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Growing not dying [FaithMatters]

I just finished reading 'A Churchless Faith' by Alan Jamieson [UK|US|CA] which I found extremely thought-provoking and encouraging. In particular, it introduced me to the work of James Fowler in modelling spiritual growth as stages of faith. The book challenges the prevailing view about church leavers and I felt has clear messages for both the individual feeling church is no longer for them and for churches facing the departure of well-known members.

From the perspective of someone rethinking their religious faith, the most helpful aspect of the book was the level-voiced and non-judgemental survey work (drawn from Jamieson's doctoral thesis) showing why people stop attending churches. Jamieson develops a model showing why people leave and the summary, surprising to some, is that it's a matter of growth of faith rather than death of faith that makes the majority of leavers go it alone. The key message to the individual? "You're not the first to face this, and you're not on your own".

Like the related book 'The Post-Evangelical', Jamieson discusses the fact that faith systems today exist in the context of a culture completing the transition to a post-modern outlook. His challenge to church leaders is to see leavers not as the fallen but as pioneers. His research finds in the majority of cases individuals with insight into expressing faith in post-modern terms rather than in the modernist terms of the established churches. The key message to the church? "Culture is changing, and your leavers are your congregations's pioneers".

[Note: Earlier book reviews in the vein are in my personal reading section. Apologies if this topic turns you off!]

posted at 2:26 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Friday, July 4

Thursday, July 3

Teen Guantanamo Bay [SocioPolitico]

Forgotten to arrange summer camp for the kids? Need to find the least worst place for them this summer? What's good enough for America's international guests is good enough for its children too - take a look at the teen answer to Guantanamo Bay [via Interesting People] (which you will recall is the Least Worst Place to keep prisoners of war for whom you have no respect indefinitely without trial or cause) and see what you think...

posted at 3:41 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Big Deal, Redux [WebTech]

I have commented to a few people that Blogging is a Big Deal. Not, I hasten to add, because I think that anything more than a core of special people (special can have many meanings, but I like Halley's article...) will ever decide to participate in a meaningful way in that specific activity. Rather, it's because of the work that it's catalysing, both extending blogging and going way beyond, as Jorgen Thelin hints and Tim Bray explains.

Weblogs are, in my opinion, the most successful application of web services to date. They have been successful because a combination of social factors and sufficiently OK technology have come together at the right time, and because they have a universally almost-agreed format for the content of the conversations. Most of the fuss in the world that calls itself web services has been about the plumbing, and no doubt one day there will be wonderful things happening there, but for now the big win has been for the application with a standard content format, transferred using whatever communications method comes to hand (for the most part, HTTP - XML-RPC has and continues to be crucial too, and while I don't share Tim Appnel's distaste for mentioning it I do share some of his reservations about its future).

That's why I consider the current online debate about whether XML-RPC should be used for (n)Echo divisive (Update: and is seems Sam agrees). It does a great job baiting certain individuals but fundamentally (n)Echo has to be about a content description first and then later about a way of communicating it.

Blogging was already a fascinating social crucible, empowering millions to express themselves and thousands to engage in distributed, accountable conversation. Now it's spawned a unique technology encounter. Open source has given us a development methodology for the massively-connected era. We now see the spontaneous formation of a potential design methodology for the massively connected era.

[Also posted to java.net]

posted at 4:32 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Wednesday, July 2

Down with spam, long live SPAM

Seems Hormel, makers of SPAM Luncheon Meat, are suing a company that decided to use their SPAM brand in the name of a spam filter product, for weakening their brand. Now, I'm sure there will be plenty of postings accusing them of having no sense of humour, but I think Hormel are actually very clueful and tolerant - their policy is very clear and a model of restraint.

The phrase 'mickey mouse' is in common use to describe an invention which is overly simplistic but I bet anyone trying to register a trademark containing the phrase would get a swift reply from Disney. Likewise, it's no surprise to see Hormel defensive. Their brand is widely recognised across the english-speaking world and has already taken enough knocks.

posted at 3:44 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

History (edited)

Bill Gates' interview in USA Today is jaw-droppingly disingenuous:
USA TODAY: There seems to be some worry at Microsoft about Linux ... How much of this is a concern?
Bill Gates: Well those are our current competitors. I mean, it's no different than in the past people used [IBM's operating system] OS/2.
Is this the same man who said (in the forward to the OS/2 Programmer's guide):
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system,
and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over
10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for
everyone involved with PCs."
Talk about revisionism. I remember going for an interview in Redmond back in 1990 and there were OS/2 machines all over the place even then - they were the only stable systems to develop on.

posted at 3:43 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Tuesday, July 1

Storm in a Soup Bowl

While totally invisible to the bulk of humanity, there's been a storm in a soup bowl of late as the Great and Good of blog-tech have been focussed into a Wiki to design a successor to RSS and the Blogger API - the name 'Echo' has been mooted as a placeholder. The choice of a Wiki is itself interesting, as Clay Shirkey notes, and from the messages its host has added to many pages the soup bowl has been straining at the seams. I've tried hard to keep up with the discussion, as has Norm, but the sheer pace of the hive mind is too much for anyone with a day job to cope with.

The reason for the storm? Well, As Clay hints, one or two of the well-known figures in blog-tech have taken the creation of a personality-reduced space as a personal affront. I really don't want to get into the personality side of things, although I have been surprised and saddened to see the venom that's been expressed in some postings by people I respect.

One issue that needs considering though is whether this project is there to offer an agreed unification of RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 (and stop there) or whether it's there to go further. The project's motivation page says a lot on this, and comments moving towards each extreme have been popping up all over, but I think it's clear the answer lies between the extremities. I completely agree with Sam that seven elements is the magic number for things people can manage to agree about in one breath.

But when it comes to not inventing things, I'm not so sure. Mark Pilgrim is on the ball as usual, and the point here is that there are so many exciting things that will come from an agreed content format for this slice of web services. If we don't co-operate now on defining the format, someone will inevitably come along and lock us in. I don't just mean threading and other features for blogs either. So I still support 'Echo' and I hope you will too, preferably by actually joining in.

[Also posted to java.net]

posted at 6:12 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

AdSense, one week on

Seems there are quite a few people now who have successfully joined Google's AdSense programme. At xanadb the aim is to buy a GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual - Russell Beattie is going to fund his addiction to rack servers.

My experiences to date are of not getting any ads to show up on some pages (the Sun Bloggers page for example - the community service ads are Google's space fillers), very slow replies to tech support requests, an e-mail with accusations of rigging when the click rate was high on the first few days, and the placement of ads on Sue's shop that lead straight to her competitors (at least her prices are uniformly lower than theirs, so far).

So while we're grateful for the cash Google say they will pay us one day, and the service is a welcome innovation, it's not 100% rosy.

posted at 4:05 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Feature creep

One point to consider when making edited word processing documents available is the undocumented features of the proprietary system you are using (where in this instance 'undocumented' means 'not advised to the customer' - plenty of tech experts know the features are there. There's a handy audit trail [via The Inquirer] showing who edited the UK government's plagiarised 'Iraq threats' document for example, and people have been caught out before by revision history markings in documents they have released.

So as a hint to those in the public eye, remember to publish as HTML where you can and PDF where you can't...

posted at 2:58 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |