Your donation will help in the ministry of Quaker Ranter and QuakerQuaker. Learn more about my work at MartinKelley.com. I’d love to come visit your meeting or Quaker space to give a workshop on Quakerism. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the weekly Quaker Ranter email newsletter, you can do so here.
Please feel free to email me at martink@martinkelley.com if you have any ideas or feedback or just want to say hi!
The paypal system says you’ve cancelled a payment in progress. Feel free to email me at martink@martinkelley.com if you have any ideas or questions or feedback or just want to say hi!
Learn more about my work at MartinKelley.com. I’d love to come visit your meeting or Quaker space to give a workshop on Quakerism. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the weekly Quaker Ranter email newsletter, you can do so here.
Quaker: As the blog name implies, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, known colloquially as Quakers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our society and its interactions with the larger world. I’ve been blogging as a Friend since 2003. I read through a lot of Quaker material every day; much of the content on QuakerRanter is a curation of the content that catches my fancy.
Frequent topics of interest: Nonviolence, Media & Tech, Design, Family, South Jersey/Philly, and Photography.
Every Friday, that week’s posts are collected together into a email newsletter. Here are the most recent editions:
2026 • 2025 • 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009 • 2008 • 2007 • 2006 • 2005 • 2004 • 2003 • 2002 • 2001 • 2000 • 1999 • 1998 • 1997 • 1996 • 1995 • 1992
Blog categories:
Quaker
As the blog name implies, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, known colloquially as Quakers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our society and its interactions with the larger world. I generally only include my own posts in this list.
Nonviolence
From 1995 – 2008 I was the publisher of Nonviolence.org, a ground-breaking portal and blog about peace. Many of these articles are archived from that period.
Media & Tech
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been reinventing the wheel since I started my first zine back in college. Here’s some highlights from this category:
Design
Thoughts on design in general and my freelance work as as MartinKelley.com in particular.
Family
Personal posts about the family – wife Julie and kids Theo, Francis, Gregory and Laura.
Culture
A general topic for timely posts.
South Jersey/Philly
Local field trips, etc.
Religion
More generic religious writing.
Photos
Mostly artsy iPhone photography.
Long in the works, my O’Reilly Media-published “Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators” is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to “hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat” but it’s more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: “folksonomic density” (Google it now kids and you’ll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).
A hundred thank you’s to my fine and patient editor S. (don’t know if you want to be outed here). I’ve been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I’ve sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it’s amazing I found any time at get all this down.
As luck would have it I’ve just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O’Reilly website.
Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple
sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger
aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a
new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around
specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet
to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional
inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role.
Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to
understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness
the power of the long tail by catering to niches.