June 2003 Archives

Link to Whole Earth issue on Technological Singularity and one by Jaron Lanier (virtual reality guy)

All of this comes from thoughts spurred by Natural- Born Cyborgs

Clark uses the phrase: Tools for thought and action (p.29 NBC...Natural-Born Cyborgs) Just as computers and phones and cars  all help us "file" and "communicate" and "travel" quickly and efficiently,  none of which are really questioned at all by Churches or their members,  but simply accepted as "tools" that keep us in the flow,  this idea of computing aids that help us in communication and thought-scaffolding holds promises for us as a reflective and communicating community.  Keeping our thoughts and insights "circulating" is an important KM (KNowledge Management) tool/resource.  I like the term "KNowledge Sharing" better,  because that's the spirit of the term Knowledge Management ,  at least in my book. 

Just started reading. So far, pretty interesting. Good questions about the "status" of "external" pieces of scaffolding; the "extra" pieces of thought flow resources that help us to "handle" cognitive processes. The assumption under question is that of whether the only truly human "thoughts" are those that take place inside the skull, or in the "primitive bioinsulation", or the "good old fashioned skin-bag".

I think that "The Jerk" reminds me of a time in my life when I was starting out in ministry, in Seminary, and going to see movies like The Jerk with a good friend who lived across the hall in the Seminary Dorm where I resided from 1978-1981. We would often quote various things from the movie in the years ahead. It was a fun-loving, relaxed, and yet "emergent" time in my life when I was about to embark on some adventures that would tie me close to technology, ministry, Janet (whom I would meet in 1982), Cincinnati, and United Theeological Seminary, where I got fascinated with the possibilities for Online Community, and knew that I was going to find myself "immersed" in it.

The line from the movie "The Jerk" (I can just see the look that Steve Martin had and hear the way he said it) came to mind in a much more serious and life-impact way yesterday as I read over a 4 page email from my friend Larry concerning our talks over the past couple weeks concerning a role for me at the ecumenical center/place/community where he is Executive Director.

A couple or 3 weeks ago, Ken Walker wrote an article that was a great Biblical articulation of something which I had noticed and written about in Allowing Voice. I was bemoaning the tendency of Churches to want to "be the whole content"; to have the people depend upon it (and its leaders) for the whole shootin' match. That tends to make Churches a whole lot like marketers. They want to "define" the needs, and then provide the "right perspective" on them, a nd sens us home all warm and fuzzy, all the while most of us go home feeling like no more of ourselves has been known.

The thinking and envisioning I've written about in the previous post are about an ecumenical center with which I've been associated with for 10 years, through my friendship with Larry, and my involvement with a group of people who formed a class they called "Servant Leadership School", named for the ministry and group study after which it was patterned, the Servant Leadership School started as a ministry of The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.

I spent a good chunk of this afternoon sitting on my Mom and Dad's back porch in the nice breeze and jotting down notes in between the lines and on the backs of sheets of the emails I printed out on Thursday which Larry sent to me, outlining some things he is thinking of presenting to hopefully get some things in motion that will allow his organization to fund some work for me that will help enhance their mission.

I felt a sense of safety, there in the nice back yard of my parent's house; perhpas a sense of safety of being in this family, and how I've been usually been able to "relax" when I'm there. Sure enough, on my way home, I felt the uncertainties and the anxities return, even though all this energy flowing concerning Larry's advocacy for me in his proposal in the works has energized me quite a bit. I am wri tign this as I sit down preparing to email a few more thoughts that I received during the aforementioned sitting on my parent's back porch.

More on the previous two posts about the WMD mystery

Back when the Weapons inspections were happening,  and the Bush administration kept saying "We're running out of time",  one HAD to be thinking that they're certainly in TOO MUCH of a hurry.  All of a sudden,  after more than 10 years,  it was SO CRITICAL.  Of course,  the Terrorism anxiities provided an easy door to re-open the matter,  and one which this administration has been found to be pursuing from the outset ( I saw a story back before the Iraq invasion about how the Bush administration has had this Pax Americana plan all along,  and that they siezed the opportunity opened by Sept. 11 to stand tall against AlQuieda and the "axis of evil".

