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Friday, October 10, 2003
Mention Me! XLV Welcome to everyone checking in from Wired News. I'm about to head out for the weekend, but if you'd like to check out Media Diet's Virtual Book Tour entries, you can start with Dennis' first entry this past Monday. Make with the clicky click and scroll up to catch up. Virtual Book Tour 2 VI Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party, trips on over to the fifth stop of the Virtual Book Tour today. Over in BradLands, Dennis and Erin Quill, the inspiration for the character Lauren in the book, wax gabby about movie musicals. After dissing Moulin Rouge and Chicago, Erin goes on to list her favorite movie musicals. It's a fun segment, and it's good to see Brad opening BradLands up to other contributors -- and to see Erin join the fray! Sounds like there will be more material published throughout the day. Cool beans! I'll continue to follow the tour as it progresses. 'Tis the Season to Be... AWOL XV This afternoon, I hop a train south to Rhode Island to spend the holiday weekend with my parents. While I always hope to update Media Diet while traveling, if I don't, that doesn't mean that Media Diet is dead (long live Media Diet!). It just means that it's resting. Worst case scenario: Media Diet will be back up and running Oct. 14 or so. Thursday, October 09, 2003
Virtual Book Tour 2 V Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party, moves on to the fourth stop of the Virtual Book Tour today. Over at Rogue Librarian, Carrie Bickner shares her personal recollections of the movie Jaws. Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Virtual Book Tour 2 IV Supposedly, Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party takes the step to the third stop of the Virtual Book Tour today. But checking in at Inkblots Magazine, I can't find Dennis anywhere. Maybe he'll show up later in the day. I'll continue to follow the tour as it progresses. The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIV Last night, a friend and I checked out Namaskar, a new Indian restaurant in Davis Square in Somerville. Quite a bit better than Diva in terms of decor, food, and service, Namaskar impressed me quite a bit. Basically, Namaskar is a fancy restaurant hiding behind reasonable prices. The interior design is amazing, and the restaurant is extremely tastefully lit. The partial suspended ceiling really works well. And the food? My friend and I shared an aloo nan, lamb saag, and chicken vindaloo. Neither dish was overly spicy, even though we requested them to be "hot," but everything was extremely good. Even the glass of milk I ordered. The service was a little intense on the upsell, trying to get us to buy beverages and desserts we didn't want. "Anything to drink, sir?" "I'll have a glass of milk." "Perhaps a coffee? A special coffee?" "No." "OK, how about you ma'am. Anything to drink?" "No." "Coke?" "No." "Sprite?" "No." "Ginger ale?" "No." At the very end, I declined more ice water, and the man with the pitcher said, "Please, sir," and insisted on pouring me half a glass even though we were about to leave. It was hilarious. Right now, the restaurant doesn't have a liquor license, but if and when it secures one, Namaskar will be a classy establishment indeed, especially if they can cut back on the upsell. The place was practically empty. They didn't need to pressure us. Event-O-Dex LXXVIII Oct. 9-11, 16-19, and 23-26: The Poets' Theatre stages Dario Fo's "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway in Somerville. Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Virtual Book Tour 2 III Extra special thanks to Dennis Hensley, author of Screening Party for hosting Media Diet yesterday. He rocked the casbah. Now, he's continued on his merry way for the second stop of the Virtual Book Tour, dropping into Dave Thomas' Baltimore-based blog Confessions of an Indie Filmmaker. In an email interview with many of the people featured in Hensley's book, Thomas plumbs the importance of Mad magazine, the new James Bond actor, movies Hensley couldn't include in the book, and whether Dr. Beaverman ever braved a gay bar. It's a catty snarkathon that's in the spirit of the book -- but in addition to. Imagine: They're really like this when they all get together! If only all my friends were so fabulous. (Just kidding, you guys are great.) The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXIII On the way back from Narrowsburg, New York, where the Fast Company editorial team gathered for a planning retreat late last week, Bill, Rob, Christine, and I stopped Friday night at Rein's Deli-Restaurant in Vernon, Connecticut. If you drive between the soul death that is Boston (harf!) and New York City frequently, you're well advised to check this out as an eating option. Crowded with locals -- including several elderly couples that seemed to be regulars -- and road-weary travelers, the New York-style deli boasts an ample menu. Slightly lacking in service -- "Didn't he take your drink order? Harrumph." and "French fries? I thought you wanted chips." -- the