Some gratuitious family pics

June 14, 2007

In the What a Dif­fer­ence a Year Makes (or Does­n’t) Department:
Julie took the kids out to South Jer­sey’s fabled Sto­ry­book­land last week.The fun­ni­est dis­cov­ery were the pic­tures that matched those from Theo’s class trip last year.
|2006|2007|
|Theo's class trip to Storybookland|Theo returns to Storybook Land|
|Theo's class trip to Storybookland|Storybookland 2007|
|Theo's class trip to Storybookland|Storybookland Return 2007|
We all went togeth­er on a fam­i­ly trip this week­end to reac­quaint our­selves with one anoth­er: our sched­ules haven’t been sync­ing well late­ly. Julie picked a farm B&B out in Lan­cast­er Coun­ty full of chick­ens and goats and an easy com­mute to Stras­burg PA, a good place for those who like to look at trains, trains, and trains, then drool over trains, trains, trains, and trains (we haven’t seen trains or trains up close yet). Pic­tures from around the B&B are here; strange­ly we for­got the cam­eras on our steam-powered out­ings so you’ll have to look at old pics. Here’s a shot of the kids on top of the play­house barn’s slide:
Trip to Lancaster Co. B&B

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del​.icio​.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

March 17, 2007

blankIt’s
not nec­es­sary to devel­op your own Web 2.0 soft­ware infra­struc­ture to
cre­ate an inde­pen­dent Web 2.0‑powered com­mu­ni­ty online. It’s far
sim­pler to set a stan­dard for your com­mu­ni­ty to use on exisiting
net­works and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decid­ed on about a dozen cat­e­gories to use with my DIY blog aggre­ga­tor (Quak­erQuak­er).
I only want to pull in posts that are being gen­er­at­ed for my site by
com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers so we use a com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­fi­er, a unique prefix
that isn’t like­ly to be used by others. 

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del​.icio​.us social book­mark­ing sys­tem, the Flickr pho­to shar­ing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I’ve been using the com­mu­ni­ty name fol­lowed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of cat­e­go­ry descrip­tion to make a set of unique tags for
the aggre­ga­tor. When some­one wants to add some­thing for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my exam­ple, when someone
wants to list a new Quak­er blog they use “quak​er​.blog”, “quak­er” being
the com­mu­ni­ty name, “blog” being the cat­e­go­ry name for the “New Blogs”
page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

blank
You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the com­mu­ni­ty pre­fix, the oth­er for the spe­cif­ic category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

blank
Now use the “String Con­cate­na­tion” mod­ule to turn this into the
“community.category” mod­el. The com­mu­ni­ty input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the sec­ond slot and the cat­e­go­ry input goes into the last slot.

blank Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr auto­mat­i­cal­ly removes it in the resul­tant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry” with­out a
dot. Sim­ple enough: just pull anoth­er “String Con­cate­na­tion” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the mid­dle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

blank
Pull three “URL­Builder” mod­ules into Pipes, one for each of the
ser­vices we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each ser­vice uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del​.icio​.us http://​del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​tag
Flickr http://​api​.flickr​.com/​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​f​e​eds
Google Blog Search http://​blogsearch​.google​.com

Under path ele­ments, put the cor­rect tag: for Del​.icio​.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

blank Fetch is the Pipes mod­ule that pulls in URLs and out­puts RSS feeds. It can also com­bine them. Send each URLBuilder out­put into the same Fetch routine.

Since it’s pos­si­ble that you’ll might have dupli­cate posts, use the “Unique” mod­ule to dedu­pli­cate entries by URL.
Through a lit­tle tri­al and error I’ve deter­mined that in cas­es of
dupli­cates, feeds low­er in the Fetch list trump those high­er. In the
actu­al Pipe pow­er­ing my aggre­ga­tor I pull a sec­ond Del​.icio​.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
per­son­al­ly over­ride every oth­er input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

blank
With exper­i­men­ta­tion it seems like Pipes orders the out­put entries by
descend­ing date, which is prob­a­bly what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” mod­el that allows
you to extend stan­dard RSS feeds (see yes­ter­day’s post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del​.icio​.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the pho­tograph’s meta­da­ta about when it was tak­en. Pipes’
“Rename” mod­ule lets you copy both fields into one you cre­ate (I’ve
sim­ply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manip­u­late and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trou­ble lay­ing it out on a webpage.

Update: it’s all moot: accord­ing to ZDNet blog, “Pipes now auto­mat­i­cal­ly appends a pub­Date tag to any RSS feed that has any of the oth­er allow­able date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

blank The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Out­put” module.

In action

You can see this pub­lished Pipe here, and copy and play with it your­self. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs. 