Jim Wallis of Sojourners has been saying that this PaxAmericana push has and will have serious consequences for the poor,  since money that could and should have gone into the economy are being redirected to pay the cost of the war.  See this speech and this interview 

I heard this phrase not too long ago,  just before I began seeing a rash of articles in Blogville asking the question:  So where are they,  these Weapns of Mass Destruction? 

A Google search on this phrase yields quite a bit

Weinberger earlier this week wondered why the media has been so slow to do their own investigation,  rather than simply cover the democrats talking about it.  Then he asks the question a lot of us are wondering about:  "Did Bush lie to us in order to get a war that he wanted?" | JOHO, 6/21/03, Divestigative Journalism 

My suspicion is "Yes,   of course he did".   Maybe one could be extremely kind and say that Bush deceived himself into believing it.  Or maybe somebody deceived him.  I find the latter to be somewhat implausible. 

Talking Points Memo Link

Weinberger has been asking and wondering about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction" ,  as I'm sure many of us have (like me,  but I haven't  done much writing or commenting or reading about it).  I'm certainly not hearing much of it on the news,  in THIS country at least.  AKMA posts a comment to check out Joshua Marshall,  so I did, and this is from 6/21:

There's a bounty today of good material on the growing debate and/or scandal about the administration's over-hyping of evidence about Iraq's WMD programs. Actually, in my Wednesday morning column in The Hill I said that there really is no new debate or new scandal. It's really more that it's suddenly become acceptable to discuss what everyone knew for the last year or so: that is, that the administration was willfully misrepresenting the evidence both on WMD and a purported link to al Qaida. | Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo

Job/Spam boards. Recently I have signed up with a half dozen or so "Job Postings" services, and since then, my amount of SPAM has tripled. It so disgusts me. Many of these boards pose as a "service" , get your info, and then inform you that to get your resume posted it's "only $49.95" I need to start finding a way to "strike back" and track down these Scums of the Internet who sell my email to these absolutely filthy spammers. Are there any good resources of Good Filters to use, and attempts by victims of such spammers to expose the ones who selll their lists to such outright scum?

Yahoo mail seems to have a filter that catches quite a few (though several make it through). Is there an Outlook filter or tool I can use that utilizes the filtering used by Yahoo in this way?

Any other sugestions are welcome.

Never thought about this before, but it is rather ironic.  (from EthicsDaily.com

"Southern Baptists have regularly invited sitting Republican presidents to speak at their annual convention. They did not extend invitations to the last two Democrats, however, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who, ironically, both worshipped in Southern Baptist churches."

JOHO (David weinberger) has this reference from Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week (see my commentary below):

Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste - because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars - just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.

By the way, the link above will decay in a day or two. And, in any case, you won't get to see the big photo in the paper version of me and Doc.

This morning Kelli brings this in to my office and says "Happy Father's Day Daddy". After I took one bite, I thought I should snap a picture. Today will be hard, I'm afraid, as my mind and emotions seem to be dominated by the sense of shame that I feel that I have let the family down in the "provide for" department.

Page of RSS feeds related to Education (from #5 in the post below),  From a comment to Dave Winers Weboog on BloggerCon (which is Oct.4 ,2003)

(Since that's my Mom and Dad's 50th,  I probably couldn't make it to that one,  even if I happened to land that Ideal Job sometime between now and then.  But someday , hopeully sooner than later.......)

From the comments to DaveWiner's post to his BloggerCon weblog (A question for educators who do weblogs)

Educational blogs have been around for a long time.

1. This article - http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/view.cgi?dbs=Article&key=1023977253 - lists a number of the earliest educational blogs.
   