restaurant does provide good food. I had a pastrami reuben, French fries, coffee, and water, and while it wasn't amazing, it was worth returning to if I find myself between the two cities again. Event-O-Dex LXXVII Wednesday, Oct. 8: Neal Stephenson reads from Quicksilver, volume one of the Baroque Cycle, at the Harvard Coop. 7 p.m. Virtual Book Tour 2: Newsletters of Note The only thing that's newsletter like that I can think of is Written By, which is the magazine that is sent out to Writer's Guild members by the WGA. It always has interesting interviews with film and TV writers. The only problem is, you have to be in the Guild to get it. When I inked a deal to co-write a pilot of my first book Misadventures in the (213) for NBC, I got to be an associate member, but then you have to work again in the next three years, which I failed to do. So I'm no longer an associate WGA member, and I no longer get the great mag Written By. Whenever I see it at a newsstand or somewhere, I think about my failure and floundering career. Virtual Book Tour 2: The Movie I Watched Last Night My favorite movies about movies: Cinema Paradiso -- an all-time fave. I always cry when the older director visits his childhood bedroom, and the kissing montage at the end lays me out. I also like Living in Oblivion; it's so dark and funny. I laughed a lot at Bowfinger, too, where Steve Martin tricks Eddie Murphy into being in his movie. When I think of people watching movies in movies, the first image that comes to mind is Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. There she is again: Madonna Goddess of the Silver Screen. Ugh. It's always interesting in movies where they have a character watching a certain movie, because the choice always tells you a lot about the character, like what is the movie Rosie O'Donnell and Meg Ryan watch in Sleepless in Seattle? I can't remember, but it was some romantic movie. If they'd been watching The Exorcist 2, it would have been a totally different movie. Virtual Book Tour 2: Event-O-Dex As far as events go, I'm going to be doing a reading/signing of Screening Party in Seattle on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7 p.m. at Bailey Coy Books (414 Broadway East), which should be good for a few laughs. I usually have a full cast of folks reading with me. I'm going up there for The Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. I'm hosting an event there called the Home Video Gong Show, which is where people bring videos from home -- whether they made them or just happen to have them -- and we screen them for a panel of celeb judges who either Gong or score them. At the LA version, which I've hosted every July for the last five years, we've discovered such gems as The Dixie Carter Unworkout, excerpts from a TV movie where Kate Jackson broke her arm and had to keep filming -- it's genius the way they tried to hide it -- and a very popular old video of a young girl beiong taught about her period. It's going to be a nutty night. Some other events that I like are the Last Remaining Seats series. Every June, the LA Conservancy screens old movies at the old movie palaces on Broadway downtown. If you're around LA and love old archeticture and movies, you gotta check it out. They always have celeb guests being interviewed or fashion shows or some such thing. I'm also a big fan of the American Cinematheque series at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Earlier this year, they did a series of musicals of the '70s and '80s that was heaven. I saw Xanadu, the Apple, which is absolutely nuts, and Fame, which made me cry five times because I felt bad for all the talented kids who would never succeed. Monday, October 06, 2003
Virtual Book Tour 2: Magazine Me All right, I confess. I am a magazine junkie. I subscribe to so many magazines, it's ridiculous. Part of how I rationalize this is that I write for many magazines for my living. So it's part of what I need to do for my job, but it's still a little out of control. Some thoughts on magazines: I miss the old mid-90's Movieline with all the fun, edgy interviews. The new Hollywood Life looks good and still has some fun suff, but it also has all that fashion crap like lip gloss etc. We live in an Instyle world. If my Entertainment Weekly doesn't come on Friday, I'm very upset. I need it to kick off my weekend. I enjoy their film reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman. I recently co-wrote a film called Testosterone that premiered at the Toronto Film festival, and Lisa S. reportedly saw it but did not write about it in her wrap up of the fest. I don't think she liked it. Although EW did mention the fact that Antonio Sabato, Jr., drops his trousers, which is true. Well, at least it was a positive mention. My pal Dave is the king of the zines, and whenever I'm at his place, I get to read cool zines like Chunklet and Giant Robot and The Believer, which has these excellent long interviews with interesting people. I also like to read screenwriting magazines like Creative Screenwriting. I like to hear how other writers do their thing and what they bitch about. My