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Need to get the vocal parts in Midi format. According to our choir director extraordinaire, this can be obtained from "The Silvis Woodshet" http://gasilvis.net. But I have no experience downloading and playing midi files. So this (like LinkedIn) will be an experiment. I'll post how it works. I can learn the part by listening to a good CD - such as the John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir - with Barbara Bonney's exquisite solo soprano singing. But I think it will be easier to learn the part by hearing the Midi file. We'll keep you posted 
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165 7:22:31 PM
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BloggerCon 2003 VIII Spirituality: AKM Adam AKM Adam is associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Here is a rough transcript of the session: I walked in a little late, when Adam was taking suggested topics of discussion from the audience. Recommended themes included the role of blogs in congregations, blogs as genre of spiritual writing, blogging as spiritual exercise, the spiritual community, the community-building aspects of sermons, the difference between oral and written traditions, and how blogs can help us learn about real-live people. After touching on Real Live Preacher, a semi-anonymous minister in Texas who blogs regularly, as an example, Adam began leading a group discussion. There are two schools of thought about sermons. One holds that you prepare spiritually, reading, studying, meditating, and then you channel a sermon. No documentation of the actual sermon. Other people don't ever really prepare but still preach extemporaneously. Those are the people you don't want to listen to. Still, we hold ministers responsible for being the real Christians for us. There are also people who can't read. I don't mean that they can't read but that they have trouble reading from a text. I have trouble reading Bible. They sound like the built-in text reader on your computer. There's a problem with reading in general. That's a more fundamental problem than preaching extemporaneously. It's a problem coping with words, thoughts, and expressions. There's a reason that preachers frequently go to seminary: It's to learn something about what they're doing. Seminary is bad for some preachers. You can get feedback and input on your work by, say, posting a Weblog. If you put sermons on a Weblog, you're preparing for Google juice and interested people who actually want to see what's going on there. People come to my site and comment on my sermons whom I've never met before. They have no intrinsic motivation to find out more about me. They're doing a Google search for some word and "sermon," and they're stuck in the mire of conversation with me. If a real-live preacher puts the effort into starting those conversations, there's a lot that she can learn. There might be some things that you don't want to say to their face. Maybe she says "obviously" all the time. Dan Bricklin: What you're saying is more about the Web than about blogs, unless you're following the development of a preacher. When I think about spirituality and blogs, I think about the intertwining of spirituality and other stuff that's going on in the blog. The blog lets you put the two together. In my blog, I will quote scripture, which is somewhat odd in a techy blog. Scripture is great to use as examples because there's so much commentary around scripture. One of the fundamental things that I try to do is go to congregation groups and look at their Weblogs. Sisters and brothers, there are a lot of bad Web pages in the world, but a disproportionate number of them belong to churches. And they're more resistant to change. If you're not showing anything that someone might not like, you're probably not showing anything that people might like. The more of the stuff of the congregation that shows up here, the more that anyone who comes to the Web page will recognize the voice of the congregation. Chris Locke says that large corporations and organizations don't have soul. I don't agree. I wouldn't say that corporations have soul, but collective entities have a lot going on. Question: Is it your experience that the written form of a sermon is more useful before it's preached -- or after? I have an inflated view of myself of a preacher. People say that when they read my sermons, they can hear me preach. The same is true with my blog. There's a lot of continuity. There's not so much a better or worse, but people like going back to it and remembering. People who weren't there like knowing what people were talking about. With student sermons, they tend to get better after a few whacks at them with comments. Unfortunately, by then they've already been preached. One thing you could do is put some notes up on Monday, ask for some feedback, and then incorporate that into your sermon Sunday. Griff Wigley: Have you done that? No. This is my sermon, sir. It comes from preparing it, going over it, maniacal composition and copy editing. I preach it to myself three or four times. My father worked in English composition and specialized in comedy. We would watch movies such as W.C. Fields, and analyze what was funny. W.C. Fields says that you'd go to a city, find the outlying areas that were funny, and incorporate them into what you say. In Pittsburgh, there's McKee's Rocks. Anything you say about that will be funny. I'm from that school, going through everything and seeing what works for me. Griff Wigley: Would you post your reflections about your struggle going through that sermon? I do. I did a sermon about El'dad and Me'dad in the camp. Every hour or two, I put up some comments about my struggle. I need two things in a sermon: the introduction and the conclusion. It takes a lot to really wrap a sermon to lodge it in someone's brain. The other thing is a hook. Just like a pop song, I need something that I know is the riff -- not something I'll repeat all the way through -- but something that I'll return to and lean on in critical moments. I couldn't find a hook for that sermon. But people left comments, and I eventually came up with the Dad Bros.: El'dad and Me'dad. I just did that one time. I can't imagine boring people with that process every time I preach. Some churches aren't open to comments. This isn't business, this is God. I am not one to prescribe one thing, not for anyone, not for preaching, not for anything. That said, a lot of that hesitation and fear is antithetical to what a congregation should be doing. A Trappist monastery Web site without any text on it? That I could get behind. Paul says, "I am not afraid of the Gospel." Put it out there. Take the shots. Take your lumps. For congregations that are inclined to take that step, that's an important part of it. Dan Bricklin: This is a problem with any community and the Internet. We've got a general mailing list. And we've got a list in which topics are discussed. That can get pretty hot and heavy. We split it because not everyone can put up with the nerve. Not to put Ross on the spot, but in Blogware, to comment, you need to be registered. That makes me think that you can say, I don't want to see anything from Ross. It's a problem, but it's a problem worth dealing with. Dan Bricklin: But it's a question of what you put out in the world. Does the preacher decide what's put out there? Do you post the comments that matter? Open deliberation is important. The Talmud sounds like a Weblog. That's a great model for this, as is the revolutionary period and pamphlets. Sermonds are much more closed in their deliberation. They're not mutually exclusive, though. The Web can counteract and countervail the cultural tendency to short attention span by drawing you into interactive deliberation about things. Griff Wigley: The reason I asked about your blogging about struggling with a sermon is that because as a man of the spirit, it's a good way to share your development as a spiritual person. As a dad, I've posted excerpts from my real journal to my blog for my three 20-something sons. You can't say too much about the people you're counseling, but you can blog about your daily experiences as a preacher. This isn't just God and me, this can happen to you, too. This is a really important topic. There are a lot of congregational leaders whose notion of relating to an unacquainted public is that they have to seem pious and perfect and spiritually powerfully in every way. Or, on the other hand, to say, in effect, I'm not that kind of guy. I don't know what I'm doing. This is all so confusing. The perfect preacher might not be as wonderful as you want him to think. That's the PR notion. Real Live Preacher has a depth that's not available in any other sources. You don't have to be a clergy leader to do that. It's edifying for the world to see there are alternatives to the extremes. Dan Bricklin: Seminary students can use their blogs as a resume. Congregations might choose to hire only clergy who blog. When I wrote the blurb for this session, people gave me a hard time about saying that bloggers have souls. There's a perceived question about whether I'm speaking to people to whom I'm accountable to. Am I saying that all bloggers need to subscribe to a metaphysics or they don't have a blog. That's not what I said. It's an environment in which people can correct me even if that's what I'm going to say in the end. Purely hypothetically, not based on any congregation I know about, but something that I can only imagine, say you call an interim minister without knowing anything about them. If it just doesn't work out, wouldn't you like to replay that, look at the person's blog and be able to say the person is a tedious windbag or their far right politically. If you can fake something well enough for two years, you might be close enough, but it takes a lot of energy to fake that much. Dave Weinberger: Is there an implied metaphysics in truth, if not soul? Let's look at communities. You're open to people of various faiths questioning you. There are all sorts of truth. Others aren't so open to that. Do communities of bloggers have a shared metaphysics about truth, if not faith? Let's change the subject from faith to politics. You're either going to get a lot of right on's or people actually discussing the topics. Dave Winer: I want to go back to the example where both of us got flamed simultaneously. Looking around the room, there's the notion that were friends on the Web. I'm not your friend. I'd like to be your friend. But there are some people who assume we're friends. You got push back because you had anything to do with me. Is it OK to make it a condition in a friendship that someone can't be friends with someone else? I say no. That's not OK. There's not much of a me left if you take away my friends. I am largely constituted by the spiritual hyperlinks. Dave Winer: I don't believe that. I see you right here. I wouldn't have been here if two years ago, David hadn't started emailing me and Halley hadn't started emailing me. My presence here is dependent on those relationships. Dave Winer: My uncle just died. Did he die because his friends stopped supporting him? No. His heart stopped beating. Existence is pretty simple. I got the impression from your blog that when your uncle died, you were diminished. Dave Winer: I wasn't in any way diminished. I was enhanced in real ways. His existence is what I'm talking about. As a reader, for someone who Dave Winer was a three-minute voice on the phone and reading Scripting News, my sense was that it was like you were in a movie, hit in the chest with a shotgun blast. I read that as loss, as something important going out of your life. If you subtract the social hyperlinks, the spiritual hyperlinks, what is left is not AKMA but some kind of body lying there. Dave Winer: Are your friends allowed to make friendship conditional? This is a pointed question that gets really deep and uncomfortable. I owe people to whom I have long-standing relationships and respect, and there's some concern that I am endangering the AKMA-ity of AKMA by associating with you. There are folks where it changes the very notion of who they are when you learn something about them. I want to signal that in that instance, I extended myself to say, look, I've read the controversies. Part of me is that I'm a pastor. I hear what's bothering you and you and you. I'm not here to adjudicate what's bothering you, but to listen, respect, and perhaps interpret what seems to be going on. Sometimes it's best just to listen. I'm going to go to BloggerCon. Then I'm going to go home.