2. Peter Ford (of School Blogs) lists many, many school blogs: http://www.schoolblogs.com/stories/storyReader$138
   
3. (Some) Professors who blog - http://rhetorica.net/professors_who_blog.htm
   
4. This is a good list of topic areas within the field - http://www.barclaybarrios.com/tsk/blog/academics.html
   
5. Blogs in educational technology aggregated by my Edu_RSS service - http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/xml/feeds.cgi?feed=all
   
6. David Wiley's request for a list of authorities in the field brought a wide variety of responses - see the comments section... http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000060.html

Stephen Downes • 6/14/03; 10:38:31 AM

I had a trackback on one my posts this morning, just a couple of hours after I posted it. It really brought home a sense of the power this feature represents. It's like a gigantic Web of shared testimony. It's like I was sharing this bit of my experience at a campfire at a Church camp where friendship was thick, and here's another person, standing just on the other side of the fire, saying "Yeah, I know what you mean...it's like....." Thanks, Steve.

What he said:

what to me is the most important aspect of blogging: the creation of a web of Web selves |  Read the article about AlwaysOn (this line is just above the paragraph that contains the bulleted points almost at the end of the post)

When Weinberger of JOHO (same article as The Web Self article below - or earlier) puts it this way,  I REALLY think Church Web/Church Weblog.  A "Web of WebSelves";  that image carries with it so much of what I thik Church websites need to be.  Church Websites use brochure language to try to describe it to us.  What they're trying to do is give us enough of a "feel" to get us to come and meet them,  or "experience" the worship,  or "try it" or all the above. 

David Weinberger of JOHO writes about the claim by AlwaysOn that they are a "SuperBlog", and David points out that there's not really a way for members to "write" in an area that is "them" (that's how I understand what Weinberger is saying, and that's what blogging is for me as well:  a place that's "Me" on the Web.)

The part of AO that might be considered bloggy is pretty clearly a commenting or letters-to-the-editor capability. That's good to see, and people are writing trenchant commentary. But it's missing some core stuff that's central to understanding why bloggery is important: Members don't get a home page where I can go to read what they've written today. The "members profile" page doesn't count even though it has a linked list of previous posts. This matters (to me, anyway) since I think the most important effect of weblogging is that it creates a persistent place on the Web that comes to stand for the person; a blog site is as close as we've come to having a Web self.

Tony is obviously a great marketer. Every time he proclaims AlwaysOn as a "super-blog," he's having an actual effect on the world. People who go to AlwaysOn thinking that it's a prime example of a weblog are going to hear interesting voices — good — but are going to miss what to me is the most important aspect of blogging: the creation of a web of Web selves. That objection is political, not semantics. | see the whole article, AlwaysOnDebate

This is also where I think Church organizations are missing the point.  (Read on in "Churches missing the point")  

This was a funny, and sometimes profound movie.  Not that they delved deeply into theology, except that some very simple theological points can be profondly relevant,  like the simple matter of trying to comprehend the role of God as deity.  Part of it is that it's not comprehendible.  Part of it is to anthropomorphize God is to make it even more incomprehensible. 

The whole time, both Janet and I were wondering what God ight have for us in all that we are experiencing now.  I am in a struggle to find a new place where my abilities and my passions can be utilized.  I have "held out" on taking something "less" (the biggest "less" is "less money".  It is not a matter of "less worthy work".  It is a matter of "appropriate work" according to where I can do the most good.  X number of hours in  "temp jobs" is x number hours NOT spent moving that much quicker to the goal.  But, t he amount of time spent "searching" and "making contacts and inquiries" is more debt as bills continue to come.  Low paying work will "stem the tide",  and yet we will remain behind,  and slip further behind,  albeit more slowly,  and also move toward the next rightful place at that much of a slower pace.  It's a very scary catch 22,  and I keep wondering where "faith" and "reason" and "what the best course" all meet;  what the best balance is.

The DVD I've had for a couple of years, and bring out more often than others, especially now and lately (see my The 'Field of Dreams' Roadtrip story)

Aside from its mystical , connected meaning to my present "dreams",  it's one heck of a baseball movie,  capturing ther hearts of many a baseball fan who misses the "When it was A Game" feel the game used to have, and whoever's family history is accentuated and made dear by numerous little league games and trips to major league parks.  This movie certainly tugs at this heart of mine,  especially when Ray calls out "Dad......you wanna have a catch?" and his voice breaks....and the lump in my throat pops up just about every time. 

The DVD is good too.  A very good "Making Of" documentary is one of the extras.

For talking about Janet and me and ther past 20 years,  as today is our 20th Wedding anniversary.  Part of the day is looking at job ads,  working on a couple of web projects,  and looking around for more of the same.

I rewatched "Field of Dreams" again (for the nth time,  at least half a dozen) a couple weeks ago on a Thursday (I think it was May 29th).  I remember it becuase after it was over,  Janet told me that her parents had offered to pay for a Cold Fusion training class, and I felt encouraged by that;  that here was some support for "finding my way" to my dreams.  I'm still looking for the time and place most opportune for that. 

My Web projects and Job inquiries on this,  the 20th anniversary of my marriage to Janet.  

I have begun a small Website project for a member of the Church we've been attending.  She has published a book,  and I'm going to spend some hours doing a website for her ($200).  It's a cheap price,  but it will help me to have something else for my "portfolio".

20 years ago today, also the year I began my first fulltime Youth Ministry job,  Janet and I got married in Cincinnati and she came to live with me in Keokuk, Iowa.  That was the beginning of what was to be a short-lived Youth Ministry career,  since it seems that I was destined to be involved in electronic communications as ministry,  and eventaully,  after I completed the MA in Religious Communications at United,  that was to place me squarely in the Web development profession. 

Look over in My Web Development section to read about what I'm trying to accomplish on the job front. I post it over there so the "20th Anniversary" headline stays at the top of this page,  and Check 20 years of marriage June 11 for more on Janet and Me and being married for 20 years.

Community is not entirely physical.  Everyone knows that,  but there is still a lot of protest from traditional Chuyrch circles about how "Virtual Faith" cannot replace the physical gathering.  And I say,  over and over,  its not about REPLACEMENT,  it's about AUGMENTATION.  It's about providign another channel into encouraging of story.  It's about "hearing the voices" of the People of God,  and even as I write this on this "Pentecost morning",  I have the feleing that very few of the people I know are even reading it,  even though I know I keep this weblog,  and update it often,  and often write about things I care deeply about. 

Pentecost Sunday.  With some work to get going on, and being without my family today (they get back later today), I am in my home office this morning,  with Pentecost very much on my mind.  I was recalling how 20 years ago on Pentecost Sunday, I preached a sermon in the Church where I had been Minister of Youth/Associate Pastor for about 3 months.  It was my 27th birthday that day. 

From Reds Coverage at the Cincinati Enquirer Website

Most of this season,  I've avoided writing anythking about the Reds.  One is,  at least earlier,  they didn't provide much to "write home" about.  Bad pitching,  bad defense,  and for a while,  bad hitting.  The first two remain a problem,  but the hitting has finally reached a level that Reds fans had been talking about but not seeing much over the past two seasons.  And it has made for some exciting finishes at Great American Ball Park. 

This blogger (Blogos-- he seems kind of related to me in his play on the word logos) ,  newly discovered this morning via my  Technorati, link  has this post about searching a local library (he's in Maryland) using a javascript that gets an ISBN number from Amazon. That would be cool to use.  I have often done that (all manually , of course).  Probably not Amazon's favorite kind of idea,  but I like it. 

I'll just keep askin' until the right person sees it:  I'm still working on getting Radio "stories" into my MT blog. 

