RecycledSpam

Making The Most

Here is how you can make the most of the teaching. I will be setting this up as a teaching loop that should take a month to cycle through, and can then be repeated or accessed in your own time.

Each re-spammed posting will have its own discreet address for you to link back to.

Each posting will be feed to RSS newsreaders in XML. You may want to download a free newsreader for your PC or Mac, then you wont have to bother coming over to the web site everyday.

I will be mentioning some books along the way but I will focus more on articles and blog postings that are free and immediate.

You are free to reuse these postings as short articles. Please let me know where they will appear and link them correctly to the address of the actual post, not the front page. For example "http://tall . . . . . .html#12345678"

You are free to mash up what I write with your own or other peoples writings - and if you end up with somethin good . . then please let me know. Mabye we could publish together in book form?

Go ahead and comment on what i write - disagree, agree, add more links, write up something better and let us all know. Let all help each other understand.

Allow Me To Introduce

Allow me to introduce this learning journey.

My name is Andrew, but i am better known online as TallSkinnyKiwi. I have been trying unsuccessfully to write something helpful on new media for sometime - a writing project that would encompass the exciting frontier of the internet, the current renaissance of co-authorship, the rise of blogging, and the way of digital storytelling, the ethics and morals of writing online, etc. This is one attempt to do that, and i make no promise to complete that task.

My unique twist in this contribution to our understanding and practise of new media may be its usage by the global emerging church. The church has always been involved in the revolutions of publishing and new languages (writing them down and preserving them) and i dont see the church standing on the sidelines on this current revolution either.

My qualifications to write this?
Well . . not much in the way of professional new media training and I dont write enough code to be a geek. But . .

1. I have been blogging since 1997 (when I was known as "CyberRev" and before we called it "blogging") and one of my later blogs (tallskinnykiwi.com) made it to number 3 on Blogger Forum's Top Ten list - even beating Dave Barry (he-he-he) - and this was a few months after I had stopped the blog.

2. Another qualification is making it into the Google Top 40 for the name "Andrew", a position that i no longer occupy, since i stopped my famous blog and started another. No regrets, though. Its good to break the cycle sometimes - stops you getting addicted to hits and stats, lets you get on with your life. My favourite bloggers are those who occasionally take a blog-fast and tell their viewers to go somewhere else for a while.

3. I have been a digital storyteller since 2000, and am currently the world's oldest VJ (video jockey) at 40 years old. Well, there might be older VJ's than me, but I havent yet met them. They are probably better than me also - I really suck at it, despite having some wicked gear.

4. I have been involved in the church's use of new media for a long time - from frustrating myself over Adobe Pagemaker in the 80's, multimedia labyrinths in the early 90's, rave based worship in the late nineties, to internet storytelling since then. And yet I still struggle to program alarm clocks. I have a fondness for free software and can probably tell you how to do something cheaper or for nothing. I am also a knowlege geek and read all I can about New Media theory, postmodernism, architecture, cuisine and other information that most people cant be bothered to read. But I find it fascinating and see a lot of parallels and connections between everything and everything.

Besides that, a lot of people have been asking me to write something to help them understand the new media mind. They have approached the internet with old media values and resources and are frustrated that the chasm between old and new is so wide.

Recycled Spam? Yeah . . . I get a lot, despite my filters. Last week I got about 100 in one day and decided to recycle them, to turn them into something useful, and feed them back into cyberspace. I have chosen to use the aesthetics of spam to guide the look and feel of this site. Spam, that unwanted advertising in your mail box, has a texture and shape that creates anger, terror and disgust. It the perfect fodder for transformation.

Maybe the thoughts will help equip people to find the right way on the internet.
Maybe I will be able to take other people's thoughts and re-mash them here so that we better understand where we stand in history and how we can better tell our stories.
Maybe we will one day see an end to the insulting waste of energy and time that spammers ingite by their violent intrusions into our mailboxes, and instead, see changed people send lov'n to each other.

This book is dedicated to God who is the Great Aggregator, the VJ who has shown us what is good and what is required of us . . . to love justice, to show mercy, to walk humbly with our God.

God . . . please show us the way.