Marketing and Strategy Consulting
Thomas and Sam discuss new Macbooks and the problem with trying to count your followers in relation to your success.
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In which Thomas and Sam discuss Bob Dylan and Evangelicals.
The post Thinking Religion 91: Let’s Talk About Bob Dylan and Evanglicals appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Thomas and Sam discuss titles, office spaces, new jobs, being unplugged from the hive mind during the work day, and everyday carries (along with some deep philosophical ideas you’ll have to stick around for).
The post Thinking Religion: No Bread, No Bag, No Money appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Thomas and Sam discuss pants, button down collar dress shirts, briefcases, leather goods, and the role of religion in political rhetoric.
The post Thinking Religion 89: Do You Want To Talk About Pants? appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The post Thinking Out Loud 121: Even Superheroes Have Flaws appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Thomas and Sam, along with guest host Roshan Abraham, discuss Jonah’s presumptive bisexuality, Classics’ past present and future, Ephesus as the ancient 4chan, roles of the public intellectual, autobiographical memories, textuality, authority, and Bernie vs. Hillary sexism.
The post Thinking Religion 88: Snapchat is the New Oral Tradition appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The post Thinking Out Loud 120: What World is This? appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Most Christians are Republicans and a few liberal ones are Democrats (or something like that). That’s been the conventional thinking for the past few decades, especially with the rise of the Moral Majority and Evangelical movement going back to the late 60’s and early 70’s. However, the election of 2016 is pointing to a possible shift in perception of this old adage. Are we seeing a role reversal where the Democratic Party becomes the party of patriotism, American Exceptionalism, and faith while the Republican Party becomes the party of angst, cynicism, and Russian influence? We discuss the last two weeks of both parties’ conventions and why that role reversal might just be the case.
The Democratic convention’s most surprising argument: Christianity is a liberal religion | Vox
The post Thinking Religion: Trading Places appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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But Marsbot is important for other reasons, too. She represents a different kind of bot than the ones you see in Facebook Messenger — one that’s proactive rather than passive. She’s not a chatbot, but an interruptive bot. Crowley says that most other bots are in the model of Aladdin’s lamp: you invoke them and the genie appears. Marsbot is more in the Jiminy Cricket mode, hanging over your shoulder and chiming in when needed.
Source: Marsbot Is Dreaming of You — Backchannel
I’ve been testing out Marsbot the last few days, and I’m seriously impressed. I’ve been using the Ozlo bot for my random food suggestions based on location, time, preferences etc… and I’ve been happy with Ozlo.
However, Marsbot has something unique going on… it’s not a bot that waits for you. Rather, it’s proactive. If you’ve seen Her, you know immediately what I’m talking about.
Plus, it’s based on Foursquare’s accumulated data over the years, which is immense. Plus, it works in your text messaging app (iMessage if on Apple) where you’re used to getting personal updates or messages rather than going into another app on your device.
Messaging bots are going to be big and change the way we do computing and think of computers.
Take notice, churches 🙂
Thinking Baptists
Merianna and Sam discuss the notion of hospitality and how various churches welcome (or don’t) visitors and strangers into their worship services.
The post Thinking Baptists 21: Welcoming Visitors to Your Church appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Elisabeth and Merianna talk about moving your draft from the splatter paint on the canvas, letting the words fly off your fingertips to a manuscript with purposeful meaningful words. Words matter. Choose them carefully, especially if you are staff writer for a presidential candidate.
The post Thinking Out Loud 118: Words Matter appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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This week, Thomas and Sam discuss how to use social media effectively, why you shouldn’t invoke God when comparing others to Lucifer, and ways to save money on all of your internet subscription services.
The post Thinking Religion: Permission Slip appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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My partner Merianna was preaching at a nearby church last month and she needed a time estimate for the drive that Sunday morning. We googled the church and got the address. While on the results page, I noticed their “Hours” stated they were closed. It was a Sunday. That felt… peculiar.