magazine addiction must at some time be curbed. If I stacked my magazines at my front door, stood on top of them, and leaned forward, I would end up in the Pacific. Oh, and I am constantly amazed at how dumbdumbdumb Us Weekly has become. Although there is a picture in the latest issue of Mariah Carey taking golf lessons in high heels, which is well worth keeping my subscription for a while longer. Virtual Book Tour 2: Products I Love When I think of new products that I love, the first thing at comes to mind is Tivo. I've had mine for about two years, and can't imagine life without it. I even wrote a story about it for TV Guide called, "Help I'm Addicted to my Tivo." But the truth is, I don't want any help. You can have my trusty Tivo remote when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. Though Tivo's far from perfect. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, my roommate and I -- while watching the horrifying WTC coverage -- got the following message: "Tivo would like the change the channel and record Mama's Family." Hey, at least it wasn't Caroline in the City. Speaking of watching TV, my new favorite couch potato snack is the cereal Marshmallow Safari. It's like Lucky Charms, but a little more buttery. Sugar-coated heaven. My other new favorite product is my duct tape wallet. It's super fun, though everytime I pull out my wallet, my friends make fun of me for carrying so much stuff, like I'm George Costanza from Seinfeld. I just need my retail punchcards where I can find them. Sue me. My favorite gift that i got recently -- my birthday party was last night -- is the Olivia Newton John Barbie from Grease doll that I got from my pals Doug and John. It rocks, but the face isn't very Olivia; it's like and old-school Barbie face. I'm going to fix her up with my beloved Joey Lawrence doll. Virtual Book Tour 2 II As you might have noticed, Media Diet was hosted by Dennis Hensley today. Dennis is participating in the Virtual Book Tour to discuss his book Screening Party. The tour runs through Oct. 13, and you can follow his itinerary as he bops across the country. While I'm heading home for the evening, Dennis is based in LA and I'm hopeful that he'll grace us with more media-related pointers and commentary. Maybe if we squeeze our eyes shut and wish really hard... Virtual Book Tour 2: Music to My Ears I tend to buy a lot of CDs and just received an iPod for my birthday so it looks like my music listening is going to go to a whole new level. One of the friends who pitched in on my iPod made me promise that I'd still put together my slightly adolescent mix cassettes with self-designed packaging. I assured him that I would. I'm basically a teenage girl at heart. My favorite CDs of late include John Mayer, Liz Phair, Gavin Degraw (who kicked my ass live at the House of Blues recently), Trisha Yearwood, Martina Sorbera, Jann Arden, and Robbie Williams. When I'm writing I sometimes listen to movie soundtracks as mood music. My favorites are Gattaca -- so atmospheric and haunting -- and Cinema Paradiso, which moved me so much when I first saw the film that i get moved just listening to the music. I also love song soundtracks from my favorite sort of cheesy favorites, like Xanadu, Centerstage, and Coyote Ugly. Leann Rimes is right; you can't fight the moonlight. In working on my book Screening Party, I bought the soundtracks to most of the movies I feature in the book -- for inspiration and also to play at the release party for atmosphere. I thought for sure I'd be able to get the Glitter soundtrack cheap or used, but the joke was on me. I absolutely needed it for my party and the only copy I was able to find was full-priced retail: $18.99. I think it was Mariah's revenge for all the jabs I poke at her in the Glitter chapter. She was having the last laugh as she so often does. Virtual Book Tour 2: Books Worth a Look In working on my book Screening Party, there were a few books that I used as references. One was the Jaws Log, which is a record of all the crazy shennanigans that happened on the set of the original Jaws; all about how the shark wouldn't work right and so forth. I actually discovered it after I had sort of finished the chapter on Jaws, so I didn't pull too much from it, but it was interesting reading. Another book I found particulalry inspiring is John Travolta's Staying Fit, a workout book from the early '80s, his post Staying Alive buff phase. I refer to it with a mixture of affection and ridicule in the Saturday Night Fever chapter of Screening Party. I've decided recently that I want to be a collector of celebrity workout paraphernelia, like the way some people collect lunch boxes or cat stuff. My favorite item of late in this department is Dixie Carter's Unworkout, in which she makes a lot of insane faces and inspires the viewer to think of themselves as a cougar. But back to books, the truth is I didn't use too many in working on the book. Between all my mouthy friends and whatever nuggets of trivia I could get from the DVDs of the movies, I had more than enough material. In fact, I was surprised at how long the chapters