Can somebody tell me what's wrong with IE6 and Movable Type's default index.html template? I keep getting that problem of the text not wrapping for the browser window (this is not a problem in Netscape 7, or in IE5, but knowing that IE6 is the leader --the most likely browser used --- I want to find a solution). I've tried many suggestions. I'm just not enough of a Perl/MT techie to know what to do , or what I'm doing wrong. I've seen other MT -based sites where the problem doesn't exist. Usually they've done saome re-arranging of the colunmns. I tried to do it manually but somethign broke when I did it. I even upgraded to 2.64, but the same problem occurs.

This is my MT blog of my cry for help from my Radio blog (since this is where most of the people who read my RSS feed will see it) and comment or Trackback (Trackback is so cool...this is the major reason I decided to try MT)

Back when I was working on that DMin project (focusing on Online Community and the Church),  I ran across this article in WIRED mag.  Jennifer Cobb soon published a book entitled Cybergrace,  which sits on my bookshelf.  She alerted me to a then a somewhat obscure theologian named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  I had run across some insights of his via a seminary professor of mine, Glenn Hinson,  who described the "Theistic evolution" concept to a youth group under my charge back in 1980 (we were having a weekend retreat, and the subject was Prayer,  so we had Dr. Hinson,  who was a writer of books on Prayer and Contemplation.  I don't recall the tie-in to theistic evolution,  but I suppose it was something alomg the lines of how one,  to be "in nature" in order to be more closely atuned to the physical IN ORDER to be most aware of CREATION, and thus be in a state of "proximity" to God via that "mental mechanism" (actually,  to "sit in creation" as a means to "be creature" and thus dependent upon and "in" God,  just as God is IN nature.)

Anyway,  Teilhard has been "adopted" by those enthralled with Online Spaces,  as a "forseer" of the "networked spirituality" that now is discussed in some in the theological community (who also happen to be "geekily-inclined").  Cybergrace (published in 1998 by Crown Publishers,  is a book I have lifted off my shelf and onto the desk where I will be picking it up again,  to review 5 years later and see what this study does for me today. 

Smart Mobs has this entry on games that "use" the online world and the physical world,  suggesting to me that there may well be some interesting Online Community implications,  and also perhaps for Online Education,  as ftf classrooms and online classrooms meet

Virtual World, Street, Mix It Up In Mobile Game. Uncle Roy All Around You sets online players alongside players on the streets of London.

Street Players search for Uncle Roy through the back streets, the tourist traps and the leafy boulevards of Westminster with a handheld computer.

Online Players cruise through a virtual model of the same area, searching for the Street Players and looking for leads that will help them find Uncle Roy.

Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together.

They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking... [Smart Mobs]

Webcams,  hooked up via WiFi,  live from classrooms?  "Blogging" class notes, class discussions,  etc.  The possibilities "stream" in. 

From EthicsDaily.com:

06-04-03
Eight weeks after the war's end in Iraq and with no evidence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction, America's three major newsweeklies featured articles on Monday related to the possibility that the Bush administration either lied about or grossly exaggerated the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. | more

Isn't it a bit scary that now we get to hear ,  in major media outlets,  what we should have been using as a major question causing us to put our collective foot down and say "NO" in the firt place to the "pushing" of an adminstration who will apparently stop at nothing to put  its plans and intentions into motion?

One could read from various sources,  the questions such as "Do we really have enough evidence?", a nd the best reply proponents of war could give was "You know he's got to have 'em,  you know they're hidin' em',  and you know he's willing to use 'em.  What it all amounted to was a massive public propaganda campaign,  utilizing the "anti-terrorist" justification to implement highly ethically questionable (actually,  egregious ethical violations) "pre-emptive" strategies.    Now that it's "Done",  and people have apparently been "persuaded" that "Operation Iraqi freedom"  was a "huge success",  the various media outlets are beating the drum on questions that should have been sufficient to rally more rationality BEFORE our decision to appoint ourselves as the world's calvary.