It wasn’t intentional, of course. It’s just a tiny detail that is easy to overlook. But when you only have, on average, about 3-5 seconds to “convert” someone to making a click or engaging with your page in some way, these tiny details add up.
We all like to pretend that we’re expert marketing strategists. We grimace at bad commercials, parse political campaign logos, and pretend to disregard those annoying Facebook video posts from mega-global sugar water makers. We tend to think we don’t need help with our marketing strategies, especially the online ones, because… anyone can create a Facebook Page or Twitter account or even website. It’s easy!
Right?
Well, yes.
But not really. Not if you want to spend your time doing what you’re good at and not making tiny mistakes that add up over time and actually do harm to your “brand” (and yes, we all have a brand whether we like to admit that or not). Seemingly trivial details such as having your Google Business information correct or your Webmaster settings correct for the best Google results or your Facebook Page details can be the deal breaker for someone deciding on whether to call or visit your business, church, nonprofit, etc.
Budget wisely, but keep in mind that doing so doesn’t mean cutting the corners by turning over your very important marketing details to a summer intern or someone who has a mobile phone and a Twitter account. Call us if you need help.
Bryan Richardson, Android software engineer at stable|kernel, wants you to consider this: what if firefighters could wear a helmet that could essentially see through the walls, indicating the location of a person in distress? What if that device could detect the temperature of a wall? In the near future, the amount of information that will be available through a virtual scan of our immediate environment and projected through a practical, wearable device could be immense.
Source: The Technology Behind Pokémon Go: Why Augmented Reality is the Future
Call Pokemon Go silly / stupid / trendish / absurd etc. To a certain point the game is incredibly inane. However, it does illustrate the ability of memes and mass fads to still occur in large numbers despite the “fracturing” of broadcast media and the loss of hegemonic culture.
The more immediate question to me, though, is what to do with this newfound cultural zeitgeist around AR? Surely, there will be more copycat games that try to mirror what Pokemon Go, Nintendo, and Niantic have created. Some will be “better” than Pokemon Go. Some will be direct rip offs.
Tech behemoths such as Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, and now Google understand the long term implications of AR and are all each working towards internal and public projects to make use of this old but new intense hope and buzz around the idea of using technology to augment our human realities. I say realities because we shouldn’t forget that we experience the world based on photons bouncing off of things and going into our eyeballs through a series of organic lenses that flip them upside down onto the theater screen that is our retina before the retina pushes them through the optic nerve to our frontal cortex where our electrochemical neurons attempt to derive or make meaning from the data and process that back down our spinal cord to the rest of our bodies… there’s lots of room for variations and subjectivity given that we’re all a little different biologically and chemically.
We’re going to see a fast-moving evolution of tools for professions such as physicians, firefighters, and engineers as well as applications in the military and in classrooms etc that will cause some people pause. That always happens whether the new technology is movable type or writing or books or computers or the web.
Games (and porn unfortunately) tend to push us ahead when it comes to these sorts of tech revolutions. That will certainly be the case in terms of augmented reality. Yes, Pokemon Go is silly and people playing it “should get a life.” But remember, the interactions with that game and each other that they are making now will improve the systems of the future and save / improve lives. Also… don’t get me started on what it means to “have a life” given our electrochemical clump of neurons that we all are operating from regardless of our views on objectivity, Jesus, or etiquette.
Thomas and Sam are joined by Merianna Neely Harrelson to talk about True Love Waits, Kissing Dating Goodbye, Promise Rings, and all the interesting parts of Evangelical Christian culture of the ’90’s (and how much of that is being reexamined)… and why Sam still calls himself an Evangelical.
The post Thinking Religion: Growing Up Evangelical in the 90’s appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The post Thinking Baptists 20: No One Gets Out Alive appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The post Thinking Out Loud 117: Finding the Corners appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Further confirming the notion that your website address really doesn’t matter that much anymore, I present linkmoji.