ended up being. As far a reference books go, I do find myself referring a lot to Leonard Maltin's 1997 Movie and Video Guide from 1997. I flip it open a lot when I'm doing articles. Perhaps I should update it at some point. Apparently, there have been a number of films released since 1997. As for film critics, I always enjoy reading them but I seldom let them keep me away from films I want to see. Some people don't like when critics get really personal in their reviews but that's what I enjoy reading the most. I do like Pauline Kael's reviews because you never quite know where she's going to go. I also enjoy Manohla Dargis' writing in the L.A. Times. She's surprising and brings a welcome jolt of youth to the paper. My favorite online critic was Dave White on Ifilm, but I think they got rid of him. His reviews were so blunt and hilarious. He wasn't above using such terms as "sucks", "blows," and "bites it." Where Screening Party fits into the world of film-related books, I don't know. I think I'd rather have people look at it as an entertainment rather than a reference type book about movies and get into the more novel-esque aspects of the book. It's funny; in bookstores, I've seen it stocked in every section from fiction to humor to film to gay books. I think I like it best in fiction for some reason, even though much of it is fact. Sunday, October 05, 2003
BloggerCon 2003 IX Managing a Community: Joi Ito Joi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. Here is a rough transcript of his talk: This session is on community, and I wanted to start off the discussion by getting everyone involved. A lot of the other sessions have been about the content of blogs and the technology. To me, blogs are a really interesting tool for connecting people, but there are a lot of other tools that can bring people together. I use IRC and Wiki as community tools, too. I'm going to talk about the different kinds of communities, some of the issues, and how we can alleviate some of the problems that come up in communities. This is an IRC channel. Originally, it was a place for people who hang out at my blog to hang out. I don't control it in any way. It's kind of an odd thing when your name becomes a place. I have a lot of experience with communities. I started a mailing list in the late '90s, and people forget that it's your living room and think it's a public place. The IRC channel and Wiki support blogging a lot. When you blog aggressively and get flamed aggressively, you need emotional support and technical support. Blogs are pretty temporal. Wikis are more structured. And the IRC channel is really temporal. If I blog something and get flamed, I can go to IRC for support. If I blog something, I can mention it in IRC, and people can rip it apart for me to edit it. There are also bots in the channel. Joibot does a lot of handy things in the channel. It keeps track of who people are. When you enter the room, you're heralded. Since Joibot are an open-source project, a lot of participants can contribute functions. At conferences like this, there are a dozen people right now who have something to contribute. In IRC, it doesn't get cluttered. You can share links. You can provide feedback on the back channel. During the power outage in New York, a lot of people came to hang out and help people. Wikis are also really useful. They really are about community. Once it develops a critical mass, a lot of people hang out there. Then it's a Wikisphere. Some people just fix punctuation. Some people insert strange comments. There are a couple dozen contributors to the Wiki, but there's a great deal of traffic. As a result of having a great deal of Google juice, people put themselves in the Wiki. Both Wikis and IRC, which are relatively old technologies, benefit from blogging. Your reputation becomes collateral, and you tend to behave more. A funny thing we did at a conference in Aspen: I was streaming in iSight, and Kevin was talking in an IRC channel. There's a distributed way to conference bash. Kevin Marks: The heralding and chat bots are the interesting things here. One member added a dictionary to Joibot. After awhile, someone else started keeping track of the people in the room. Because anyone can add a definition to something, you can find out who someone is. That makes for some interesting times. There's also a feature in several of these bots that will post to blogs. Joibot actually has a blog, which is broken right now. Chumpbot is also a common form of bots. People who operate IRC channels are basically in financial disaster. They're maintaining a sustenance level. Now that all of us bloggers are getting into IRC, it's rejuvenating IRC developers. How can we bridge protocols and mix all these things up. A lot of uses won't survive, but we'll come up with other uses. There are generally 60-80 people in this channel at any given time. Maybe a dozen focus on the screen. Kevin Marks: Microsoft abandoned all of their IRC not long ago. A lot of people are now going to be looking for other ways to chat. One of the things that's interesting is that blogs have a certain kind