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164 1:50:49 PM
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Looks like an interesting read. Gurteen: Innovation in Networks. Gurteen: Innovation in NetworksDavid points to two articles that highlight the role place and networks play in innovation, taking Silicon Valley as an example. But if you want to know how and why innovation in networks happen in the Valley, I recommend John Seely Brown's article, Mysteries of the Region. [elearningpost]
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163 1:34:52 PM
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Given the venture in the South Pacific, I thought this might be of interests to record ============ And now for something completely different: The Social Issues Research Center in Oxford, UK has released an absolutely marvelous online guide to British pub etiquette. In a number of steps the guide takes your through the basics of ordering drinks and food (believe me, this is not obvious for non-brits), choosing your pub, making contact in pubs, pub-talk and other rituals, round-buying (very important when you are out drinking with the locals), sex & games and how to become a regular. (link courtesy of but she's a girl) There are really absolute gems in this guide, some things that appear obvious:
but there are also more subtle codes:
And there is an enormous amount of insight given to what appears to be social mysteries, if you didn't grow up in or around a pub yourself. Coming from a place (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) with a rather strong pub culture itself, I always have found quite a few similarities with British pubs, but there are also just as many mysteries. I wish I had read this guide 25 years ago, it would have saved me some embarrassing moments. But the differences between American bar culture and British pubs is huge, and for Americans this guide could be your essential survival guide for social life in Brittan. [All Things Distributed]
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162 1:31:04 PM
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This morning (or was it last night...?) I signed up for LinkedIn. You can read all about the service by checking the links in a post or two below. So far the experiment has been successful. I signed up and fired off an message to someone I already knew in the network and got an immediate response! That's pretty good. Then I ran the outlook script. Now I was wondering about this, because I use a Palm and synchronize it to Goldmine, and then have Goldmine Synchronize to Outlook, so would it work.... YES It got a whole slew of email addresses and let me select a handful to attempt to make some contact with. At first I was not that excited about the pre-scripted form email, but in fact I found it better to have something to rewrite than to come up with some lame message on the fly. Expediency of making connections is the goal here. Send a handful of emails to people I thought would be receptive, and within about 2 minutes, was accepted by one of them. And he's not a high-tech guy! Also, he was not visible to me in LinkedIn before. So I guess there are settings where you can make yourself visible only to those who already know you. That suggests that the network in the system is much larger than the one that is initially visible to you. Well, the experiment begins nicely. Let's see where it goes.
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161 11:10:11 AM
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Just earlier today, I was discussing how people connect due to shared interests and/or activities. Connecting due to shared consumption patterns - I guess this is well known to the Psychographic Demographers who come up with phrases like Country Squires, and Soccer Moms. But now comes the corrolary - that the weight of human discourse has shifted to be around these consumption patterns. In other words most human expression and listening takes place in comments on Amazon about products (and other similar systems for expressing views). Is it true? Not sure what the technorati site would have to say on this... But there is a lot of truth to the social network idea of networks of trust being increasingly necessary before action is taken. Now if I were to go through my contact list and try to identify one product that each person had aquired - a car, a digital camera, a leather skirt, and so on - what does that tell me... Or do I really need to identify them according to their psychographic stereotype! Somehow that is not specific enough or granular enough. But it could be a good starting point. No, maybe it's the departure point. Start with those urban programmer bloggers that spent the weekend at BloggerCon, and maybe figure out what psychographic profile they share... That's the easy part - then you can glance over at Adam Curry as he sits down with a fresh cup from Starbucks, and say - "that makes sense." And Andrew Grumet one row back, or Sooz would be just as likely to have a cup or be thinking of getting one when they see Adam's... The hard part is knowing how entirely different their worlds are - Sooz sits next to me logging into Friendster, checking email and then looking and an IRC Channel. But her interests in music or in business or in drinking grasshopers instead of beers (because she love's Shatner in Free Enterprise), are probably very different from a Dutchman who is six feet five and earned $3m for his blogging activities and has an RSS feed for pieces of Street Garbage in Amsterdam! Adam uses a Mac and Sooz was chatting on her Dell for God's sake. Sooz, btw, I apologize if you hate Shatner and grasshopers - I was just creating a little depth to illustrate my point. The point being that granularity is not whether you'll like the stuff your stereotype likes - you will, but rather you also like some stuff (or Consume it to be more specific) that makes you rather unique. Further that stuff binds you to others, who are outside of your psychographic profile, who would like that same unique stuff, and it creates a nexus to another circle of people. That circle might be commenting on Amazon about the CD or Book you just bought and for many people anymore, those are critical conversations.
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160 1:25:34 PM
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