Enjoy.
We are the place for book lovers to discover amazing books from a wide variety of topics. All lovingly hand-curated by people who know and love reading.
Source: ShelfJoy
Interesting messaging bot for Facebook Messenger that was just released today. Once you add Shelfjoy to Messenger, you “chat” with it to discover books in various categories (or “shelves” as they call them). If you find something you like, you click “Buy” and you’re handed off to Amazon to complete the purchase with the Shelfjoy affiliate code.
Clever.
We’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while with affiliate marketing and niche recommendations. I had a friend who developed a chat bot for AIM (remember that?) back in 2003 that gave you suggestions about products based on your chats. What we haven’t had is the ability to do so in format like Facebook Messenger that already has all of your social graph data (friends, likes, credit card etc) already tied in.
I expect to see more of these and more intelligent versions of these as Messenger and Google’s upcoming Allo and Siri / iMessage continue to become more “intelligent” and tied into our existing data profiles.
Pretty soon, you’ll be paying your bills and ordering your pizza via voice with your messaging platform of choice (while forgetting how to type on a physical keyboard).
By signing up to play Pokemon Go through Google, many iOS users have unknowingly exposed all of their emails, chats, calendars, documents and more to the game’s developer and third-parties.
Source: Pokemon Go catches all your Google data (here’s how to stop it) | Cult of Mac
I’ve been thinking a good deal about this game over the last few days. I should have posted before, but I wanted to wrap my head around the whole thing (as much as I can).
I’ll have a post up tomorrow with my thoughts.
Until then… this report is insanely terrible and horrifying given our current police state / insurance state / corporatist overlords. Our privacy is our power. Don’t give it away so easily, people.
Thomas and Sam discuss their iPhone homescreens, favorite apps, the complexity of generational eschatological expectations, and Christian dating apps.
The post Thinking Religion: Generational Eschatological Expectations appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The Revs Merianna Neely Harrelson and Sam Harrelson describe the benefits and challenges of congregational polity, notes, the digital dark age, and recording what matters.
The post Thinking Baptists 19: Embracing the Conflicts appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Elisabeth and Merianna talk about those moments when you meet people in real life that you’ve had social media conversations and interactions and what it feels like to be recognized. They talk about their trips and the power of belonging to a community where you can say who you are and truly be yourself. But how do you overcome conference hangover? And how do you turn a conference experience into a community of supporters?
The post Thinking Out Loud 116: Lighting a Fire Under You appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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The Revs. Merianna Neely Harrelson and Sam Harrelson reboot Thinking Baptists with a new episode for the first time in four years. They do a recap of Merianna’s ministerial journey as well as follow up to the last episode of the show with a discussion about women in baptist ministry in 2016. They also cover the topic of pastor search committees, and why the economy isn’t doing young ministers any favors when it comes to finding pastor positions.
The post Thinking Baptists 18: All The Wands appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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Courtbot was built with the city of Atlanta in partnership with the Atlanta Committee for Progress to simplify the process of resolving a traffic citation. After receiving a citation, people are often unsure of what to do next. Should they should appear in court, when should they appear, how much will the fine cost, or how can they contend the citation? The default is often to show up at the courthouse and wait in line for hours. Courbot allows the public to find out more information and pay their citations
Source: CourtBot · Code for America
Merianna and I were just talking about the implications of artificial intelligence and interactions with personal assistants such as my beloved Amy.
The conversation came about after we decided to “quickly” stop by a Verizon store and upgrade her phone (she went with the iPhone SE btw… tiny but impressive). We ended up waiting for 45 mins in a relatively sparse store before being helped with a process that took all of 5 minutes. With a 7 month old baby, that’s not a fun way to spend a lunch hour break.
