Tag Archive - wired

Despite Rumors of It’s Early Demise, Blogging Is Not Dead…It Is Evolving

October 22, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

Is Blogging Dead
Yesterday afternoon I read two Tweets from Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester.

They were as follows:

Wired suggests blogs are old hat –call me old fashioned!

followed by,

What’s interesting is that the Wired opinion doesn’t have a single piece of data in it’s article –go read Sifry’s state of blogosphere.

Apparently this article from Paul Boutin in Wired Magazine has been getting a lot of attention this week, especially from those of us who blog. In the article Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, Boutin states:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

No, But Blogging Is Evolving
Flickr, Facebook and Twitter are amazing tools that I love and use everyday, but they are just but pieces of the package, as is a blog. To use another metaphor, they are just individual members of the body. But so is blogging.

Blogging is not dead, nor does your blog need to be pulled, rather it is an evolving art form in my opinion.

None of the social media tools that seem to arrive on the scene everyday are the complete and perfect individual tools that one needs, rather they are just pieces of the puzzle, but when brought into harmony together, have a powerful effect on one’s social media experience and their contribution to the world.

In fact, Andrew Sullivan wrote an exceptional piece, Why I Blog. He begins:

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

The Blogging Journey
In the Spring of 2004 I had been pondering the idea of blogging because I loved to write and I thought it was the wave of the future. It was through the encouragement of one of my college student’s and good friends Jared Kleier that I made my entry into blogging. I think my first post was in the Summer of 2003 on the Blogger platform. It was a reflection on John 21, of which I erased shortly after because I didn’t quite have the courage to make myself so vulnerable, and my thoughts available for critique.

I eventually worked up the courage to post regularly and after 4 years of blogging I am approaching my 1,000 post (this is post 992). There have been many ups (getting linked by Hugh Hewitt which drove my traffic through the roof), as well as some downpoints (critizing John Piper and receiving a frenzy of comments for it). There have also been many new speaking and job opportunities from those who were exposed to my blog, as well as allowing me to have my first foray into the publishing world with a chapter in The New Media Frontier.

But those things are just icing on the cake. Blogging for me is really about a labor of love, taking risks with exposing and sharing my ideas, and connecting with others that I agree and disagree with through the medium of the internet. Most of all, blogging is about commitment, devotion, and consistency over a period of time. You don’t have to drive thousands of readers a day to your blog to be a successful blogger. Some of the best bloggers are those who share their life with their families and close friends through their writing. And most of all, it’s a record of how you have changed and grown as a person, thinker, etc. I have watched my blogging evolve over time (topics, length, commenters, blogroll, etc.), and it has been an illuminating reflection on my own evolution as a person.

Blogging has changed. In the early days I could break into the top 10,000 on Technorati, but now, I’m lucky if I can crack 70,000. Those were the early days of obsessing over numbers, traffic and ranking. And even though I still hope that people read my blog, I’m more driven by the idea of sharing my thoughts, passions and life with others…and that hopefully in the process we (the blogging community, commenters, etc.) can connect with one another and help change the world. Not as individuals, but as a community who is passionate about the ideas that we share and the convictions we have….all made possible through the medium of blogging.

Twitter is but 140 characters. Flickr is photos, perhaps with comments. And Facebook is hundreds of friends sharing life online together. But there is something powerful about putting words down and publishing them on a blog.

I will end this post with a quote from Andrew Sullivan’s article that I love:

Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

Resources
Check out Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008. Here is one telling quote, “The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay.”

And check out Kirk Sexton’s new blog. Now that he just started it, he is wondering if he has to kill it already. I say no. Blog on Kirk.

Thinking Out Loud: Making Disciples in an Age of Information Extraction

July 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 8 Comments

Caution: Thinking out loud as the title says, so a bit of a choppy post. But I’m curious of your thoughts.

It is often true that we look back at how we did something as being the only way something can be done. For example, if I took all these classes (Greek, Hebrew, exegetics, etc.) in seminary, then every student should take them to get that Master of Divinity. Or if ordination required A, B, and C, then I have to do A, B, and C as well. But often, we don’t re-evaluate how things are changing, and what things need to change along with them.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for several reasons, but primarily because I think the Church, and most often ministry gets caught in a pattern of doing things the way they have always been done, and fails to be innovative in its thinking. Don’t get me wrong though, many Churches are innovative in ways that need to be innovative, and not just for the sake of it.

So my thinking out loud concerns the amount of information now available to us online, and will continue to become available online. How will that change how we do things?

Last month Wired Magazine ran an incredible series of articles called The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More–More Is Different. In this series one of the articles was The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, and it begins with this:

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

And thanks to Guy Kawasaki I came across this article World’s Oldest Bible Goes Online. This is just another classic example of what was not available to us before will now be online. Think how information like this will change seminary education, pastoring, Church life, etc. as it becomes more available online.

Ever been sitting there, late at night, thinking, “Gee, I’d like to find a good Bible quote, but how do I know if it’s been accurately translated?” Well, you’re in luck! Portions of the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from 350 and thought to have been written by early Egyptian Christians, will be available on the internet courtesy of the Russian National Library, British Library and St. Catherine’s monastery in its entirety by July of next year. The oldest complete version of the New Testament, the original text may baffle those unfamiliar with ancient Greek, but translations in English and German will also be made available. “A manuscript is going onto the net which is like nothing else online to date…It’s also an enrichment of the virtual world — and a bit of a change from YouTube,” commented the director of the Leipzig University Library.

So what does all this available information mean to us as pastors and leaders in the 21st Century?

A few months ago I wrote a post called The Changing Seminary–The Changing Pastor where Scott McClellan of Collide Magazine
 interviews Craig Detweiler in the article Culture and Seminary. Here is a brief exchange:

Detweiler: No, that’s the right question. Seminaries were created in an era where ministers were prepared to have the most information. The ministers were supposed to be the most educated and the most informed about the Scriptures.

COLLIDE: The most literate maybe?

Detweiler: The most literate. And none of that has necessarily changed, but we’re now dealing with an age of too much information. And so, the job is to help people sort through all of the inputs to find out what matters amongst the avalanche of information. It’s about pointing people to reliable sources, pointing people to credible interpretations, inviting people into ongoing dialogue with their friends, neighbors, and coworkers around the pop cultural expressions. So, it’s moving the seminary education from pastor as most informed to pastor as most insightful because people no longer have an information problem. It’s not about lack of information. It’s about lack of discernment. Information is available to all. Wisdom and discernment remain rarer than ever.

Observation: As more and more information becomes available online we will need more and more discerning Christian leaders who can sift through all the information and apply/teach/preach it appropriately. But it seems to me that the Bible is not just information, or should not be reduced to that. I remember my Greek professor telling me that it’s not enough to simply know the meaning of a Greek word (caution to everyone who looks up the meaning online and assumes that’s how it is used in the NT), but one must understand the context of the word in that letter, how the author uses, it, etc, etc.

Question: So how do we cultivate discerning Christian leaders to not simply extract information, but grow disciples in such an age?