Category: Status

Youth Ministers and Future Preachers

I’m at my “office” in the Broad River Coffee Shop sitting across from a group of young ministers and youth ministers.

Eaves-dropping on their conversation, I’m reminded that we Religious Studies folks should be thankful that Adonai chooses to work with slackers and jerks like Abram, Jacob, Joseph and Moses or Divinity Schools would not exist.

God works in Mysterious Ways…

Epoch of Juxtaposition

Doing some Sunday reading and came across this from Michel Foucault’s work “Of Other Spaces” (page 22)…

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.  We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.  We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

That is life changing.  Read it three times to make sure you at least see the direction Foucalt is pointing towards.  When I try to explain to people “what I do for a living” (academics, teaching and online marketing), I should point them to that quote.

Back to burying my nose in Foucault on a snowy Sunday afternoon (could life be any better?)…

Teaching College Students Versus Teaching 8th Graders

Wow, what a difference.

I’m enjoying the college students at Gardner-Webb Univ (harrelsonreligion.com if you want to follow along) and we’re starting to get the questions flowing.

However, teaching the 8th graders at Hammond School for the previous two years was mesmarizing because I was constantly having to think on my feet, adjust and react to the crowd.  It was a bit like playing jazz.

Teaching college is more like a staged  and choreographed production where the script stays the same every day and includes little audience interaction.   I’m sure that it’s my fault that the crowd isn’t clapping and dancing in the aisles… need to work on that…

Snow Day

Got up at 4:30, took the pups out, got dressed, had my coffee and was ready to go for a day of teaching at GWU.  I’d repeatedly called into the University’s weather hotline all last night and this morning and according to the nice sounding lady’s voice on the recording, classes were still being held today.

So, I get into my car and make it about 40 minutes down the road from Asheville.  When I hit the Saluda grade, I decided to call the hotline once more just to make sure we were having classes because NPR was reading out all of the closings in the area.  Sure enough, classes were cancelled.   Ugh.

I’m glad for a day off, but at this point, I’d rather go ahead and teach!  We were covering the Exodus today and had a reading quiz scheduled, so this puts us yet another day behind (I spent too much time on Genesis 1 and 2).  Squeezing the entire Old Testament into one semester is unbelievably hard, especially when you have so much passion for the topics we are covering (and the students are beginning to ask good questions about the Documentary Hypothesis, etc).

Anyways, I’m kicking back with some Neil Young, hot chocolate, Josephus and Schaefer today.  I’ll send pics to Flickr if things get fun outside.

Enjoy your day, whereever you are!

Going Back to Google and 30Boxes

Since I made my monumental switch to Ubuntu back in October, I’ve also attempted to move my email, feed reading and calendaring off the web as well.  I’ve been using Linux info manager Evolution for mail and calendar, which is a nice product.  It’s almost Outlook-lite.  For my feed reading, I’ve been using Liferea, which is also a simple and easy to use program, but lacks the speed and flexibility of Google Reader.

So, I just haven’t been able to accomplish that goal of going offline since I’m constantly on the road.  I miss my GMail interface, I miss the fly-through-feed reading of Google Reader and I certainly missed my 30Boxes.

So, I’ve decided to put everything back up on these platforms and get back to what I’m comfortable with in terms of usage.

Email Addresses

A few people have written to me and said they are getting bounce backs on the me@samharrelson.com email address.

It’s been gone since October. Please DON’T email me there!

You can reach me through anything on the “Contact Tab” button above. Here are my email addresses (they all go to the same place):

sam@harrelson.com

sharrels@gardner-webb.edu

sam@costpernews.com

sharrelson@gmail.com

Thanks!

Weekly Insight Podcast 11/3 – 11/10

The new Weekly Insight podcast that we recorded on Friday is now up. The show is getting better and better every week, and I’d definitely suggest checking out this new episode if you haven’t done so already. We grill affiliate educators, grill Wayne on ReveNews and have a great debate on the state of affiliate marketing (you can only imagine what Jeff, Amanda and I came up with!).

Thanks to Carsten for the plug on ReveNews as well!

Weekly Insight – 11/03/06 (83 MINUTES)

This Week’s Gossip and News:

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– MonkeyPhonecall to Scoble
– Affiliates: To Educate Them or Not?
– A Critical Look at Revenews, Gurus, Conferences
– Is Our Industry Looking Backward?
– Deep Thoughts: Search, Memetics & Affiliates

Listen to Weekly Insight Now in mp3

Subscribe to the Weekly Insight Feed

Google Bombing Politics

From the just plain stupid way that politicos have been trying to game Google or Youtube, it seems that the very area that could benefit the most from the social web (POLITICS) is either too dumb, too corrupt or too oblivious to see the real opportunity.