of tempo. In IRC, there's another kind of tension. If you connect them well, say, you have a problem on the blog and take it to IRC… [Loses track of thought while Kevin tinkers] One of the problems is that IRC brings on ADD. Halley Suitt: The brevity of it takes some getting used to it. It goes so fast. And people you don't know come and go. It's so ghostlike. It's like having some flatmates. I get up in the morning and go into IRC. People will say, did you know so-and-so came by. Did you see this blog post. It's kind of strange when you get into it. One member is really tough on regulars but nice to newcomers. That's something that only women can do, I think. AKMA is really important because when the potty mouths come out, he says, "Cough!" This is one other modality. The Wiki and Wikisphere are another modality. Dave Winer: I just started using IRC because we got a channel for BloggerCon, and it reminds me a lot of the computers of the '70s. Whatever happened to the graphic computer revolution? Why does it look so bad? The problem is that people have forgotten about IRC and it hasn't been worked on for 20 years. Kevin Marks: Microsoft about six years ago did graphic chat with people talking out of speech bubbles. It was amusing, but then it got irritating. The interface has a lot of work. The people making Java apps that do what IRC does are building proprietary things. IRC is built into Mozilla. With just a little bit of support, IRC could be brought into the blogging and software community. There's an interesting alchemy happening. Dave Winer: The biggest this session could make is to define what community is at BloggerCon. The word just comes up in conversation. You're not an audience. You're not an eyeball. What should community be like? A lot of the people who participate in this are much more knowledgeable about democracy than me. If a page gets too long, someone can move it somewhere else. For example, in the section "Does Direct Democracy Scale," you can create links to people and concepts by putting their name or the phrase in camel case. It's like a little mini Who's Who. The difference between this and a blog is that it's one document where people can add things in between. If you have a lot of people moving stuff around, it can emerge into a really readable document. The structure's not always clean. Wikis are also really useful for group linkrolls. This is more centralized than blogging. It can also get messed up if people don't feel ownership for the space. It's more like gardening than your living room. Different personalities are attracted to different tools. There's one guy in the channel who's great at one liners, but he's not very good at paragraphs. So he's good at IRC. I prefer paragraphs. There are also people who don't really care about ego or getting credit, so they'll contribute to a group project rather than a blog. Some people prefer commenting on my blog. Not that we have people using the different tools, maybe we can get people using IRC, Wiki, and blogs can learn from each other. Bloggers seem to care more about how things look. Dave Winer: Let's do a directory that's more Wiki style. The problem with Yahoo and DMOZ is that there's one person organizing the directories. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just go to Yahoo and add a link where it belongs? That would be very cool. One of the keys to successful Wikis is that the project needs to be just interesting enough to attract a lot of people, but not interesting enough to attract the trolls. Wikis are used in verticals as information repositories. Most people use Wikis like this and have decent page ranking because they make pages for themselves. Camel case your name. That's the bright side. The dark side is that every single tool, you get a different kind of troll. Someone came on my Wiki the other day and erased everything. The good thing is that one command, and it's back. It's about Google, too. People have been getting comment spammed. It's the same with the IRC channel. You'll get people who don't know about blogging wander in and start flaming people. How do you deal with the person who comes to destroy the party? There's a book written for elementary teachers to learn how to deal with bad children. It's been used in community because there are a lot of tools you can use to deal with people. People impersonate people and leave comments. Usually it's just one or two people, but they'll post as a bunch of different people so it looks like they're getting attacked. Question: If you want to stay under the radar, that's counter to what you're trying to achieve. It's an inevitability. Some people just turn comments off. Screw people. Everyone should have a blog. Some people get into blogging because they start commenting. Dave Winer: When I turned comments off, it really was time for people to start blogs. There weren't a lot of blogs then. Every blog will eventually attract flames. The beauty of it is that flames are not attractive. If you try to stay off their radar, you stay off the radar of lots of people. If you're being Web-like and doing good things for the Web, you shouldn't give into that. Just go through it. In the Dean campaign, if someone comes in and flames, other people come in and make a donation because someone flamed them. Positive energy screws up negative energy. But usually, people just run away. That sucks. 