I can just hear the magazine editors and newspaper editors weighing the numbers,  and deciding how much pro and how much con inorder to maximize subscriptions and appease advertisers and who knows what else.  What is most disturbing is that it is increasingly becoming apparent that the American public was "sold a bill of goods".  Perhaps as the American economy continiues to hammer away at us where it hurts, and Bush continues on the Republican mantra "Cut taxes" steadily moves from "military commander hero" to the doghouse just as his father did,  Americans will realize just how rash and impulsive this administration was in their military decisions. 

I hope I'm wrong about the economy.  I hope that something turns around,  even that Bush's tactics begin to show some signs of providing some stimulus.  But that won't change my opinion on the larger ethical questions of widely distributed justice isses; on the effects of the taxcuts on the poorer of our nation's people,  or the effects of the Captain America tactics of the US and the allies it took with them. 

A friend  on another system asked a question:

 if we are sure that this vision of the future that has blogs and online community as key facets is the right one, how do we make that future happen? What do we need to be doing to nudge society, even church societies, in that direction?

 My immediate reply below in Continue Reading (but realizing ,  especially after I wrote it,  that I started ranting,  but good ranting,  I think.  In any event,  more needs to be said.  There never seems to be enough of the questions such as the one in italics above.

I also, in my reply linked above,   broke into a lot of "Cluetrain-ish" kinds of "Come on, get a clue" type of confrontation (apologies to the Cluetrain authors,  who do it and write it much better than I).  Rest assured,  I don't purport to have given all the answers,  or maybe even one in that reply.  But it was a reply that I fully intend to keep boucing up against and bouncing back for more.  It will be with us a long time.  They're attempts to "nudge" (maybe leading toward "busting in the dooor")

A good freind questioned me about the extent to which I "share the depressed side of me" on my weblog. My first reaction to that is that I constantly restrain myself from doing so. What gets out to the weblog is often muffled from what I actually FEEL like saying, but want to "spare" my audience. On the other hand, some basic facts like being un-employed and that the extent to which this, on some days, really affects my "energy", I feel are crucial information to some sense that the readers are actually reading ME, and not a "cleaned up" edited copy.

I suppose the amount and frequency with which one receives "blank stares" and "glazed over" looks has the effect of driving one into the embraces of online interaction, "where people understand". It's like an oasis sometimes. Ecunet was my first experience of that. Weblogs and the people who know me in the face-to-face world (who still write me via email since none of them blog, except for the few who have met me as a result of our being bloggers, like Kenneth of JoKer's Blog or David weinberger and AKMA)

David weinberger blogged an event called "Digital Genres",  and one presenter explored the use of "hypertext" in ancient documents (ie. the Talmud):

David Rosenberg Rabbi Rosenberg is talking about the Talmud and the Internet. His question: Is the Talmud just like the Internet? The 6th Century text is printed with commentary all around it. [Illustration] Traditionally it is studied by people in pairs, taking turns reading it aloud and then arguing over the meaning via reference to the commentaries. The Talmud's hyperlinked presentation is like the the Internet. But the Internet is "insufficiently oral" and is much less fixed than the Talmud. Blogging is like commenting on the Talmud, but not every commentary counts as part of the Talmud. He asks what difference it makes whether the Internet is like the Talmud? Are we saying that the Talmud is hip or that the Internet is holy (or both or neither). "Suffice it to say, the Talmud is not just like the Internet."

"No matter what virtual personae I may create, they are all personae of the person typing the words, a person with a social security number and a single, fleshy body that is not nearly as nimble as its online voices are" (Small Pieces Loosely Joined, P. 175)

In talking about the close relationship of online personae and the "person behind the words" (or "behind the blog"), this observation brings to the surface a long standing problem I sense: that I often, to my chagrin, find myself feeling a LOT LESS articulate, a lot more impatient, and a lot less convincing than I perceive myself to be online. In other words, I have comments and emails about my weblog which express appreciation for the things I explore in my weblog. Offline, face-to-face, my experience is often dominated by that "glazed over" look I get (or perceive) from "recipients" of my offline rants. This comes from family members, acquaintances, and is probably ocurring by some of the Weblog readers from whom , of course, I will NEVER hear. The offline, face to face "failures" highlight the difference between the online personae I have, and even "feel" as I sit in front of my computer with my Weblog software fired up and ready to post some new thought, some new "discovery" via another's blog thoughts or their blog discoveries pointing to another.

