Tall Skinny Kiwi

5 Web 2.0 Spring Cleaning Projects. Done!

Spring is upon us. Here are a few small Web 2.0 projects that I have managed to get done in the past week.

1. Set up Flock as my default browser. (done). Goodbye Firefox and Safari. Flock has been one of the favourite browsers in my harem but now will become my preferred browser-dashboard, Flickr gallery, RSS reader as well as being another blog editing platform, working alongside Ecto.

2. Collate my many web 2.0 life streams into a single multi-streamed gush. (done).

3 Storm into Google, gather the bots and train them all to search my blog responsively, regularly, respectfully, and await my every command to either find, hide, dismiss or prioritize my thousands of blog posts. The last one is a doozy. This is all possible through Google Webmaster Tools (done) and submitting to Google a site map of my blog (done).

4. Add a new and improved web 2.0 friendly template for the blog (done), including a small dashboard for my web 2.0 addictions.(done)

5. Web 2.0 linked signature for Apple Mail (done)

Technorati Tags: blog, web 2.0

Michel Serres

Simon Critchley: "Coming from a background in phenomenology, I'd like to ask you about your relationship with modernity."
Michel Serres: "Maturnity! Why do you ask me about that?" (link)

Michel Serres is my favourite French thinker and author and yet only a few of his works are in English. Notably, The Troubadour of Knowledge (some of which is on Googlebooks). I first read Michel Serres in a The Postmodern Bible Reader. It was one of the best chapters in the book - "Meals Among Brothers: Theory of the Joker" which is a mindboggling, fast-paced complex little piece on socio-economic theory drawn from the encounter between Jacob and Tamar. I thought to myself . . . now HERE is a guy who is just as scatter-brained as I, impossible to box up into one category, probably more ADD than me, and yet absolutely brilliant!

I think i liked him so much because i found an author with a mischievous artistic bent who mashed genres, categories, and expectations and who was confident enough to play with structure, bending grammatical rules to create something profound and poetic. Which is why so much of his nuanced writing is untranslatable from the French but when it does make it into English, its amazing and it invites playfulness and creativity into the writing process. Spike Milligan meets Teilhard de Chardin. At my best, when I am writing well, when words flow effortlessly and transcend boundaries, I find myself thinking of Serres.

Jean Luc Marion is also a favourite but he is far more wordy and not nearly as much fun.

Interesting, I was having a chat with Leonard Sweet some years back and Len told me that Michel Serres is his favourite author. Howzat??? Len used Serres's thinking on "third places" in his book Soul Tsunami. Anyway, I found an interview with Serres from 1995 that Wired was going to publish but they chickened out.

I would love to meet Michel Serres, and hope to one day. In the meantime, a blog has been set up for Serres readers which even has a video of Serres dancing in a club . . . club without poles . . in case you were wondering.

Technorati Tags: michel serres

Barna: Churches Behind in Technology

"Blogging is also invading the ministry world. One-eighth of Protestant churches (13%) now have blog sites or pages through which people can interact with the thoughts posted by church leaders." New Barna Research Describes Use of Technology in Churches.

I appreciate Barna's thoughts and his interview results are helpful,. but I don't see God's people as late-comers to technology, either historically or presently.
The institutional church? OK, maybe.
Probably.
All right - definitely!
But I am also seeing the other side - the people of God willingly create and use the new technologies. I could name many of the current movers and shakers of the new media revolution and tell you what church they belong to. [but i wont]. However, whether we fully explore the implications of that technology, or the changing mindset that results, is another matter.

Related: (TSK) Barna on House Church, The WiFi Enabled Church, Barna's Revolution

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: blogging, blog, barna

Technorati Tags: barna, blog, blogging

Polaroid Film for Africa?

Emma Boyd goes to Rwanda and Uganda in 2 months. She needs Polaroid film to give photos to people on location. Got any?

Typepad Themes Added

I like the Typepad blogging platform and have used it since converting from Blogger back in 2003. However, it has lagged woefully behind Wordpress in the aesthetics department. Until now. There's a few new pretty-darn-good-looking typepad themes available as the result of a recent theme making contest. The theme I am using today is called HP Wicked Fun. I will probably leave it up for a few days before hacking into it and making it mine. I think it was made by Gwen Stefani.

update: hacked already. japanese theme continued as a hat tip to gwen.

Technorati Tags: blog, typepad

Ratatouille

We made ratatouille for lunch from an old French recipe. Elizabeth helped me cook it. Tasted great! Unfortunately, our 6 year old daughter Tamara felt it was not authentic and certainly not as good as what Remy the rat cooked on the Disney movie. So next time, we will probably use the movie recipe from Thomas Keller. Oooopps. That link slipped off. Try this link here.

Technorati Tags: rataouille

344 links to the blogging 2.0 world

Just when you thought you knew everything about blogging. . . 344 links

Technorati Tags: blog

Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

I am thinking seriously about attending the Graphing Social Patterns event in Washington, DC. June 9 - 11. Looks fantastic and it will have a bearing on some of the web 2.0 projects we are doing this year, in particular the online platforms for spiritual pilgrimage and justice issues. Anyone else going? I was thinking of asking if i could live-blog the conference in return for a pass. Lets see what they say.

Related: GISUser, Upcoming, O'Reilly, Facebook,
TSK: Church 2.0

Next-Wave Cover

"Gonna see my name on the cover
Gonna buy five copies for my mother
Gonna see my shining name
on the cover of the Next-Waaaaaavve"

World Changers - 5 week course

Did you know I watched "Amazing Grace" at the East India Docks in London? Best place to watch it. Really.

Bob Beltz of Walden Media tells me the World Changers Resource website is now up and a resource kit is offered. Well done! Some of us were hoping for an earlier launch - like - to coincide with the Amazing Grace movie, but at least the Calvary finally came. And its not too late at all to start a 5 week course for a small group journey into what it means to bring transformation to your world in the way William Wilberforce did 200 years ago. Chuck Colson (here on TSK last month) writes a hearty recommendation for the WorldChangers course. [MP3 broadcast here]

Anyway, if you cant afford the whole kit, just buy the book "World Changers Live To Serve" - its got the 5 week small group discussion guide in it.

Technorati Tags: amazing grace, bob beltz, walden , walden media, world changers