90% of people are good. Stand up to them. I was talking to Howard Rheingold, who's a community guy. He gave me a lot of advice. There've been some interesting results. Now, Google includes comments as well as blogs. My comments will come up in Google. Griff Wigley: Can you talk a little bit about conferencing boards? I don't understand the difference between a Wiki and something like the Well. Even I can edit and contribute to the code of the Wiki. I'm not a script kiddie. It's all open source. Blogging destroyed the whole content management industry. All we're doing is going to destroy the conferencing industry. I'm a newbie blogger. I've only been doing this a year and a half. Question: You've talked about four different media that have their own tempo and form. They're very loosely coupled. Do you seem them being more tightly coupled or integrated? If you spend a weekend learning Applescript, you can connect all this stuff. Question: What about the metatools? What do you use for community discovery? Some people wonder how to authenticate comments. One way is Technorati, which is a centralized service. There are two ways to authenticate. One is centralized. One is decentralized. With Instant Messenger, you've got buddy lists. Other services, the six-degree services like Friendster and Tribe, are another way to do this. What if you're in Helsinki and you have a list of everyone who's available to go drinking within a kilometer, and if you can't find a friend, you find a friend of a friend. Blogging has been primarily an American thing. Mobile blogging, like cell phone culture, is much more advanced in Helsinki and Tokyo. Community culture will bring in the synthesis of cell phones. The cell phone problem won't go away until the carriers change. There's an interesting book called Beyond Culture. M-time is delineated time and space. P-time is polychromatic time and space, like Mediterranean bureaucracy where everyone just shows up. P-time is very content sensitive, while M-time is much more scalable. When I get up, I can see who's online and spend all morning following what people think and develop it. When you can see the presence of hundreds and hundreds of people you know, you don't really need to schedule meetings. There are kids in Japan who go out without any plan of who they're going to hang out with. You can see who's where and say, "Let's go there!" You can even send maps using Japanese cell phones. In the old days, we didn't even have clocks. I'll meet you in that town in two months. Dave Winer: That's what this is. This is total M-time. Mobility really adds to location-based services. PCs are a sucky platform for mobility. But cell phones are great. I want to see blog entries from everyone within a kilometer of here. A lot of cell phones have GPS. So if you take a picture, you can embed GPS data into the JPGs. That's pretty cool. But it's also pretty scary. If I blog that I'm going to Boston, any thief can learn that I'm not home. BloggerCon 2003: Interlude III Hello to everyone visiting from Blog for America. This is neater than getting Slashdotted. BloggerCon 2003 VIII Spirituality: AKM Adam AKM Adam is associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Here is a rough transcript of the session: I walked in a little late, when Adam was taking suggested topics of discussion from the audience. Recommended themes included the role of blogs in congregations, blogs as genre of spiritual writing, blogging as spiritual exercise, the spiritual community, the community-building aspects of sermons, the difference between oral and written traditions, and how blogs can help us learn about real-live people. After touching on Real Live Preacher, a semi-anonymous minister in Texas who blogs regularly, as an example, Adam began leading a group discussion. There are two schools of thought about sermons. One holds that you prepare spiritually, reading, studying, meditating, and then you channel a sermon. No documentation of the actual sermon. Other people don't ever really prepare but still preach extemporaneously. Those are the people you don't want to listen to. Still, we hold ministers responsible for being the real Christians for us. There are also people who can't read. I don't mean that they can't read but that they have trouble reading from a text. I have trouble reading Bible. They sound like the built-in text reader on your computer. There's a problem with reading in general. That's a more fundamental problem than preaching extemporaneously. It's a problem coping with words, thoughts, and expressions. There's a reason that preachers frequently go to seminary: It's to learn something about what they're doing. Seminary is bad for some preachers. You can get feedback and input on your work by, say, posting a Weblog. If you put sermons on a Weblog, you're preparing