter­est­ed in how reli­gion could affect the 2012 elec­tion? Learn about the 2012 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date’s reli­gious back­grounds in Pew Forum online biographies. 

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Last weekend I was invited to speak to Abington (Pa.) Meeting’s First-day school…

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Last week­end I was invit­ed to speak to Abing­ton (Pa.) Meet­ing’s First-day school (n.b. prop­er FJ stylesheet) to talk about vocal min­istry in wor­ship. I haven’t been to wor­ship at that meet­ing for eons and can’t speak to the con­di­tion of its min­istry, but I do know that vocal min­istry can be some­thing of a mys­tery for unpro­grammed Friends. Many of us are “con­vinced,” com­ing to the Soci­ety as adults and often have a nag­ging feel­ing we’re play-acting at being Friends, but I’ve met many life-long Quak­ers who also won­der about it.

Per­haps as a response to these feel­ings, we some­times get rather pedan­tic that what­ev­er way we’ve first encoun­tered is the Quak­er way. The cur­rent fash­ion of vocal min­istry in the Philadel­phia area is for short mes­sages, often about world events, often con­fes­sion­al in nature. What I want­ed to leave Abing­ton with was the rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ways unpro­grammed Friends have wor­shipped over time and how some of our prac­tices out­side wor­ship were devel­oped to help nur­ture Spirit-led ministry.

(writ­ten this a.m. but only post­ed to lim­it­ed cir­cles, cut and past­ed when I saw the mix-up)

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I thought I’d try an experiment

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

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.

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The fall of Corzine, in the New Yorker

November 5, 2011
· Martin Kelley

The fall of Corzine, in the New Yorker

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News Desk: Corzine’s Downfall
The col­lapse this week of the broker-dealer MF Glob­al and the come­up­pance of its chief exec­u­tive Jon Corzine, who resigned Fri­day, have been and will be put to many polit­i­cal and rhetor­i­cal purposes.… 

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