The previous post and some to follow in the next few hours and days are coming from my reading (re-reading) of the final chapter of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I've been having a different experience of this book a year later as my first reading was just prior to the begining of my "Weblog" startup (and instrumental in turning my attention to the Weblog phenomenon along with "Gonzo Marketing" by Chris Locke). Now, almost exactly a year later after my first reading, I sense that I know more of what is being said.

Wow.  What an awesome and totally relevant to what I'm "into" kind of a conference.  Man,  I even had a friend who went to Chicago to some Religious Bookseller's convention.  I am constantly amazed at how much is going on "out there",  and how,  despite my subscribing to so many feeds from so many writers and presenters on Social Software kinds of things,  that I miss something like this.

AKMA comments on hearing David Weinberger in person, (David's entry into his blogging of the conference here, and his talk from the Conference's pages) . AKMA's comments ring a bell, since I went and listened to both of them (AKMA and David) present at Vanderbilt on Weblogs and education. I was one there who fit AKMA's description of 'had no partiuclar reason to learn more about weblogs" -- I think that we do it becuase there's always a reason to learn something different about weblogs, or think about another slant in why to use weblogs, or where to use weblogs, or how to use weblogs, and also AKMA's point: it's always a treat to hear David. It was also an occasion to re-read Samll Pieces, and I have a few things to blog about that as I am still jotting down "BLog Notes" (the notes I make to myself when reading a book to remind myself to "blog that") In the case of Vanderbilt, it was definitely interesting as well to hear David and AKMA in the context of higher education and hear the usual elitist paranoia about how weblogs "cheapen" the idea of the expert. One comment was a very generalized "I don' think the Web is good at all" and proceeded to make all the usual complaints about smut and disinformation and how Weblogs expose us to a lot of unuseful musings. David's reply was exactly what I was thinking and usually include in my reply to such: "Is the world a good place?"

In reading a blog of a David weinberger talk (linked by AKMA in his blog of the same talk),  I saw a comment at the bottom of the page, posted by David himself on that blog.  Another item in the differences between Comments and Trackbacks (besides the fact that Comments are made on the server of the blogs being commented upon,  and Trackbacks are made on the "commentor's" blog...thus creating a kind of "distributed conversation") is that Comments posted by a reader are often more personally directed to the receiver of the comment.  Trackbacks are intended to speak to the wider audience (even though the comment is known to be "for the public as well",  it is usually written with more of a "one-on-one" feel).  Before Trackback,  or on blogs without access to or use of this feature,  the comment will more often take the form of a public , many-to-many style with an eye to perhaps inviting more comments.

Here I have edited the ideas expressed in an email I sent , where I suggest some of the roles I could play in a Seminary setting,  exploring,  implementing, and helping to provide resources to pastors and communicators in the Church about the possibilities for community and education online.  My reference to "Fellow" is reference to the "Fellowships" offered by educational institutions for grant-funded or scholarship funded work being done in conjunction with some field of study.  As you may know if you've read many other posts on this Weblog, I am very much advancing the idea of some serious focusing of effort by Churches,  and by implication,  the trainers of the leaders of those Churches,  the Seminaries,  on "getting to know" the Web and the ways we can do new kinds of communication using it. 

In summary, it has to do with a Center for Church, Culture and Communication (similar to the Resource Center for Media, Religion and Culture site at the University of Colorado's Center for Mass Media Research.) and includes such really "cool" and "with it" and "fun" stuff like blogging the big events and conferences.