Google Bombs are nothing new to most of us who spend a good deal of time online. They were first discussed sometime in 2001 if I remember correctly, so they’ve been a presence for five years now. We’ve seen them used in a variety of ways from humor to mean-spirited attacking.

Perhaps the best known Google Bomb of all time was the “miserable failure” meme that passed around the web a few years ago. Did you miss that one? Head over to Google and type in “miserable failure” and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” choice. The result is a product of a large amount of links with similiar keywords (in this case, Dubya and the term miserable failure).

Last year, Google Bombing even made it into the dictionary (for those of us silly people who still actually use non-virtual spell checkers).

However, the latest use of Google Bombing as a means to an end raises concern. Admittedly, our political process in the US is highly flawed and the fact that over 2 billion dollars have been spent on “mid-term” elections while 50 million Americans are uninsured. But, Chris Bowers, a contributer to the “liberal” blog MyDD.com has dreamed up a new scheme to target 50 Republican candidates around the country with a campaign of Google Bombs and AdSense buys.

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

…Each name is associated with one article. Those articles are embedded in hyperlinks that are now being distributed widely among the left-leaning blogosphere. In an entry at MyDD.com this week, Mr. Bowers said: “When you discuss any of these races in the future, please, use the same embedded hyperlink when reprinting the Republican’s name. Then, I suppose, we will see what happens.”

But then it gets a little murkier…

An accompanying part of the project is intended to buy up Google Adwords, so that searches for the candidates’ names will bring up advertisements that point to the articles as well. But Mr. Bowers said his hopes for this were fading, because he was very busy.

This really troubles me. Not only does the money part of running for political audience make the idea of doing so prohibit the best Americans from entering politics, but these sorts of algorithm gamings simply dilute the political process and what we expect from voters. I’m ashamed that Bowers is doing this in hopes of electing Democrats, because as a Democrat I feel that we have a more optimistic message grounded in transparency and real democratic principles. This sort of short sighted crap is not needed if our message resonates with voters.

Further, this sort of juvenile tactic shows a complete misunderstanding of the potential for using the web in a constructive way for a political campaign. Howard Dean and Ned Lamonte were officially ordained as “blog elected” candidates by the mostly-ignorant large media outlets, but in reality there still has not been a national candidate to make use of the real power of social memetics or web2.0’ish community. John Edwards has been paying a good deal of attention to this area (even appearing at Gnomedex and on Rocketboom), so I hope Edwards will use what he has learned in his presidential candidacy in 2008. If he does, it will be groundbreaking.

Spending billions of dollars on mudslinging and negative messages might have worked before, but that paradigm is rapidly shifting and politicians seem to be the last people to come to terms with that important point.

So, here’s my plea to politicians: Stop trying to game the system and wake up to the constructive possibilities of the web. Do blogging right, make good YouTube videos (good meaning full of heart of real creative expression), construct worthwhile social memes and you just might get elected without contributing to a system already filled with greed, ignorance, violence and stupidity.

A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data – New York Times

How Much of a South Carolinian Are You?

Jamie M. sent me this.  As an ex-pat Southern Carolinian living in Northern Carolina now, I was surprised at the results.

Turns out I’m 100% South Carolinian.

Start with 100 and take off 5 of each question that you answer NO to. The higher the percentage the more of a South Carolinian you are!

1) Do you like sweet tea? Yep
2) Do you get dressed up to go tailgating for a football game? Yep
3a) (Girls) Do you wear you’re pearls with jeans?
3b) (guys) Do you own more than 10 hats but only wear 1? Yep
4) Have you ever gone to the Carolina cup? Yep
5) Have you even been “muddin”? Yep
6) Have you ever spent a day at “the river”? Yep
7) Do you own anything with the tree and moon on it? Yep
8) Do you love Boiled Peanuts? Yep
9) Have you ever been to some county festival (i.e. Okra strut, peach festival, water festival)? Yep
10) Have you ever been to the “market” in Charleston? Yep
11) Have you spent at least one night partying in 5 points?  Oh Have I??  Yep
12) Have you heard of Shealy’s bbq? Oh HAVE I?? Yep
13) Have you ever spent a night at Myrtle Beach? Yep
14) Do you eat grits on a regular basis? Yep
15) Have you eaten at a waffle house more than once a week?  OH HAVE I????? Yep
16) Do you still use sir/ma’am, please and thank you on a daily basis? Yep
17) Do you know at least part of “the shag”? Yep
18) Have you ridden in the back of a pickup truck? Yep
19) Do you say the word “y’all” all the time? Yep
20) Do you still have that southern charm? Yep

Some things never chage!