We were in a part of town that we don’t usually visit, so I opened up the Ozlo app on my phone and decided to see what it recommended for lunch. Ozlo is a “friendly AI sidekick” that, for now, recommends meals based on user preferences in a messaging format. It’s in a closed beta, but if you’re up for experimenting, it’s not steered me wrong over the last few weeks of travel and in-town meal spots. It suggested a place that neither one of us had ever heard of, and I was quite frankly skeptical. But with the wait and a grumpy baby, we decided to try it out. Ozlo didn’t disappoint. The place was tremendous and we both loved it and promised to return often. Thanks, Ozlo.
Over lunch, we discussed Ozlo and Amy, and how personal AI assistants were going to rapidly replace the tortured experience of having to do something like visit a cell provider store for a device upgrade (of course, we could have just gone to a Best Buy or ordered straight from Apple as I do for my own devices, but most people visit their cell provider’s storefront). I said that I couldn’t wait to message Amy and tell her to find the best price on the iPhone SE 64 gig Space Grey version, order it, have it delivered next day, and hook it up to my Verizon account. Or message Amy and ask her to take care of my traffic ticket with the bank account she has access to. These are menial tasks that can somewhat be accomplished with “human” powered services like TaskRabbit, Fancy Hands, or the new Scale API. However, I’d like for my assistant to be virtual in nature because I’m an only child and I’m not very good at trusting other people to get things done in the way I want them done (working on that one!). Plus, it “feels” weird for me to hire out something that I “don’t really have time to do” even if they are willing and more than ready to accept my money in order to do it.
Ideally, I can see these personal AI assistants interfacing with the human services like Fancy Hands when something requires an actual phone call or physical world interaction that AI simply can’t (yet) perform such as picking up dry cleaning.
I don’t see this type of work flow or production flow being something just for elites or geeks, either. Slowly but surely with innovations like Siri or Google Now or just voice assisted computing, a large swath of the population (in the U.S.) is becoming familiar and engaging with the training wheels of AI driven personal assistants. It’s not unimaginable to think that very soon, my Amy will be interacting with Merianna’s Amy to help us figure out a good place and time to meet for lunch (Google Calendar is already quasi doing this, though without the personal assistant portion). Once Amy or Alexa or Siri or Cortana or whatever personality Google Home’s device will have is able to tap into services like Amy or Scale, we’re going to see some very interesting innovations in “how we get things done.” If you have a mobile device (which most adults and growing number of young people do), you will have an AI assistant that helps you get very real things done in ways that you wouldn’t think possible now.
“Nah, this is just buzzword futurisms. I’ll never do that or have that kind of technology in my life. I don’t want it.” People said the same thing about buying groceries or couches or coffee on their phones in 2005. We said the same thing about having a mobile phone in 1995. We said the same thing about having a computer in our homes in 1985. We said the same thing about ever using a computer to do anything productive in 1975. We said the same thing about using a pocket calculator in 1965.
In the very near future of compatible API’s and interconnected services, I’ll be able to message this to my AI assistant (saving me hours):
“Amy, my client needs a new website. Get that set up for me on the agency Media Temple’s account as a new WordPress install and set up four email accounts with the following names. Also, go ahead and link the site to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, and install Yoast to make sure the SEO is ok. I’ll send over some tags and content but pull the pictures you need from their existing account. They like having lots of white space on the site as well.”
That won’t put me out of a job, but it will make what I do even more specialized.
Whole sectors of jobs and service related positions will disappear while new jobs that we can’t think of yet will be created. If we look at the grand scheme of history, we’re just at the very beginning of the “computing revolution” or “internet revolution” and the keyboard / mouse / screen paradigm of interacting with the web and computers themselves are certainly going to change (soon, I hope).
“We find it troubling that you are asking for exemptions to the rules we apply to all developers, and are publicly resorting to rumors and half-truths about our service,” it reads. “Spotify’s app was again [i.e. after being resubmitted on June 10] rejected for attempting to circumvent in-app purchase rules, and not, as you claim, because Spotify was simply seeking to communicate with its customers.”