for Google juice and interested people who actually want to see what's going on there. People come to my site and comment on my sermons whom I've never met before. They have no intrinsic motivation to find out more about me. They're doing a Google search for some word and "sermon," and they're stuck in the mire of conversation with me. If a real-live preacher puts the effort into starting those conversations, there's a lot that she can learn. There might be some things that you don't want to say to their face. Maybe she says "obviously" all the time. Dan Bricklin: What you're saying is more about the Web than about blogs, unless you're following the development of a preacher. When I think about spirituality and blogs, I think about the intertwining of spirituality and other stuff that's going on in the blog. The blog lets you put the two together. In my blog, I will quote scripture, which is somewhat odd in a techy blog. Scripture is great to use as examples because there's so much commentary around scripture. One of the fundamental things that I try to do is go to congregation groups and look at their Weblogs. Sisters and brothers, there are a lot of bad Web pages in the world, but a disproportionate number of them belong to churches. And they're more resistant to change. If you're not showing anything that someone might not like, you're probably not showing anything that people might like. The more of the stuff of the congregation that shows up here, the more that anyone who comes to the Web page will recognize the voice of the congregation. Chris Locke says that large corporations and organizations don't have soul. I don't agree. I wouldn't say that corporations have soul, but collective entities have a lot going on. Question: Is it your experience that the written form of a sermon is more useful before it's preached -- or after? I have an inflated view of myself of a preacher. People say that when they read my sermons, they can hear me preach. The same is true with my blog. There's a lot of continuity. There's not so much a better or worse, but people like going back to it and remembering. People who weren't there like knowing what people were talking about. With student sermons, they tend to get better after a few whacks at them with comments. Unfortunately, by then they've already been preached. One thing you could do is put some notes up on Monday, ask for some feedback, and then incorporate that into your sermon Sunday. Griff Wigley: Have you done that? No. This is my sermon, sir. It comes from preparing it, going over it, maniacal composition and copy editing. I preach it to myself three or four times. My father worked in English composition and specialized in comedy. We would watch movies such as W.C. Fields, and analyze what was funny. W.C. Fields says that you'd go to a city, find the outlying areas that were funny, and incorporate them into what you say. In Pittsburgh, there's McKee's Rocks. Anything you say about that will be funny. I'm from that school, going through everything and seeing what works for me. Griff Wigley: Would you post your reflections about your struggle going through that sermon? I do. I did a sermon about El'dad and Me'dad in the camp. Every hour or two, I put up some comments about my struggle. I need two things in a sermon: the introduction and the conclusion. It takes a lot to really wrap a sermon to lodge it in someone's brain. The other thing is a hook. Just like a pop song, I need something that I know is the riff -- not something I'll repeat all the way through -- but something that I'll return to and lean on in critical moments. I couldn't find a hook for that sermon. But people left comments, and I eventually came up with the Dad Bros.: El'dad and Me'dad. I just did that one time. I can't imagine boring people with that process every time I preach. Some churches aren't open to comments. This isn't business, this is God. I am not one to prescribe one thing, not for anyone, not for preaching, not for anything. That said, a lot of that hesitation and fear is antithetical to what a congregation should be doing. A Trappist monastery Web site without any text on it? That I could get behind. Paul says, "I am not afraid of the Gospel." Put it out there. Take the shots. Take your lumps. For congregations that are inclined to take that step, that's an important part of it. Dan Bricklin: This is a problem with any community and the Internet. We've got a general mailing list. And we've got a list in which topics are discussed. That can get pretty hot and heavy. We split it because not everyone can put up with the nerve. Not to put Ross on the spot, but in Blogware, to comment, you need to be registered. That makes me think that you can say, I don't want to see anything from Ross. It's a problem, but it's a problem worth dealing with. Dan Bricklin: But it's a question of what you put out in the world. Does the preacher decide what's put out there? Do you post the comments that matter? Open deliberation is important. The Talmud sounds like a Weblog. That's a great model for this, as is the revolutionary period and