Living With Sacred Time

I’m doing some work on my sermons this Spring and came across this fantastic lectionary resource from Vanderbilt Divinity:

Revised Common Lectionary – Vanderbilt Divinity Library

The site is based on NRSV text for the readings and even includes a nifty set of RSS feeds for each liturgical season 🙂 Can’t go wrong with that combination.

I’ve been realizing the importance of the Church calendar over the last few months. Something I want to do in 2009 is definitely move my own conception of time and the year towards a more liturgical one.

There’s something to be said for participating with a God of history using a sacred calendar rather than the one focused more on tax day and Hallmark events.

My Preaching Schedule

Here’s where I’ll be preaching and speaking in the Spring:

//www.google.com/calendar/embed?showNav=0&mode=AGENDA&height=375&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=dkluvcbohtm95puv3obudeud2s%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23B1365F&ctz=America%2FNew_York

This will be updated throughout the Spring and semester, so I’ll embed it over on the “Speaking” page in the sidebar. There are also some dates in March that you have to click the “Look for more” button to see.

If you use Google Calendar (of course I highly suggest it), you can click the little “Google Calendar” button on the bottom frame and add it to your calendar (if you live close by and so desire).

Honestly, I just like embedding these because Google makes it fun.

I Won’t Be at Affiliate Summit West

With much frustration and sadness, I wanted to let you know that I won’t be attending ASW this year.

A close family member has been sick for the last few months and some labs came back this week that weren’t good. All that to say, I’m needed here with family and the baby since they are my first priorities. Everything should be alright in the long term, but for now, family calls.

This is the first Affiliate Summit West or East I’ve missed in a long while, and it tears me up to think I won’t be there with all of my close friends and colleagues. I look forward to these gathering of the tribes so much because we are such a tight-knit community. Plus, I was really excited to hang out with the PartnerCentric team.

All that to say, I’m missing one hell of a show and networking event. What Missy and Shawn have put together really has become an integral part of life/business/friendship to anyone involved in affiliate marketing. It’s a true testament to their hard work and dedication that we all look forward to these shows so much. I know I do, at least.

If you are like me and can’t make it, make sure to check out the live stream of the Gary Vaynerchuk keynote provided by Missy and Shawn.

So, have a Coors Light for me at the All American Bar and Grille in the Rio. I’ll be there in spirit.

See you in New York for ASE this August-

Sam

Google Has Fumbled FeedBurner’s Real Time Opportunity

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Earlier this week, I lamented on Google’s poor handling of FeedBurner since acquiring the service.

Instead of capitalizing on FeedBurner’s large amount of inertia and kind feelings towards the service from the influence-sphere of bloggers, Google has relegated FeedBurner to the back shelf of its growing collection of dolls and toys.

In a post about the coming possibilities of a “ping economy” (attention economy?), Steve Gillmor points out the growing latency (ie impotency) of FeedBurner and how Google has mis-handled RSS notifications within Google Reader in general:

The Realtime Ping Server: “Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.”

Such a shame. FeedBurner could have taken blogging and pinging to the 2.0 level with more instantaneous notifications of updates. Instead, Google placed more “relevant” ads on our feeds and moved on.

Nothing to see there (except the ads, of course).

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