Ouch.
I’m looking forward to seeing what they — and the many great writers who’ve contributed to The Toast — do next. (At least two are working for my campaign!) As we look back at what this site has meant to so many of you, I hope you’ll also look forward and consider how you might make your voice heard in whatever arenas matter most to you. Speak your opinion more fervently in your classes if you’re a student, or at meetings in your workplace. Proudly take credit for your ideas. Have confidence in the value of your contributions. And if the space you’re in doesn’t have room for your voice, don’t be afraid to carve out a space of your own. You never know — you might just be the next Nicole Cliffe, Mallory Ortberg or Nikki Chung.
Source: A note on The Toast – The Toast – The Toast
What a post. What an affirmation of the open web and the idea that individuals can carve out spaces and make their voices heard amongst all the clatter.
Spotify declined to comment; Apple hasn’t responded to request for comment.
For the past year, Spotify has argued publicly, and to various regulators in the U.S. and Europe, that Apple’s subscription policies effectively punish third-party music services that use Apple’s platform, while boosting Apple Music, the home-grown service it launched in June 2015.
Well, this is not going to end well.
Evernote has been one of the leading note-taking services for some time, with clients for the Web and every major OS. The company recently announced sweeping changes to its “freemium” pricing strategy, which puts a big limit on the “free” tier and raises prices across the board for new and existing users.
Source: Evernote limits free tier to two devices, raises prices 40%
I’ve been an Evernote user since March 28, 2008 (got in before it launched in beta in June 2008) and immediately signed up for their Premium option when it opened up.
I was eager to support the app / service early on, because I saw the utility of being able to access my notes and create new ones from whatever device I happened to be on. That was already possible with the early iterations of services like Google Docs that had previously been Writely, but Evernote felt “new” in the sense that it was post-iPhone and looked ahead to a world where apps became the driving force of interaction, especially on mobile (after Steve Jobs relented on allowing apps to be installed and an app store for the iPhone).
Over the years, Evernote became more things to more people than just a note taking app. There were checklists, and document syncing, and PDF OCR, and business card storage. As a result, there were more and more calls for Evernote to get back to its roots and avoid bloat. I know I suffered through some of the “bloat” in 2011 and 2012 when Evernote seemed to really take off and started acquiring smaller and focused apps such as Penultimate, Skitch (still one of my favorites), Readable etc to round out their offerings. Then, there were the partnerships with the “offline” world such as Moleskine and Post-It Notes. We even saw an Evernote branded line of coffee mugs, backpacks, and lifestyle gear.
It was all too much.
I welcome this new period in Evernote’s story. I’m hoping they do “slim down” to some extent and even focus more on things like the current web version’s Google Drive integration (rather than being a document storage platform themselves). I’ve always thought of Evernote as more of an “Operations HQ” that ties into other apps I use like Trello or 1Writer on the iPad than a place to store all of my documents, pictures, and files.
I use Evernote everyday, and more so now that I’m trying to use iPad Pro as my main computer. It serves as my note repository, the place where I put PDF’s that I need for OCR, and a quasi-database of ideas for clients and research. It’s indespinsible to me, and I’m not sure how something “free” like OneNote or Google Keep could replicate that. I’m hopeful they continue to push forward on the excellent web version as well (and that doesn’t affect free members, which is a nice incentive for people to give it a try).
It’s painful when anything “goes up” in price. But the economic reality is that costs go up as we demand more from services and companies compete for skilled developers. Evernote did see the loss of a number of devs over the last few years, but I’m hopeful they’ll get their mojo back.
So, sign me up for another year of Premium.
Dr. Thomas J. Whitley and The Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss Sam’s use of iPad Pro as his main computer, Evernote, and the privilege of knowing how to read.
The post Thinking Religion: The Privilege of Knowing How to Read appeared first on Thinking.FM.
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