pamphlets. Sermonds are much more closed in their deliberation. They're not mutually exclusive, though. The Web can counteract and countervail the cultural tendency to short attention span by drawing you into interactive deliberation about things. Griff Wigley: The reason I asked about your blogging about struggling with a sermon is that because as a man of the spirit, it's a good way to share your development as a spiritual person. As a dad, I've posted excerpts from my real journal to my blog for my three 20-something sons. You can't say too much about the people you're counseling, but you can blog about your daily experiences as a preacher. This isn't just God and me, this can happen to you, too. This is a really important topic. There are a lot of congregational leaders whose notion of relating to an unacquainted public is that they have to seem pious and perfect and spiritually powerfully in every way. Or, on the other hand, to say, in effect, I'm not that kind of guy. I don't know what I'm doing. This is all so confusing. The perfect preacher might not be as wonderful as you want him to think. That's the PR notion. Real Live Preacher has a depth that's not available in any other sources. You don't have to be a clergy leader to do that. It's edifying for the world to see there are alternatives to the extremes. Dan Bricklin: Seminary students can use their blogs as a resume. Congregations might choose to hire only clergy who blog. When I wrote the blurb for this session, people gave me a hard time about saying that bloggers have souls. There's a perceived question about whether I'm speaking to people to whom I'm accountable to. Am I saying that all bloggers need to subscribe to a metaphysics or they don't have a blog. That's not what I said. It's an environment in which people can correct me even if that's what I'm going to say in the end. Purely hypothetically, not based on any congregation I know about, but something that I can only imagine, say you call an interim minister without knowing anything about them. If it just doesn't work out, wouldn't you like to replay that, look at the person's blog and be able to say the person is a tedious windbag or their far right politically. If you can fake something well enough for two years, you might be close enough, but it takes a lot of energy to fake that much. Dave Weinberger: Is there an implied metaphysics in truth, if not soul? Let's look at communities. You're open to people of various faiths questioning you. There are all sorts of truth. Others aren't so open to that. Do communities of bloggers have a shared metaphysics about truth, if not faith? Let's change the subject from faith to politics. You're either going to get a lot of right on's or people actually discussing the topics. Dave Winer: I want to go back to the example where both of us got flamed simultaneously. Looking around the room, there's the notion that were friends on the Web. I'm not your friend. I'd like to be your friend. But there are some people who assume we're friends. You got push back because you had anything to do with me. Is it OK to make it a condition in a friendship that someone can't be friends with someone else? I say no. That's not OK. There's not much of a me left if you take away my friends. I am largely constituted by the spiritual hyperlinks. Dave Winer: I don't believe that. I see you right here. I wouldn't have been here if two years ago, David hadn't started emailing me and Halley hadn't started emailing me. My presence here is dependent on those relationships. Dave Winer: My uncle just died. Did he die because his friends stopped supporting him? No. His heart stopped beating. Existence is pretty simple. I got the impression from your blog that when your uncle died, you were diminished. Dave Winer: I wasn't in any way diminished. I was enhanced in real ways. His existence is what I'm talking about. As a reader, for someone who Dave Winer was a three-minute voice on the phone and reading Scripting News, my sense was that it was like you were in a movie, hit in the chest with a shotgun blast. I read that as loss, as something important going out of your life. If you subtract the social hyperlinks, the spiritual hyperlinks, what is left is not AKMA but some kind of body lying there. Dave Winer: Are your friends allowed to make friendship conditional? This is a pointed question that gets really deep and uncomfortable. I owe people to whom I have long-standing relationships and respect, and there's some concern that I am endangering the AKMA-ity of AKMA by associating with you. There are folks where it changes the very notion of who they are when you learn something about them. I want to signal that in that instance, I extended myself to say, look, I've read the controversies. Part of me is that I'm a pastor. I hear what's bothering you and you and you. I'm not here to adjudicate what's bothering you, but to listen, respect, and perhaps interpret what seems to be going on. Sometimes it's best just to listen. I'm going to go to BloggerCon. Then I'm going to go home. |
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