Add Quaker Blog Watch to your site

August 16, 2005

A few months ago I start­ed keep­ing a links blog that evolved into the “Quak­er Blog Watch” (for­mal­ly at home at “non​vi​o​lence​.org/​q​u​a​ker” though includ­ed as a col­umn else­where). This is my answer to the “aggre­ga­tion ques­tion” that a few of us were toss­ing around in Sixth Month. I’ve nev­er believed in an uberBlog that would to supercede all of our indi­vid­ual ones and act as gate-keeper to “prop­er” Quak­erism. For all my Quak­er Con­ser­v­a­tivism I’m still a Hick­site and we’re into a cer­tain live-and-let live cre­ative dis­or­der in our reli­gious life.

I also don’t like tech­ni­cal solu­tions. It helps to have a human doing this. And it helps (I think) if they have some opin­ions. When I began my list of anno­tat­ed Quak­er links I called it my “Sub­jec­tive Guide” and these links are also some­what sub­jec­tive. I don’t include every post on Quak­erism: only the ones that make me think or that chal­lenge me in some way. Medi­oc­rity, good inten­tions and a famous last name mean less to me than sim­ple faith­ful­ness to one’s call.

There’s no way to keep stats but it looks like the links are being used (hours after I stum­ble across a previously-unknown site I see com­ments from reg­u­lar Quak­er Ranter read­ers!). Here’s the next step: instruc­tions on adding the “last sev­en entries of the Quak­er blog watch to your site.” I imag­ine some of you might want to try it out on your side­bar. If so, let me know how it works: I’m open to tweak­ing it. And do remem­ber I’ll be dis­ap­pear­ing for a few days “some­time soon” (still wait­ing, that kid can’t stay in there too long.)

Friends Familiar with My Struggles

May 5, 2005

A Guest Piece from ‘Quak­er­s­peak’ C. Reddy.

On April 23 I flew to Ore­gon to serve on an edi­to­r­i­al board for a book that QUIP is putting togeth­er of young Friends’ expe­ri­ences of Quak­erism. After arriv­ing in Ore­gon but before I met with the edi­to­r­i­al board for this, I served on a pan­el with the oth­er young Friends on the edi­to­r­i­al board in a QUIP meet­ing (as we had arrived at the end of a QUIP con­fer­ence for our meet­ing) about how media, print­ed or oth­er­wise, inspired us spir­i­tu­al­ly. As we relat­ed our expe­ri­ences as young Friends (and grow­ing up as Quak­ers), a num­ber of issues sur­faced rather quickly.

As young Friends move through high school and enter the [young] adult world, there is often a gen­er­al lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between young Friends and adults in Meet­ings, as if there’s some ten­sion about it. Per­son­al­ly, as a young Friend in Durham Friends Meet­ing (NCYM(Cons.)), I’ve found that I know cer­tain adults — ones with whom I have inter­act­ed more specif­i­cal­ly over the years as I have grown up. Often these are par­ents of oth­er young Friends in the Meet­ing or peo­ple who have been involved in youth group events. What’s miss­ing is the con­nec­tion to the rest of the adults in Meet­ing; I’ve been attend­ing Durham Friends Meet­ing since I was born (with a peri­od dur­ing mid­dle school where I was most­ly absent, but for the last few years I’ve been quite reg­u­lar in atten­dance) and I feel like most of the meet­ing has no idea who I am. In addi­tion to that, I’ve not known how to com­mu­ni­cate my involve­ment and ded­i­ca­tion in var­i­ous nation­al Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties, such as being cho­sen as one of six co-clerks of the HS pro­gram at FGC Gath­er­ing this sum­mer, my par­tic­i­pa­tion in Young Quakes, my atten­dance at a Pen­dle Hill Clerk­ing work­shop last fall, my involve­ment in this QUIP book, or how I have been read­ing many Quak­er books over the last few months, all of which have been VERY inte­gral in my spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment. Even Friends in Durham Friends Meet­ing with whom I do con­verse some­times after Meet­ing do not know of all these things with which I am involved.

Also, when I stopped attend­ing First Day school in Jan­u­ary of my junior year in high school (a lit­tle over a year ago) and began attend­ing the full hour of Wor­ship, I spoke to two youth lead­ers about it briefly so they would under­stand, and then there was no fur­ther response. Look­ing back on this, I feel that the Meet­ing should be more involved in such a tran­si­tion for all young Friends — not just those adults direct­ly involved in the youth group/First Day school, but every­one should be more aware and atten­tive of the young Friends in Meet­ing and their involve­ment in Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties out­side of Meeting.

One thing that each of us felt is very impor­tant yet very lack­ing is men­tor­ship with­in Meet­ing for Wor­ship. There need to be adults who are not nec­es­sar­i­ly First Day school teach­ers, youth group lead­ers, or par­ents who are will­ing to have a rela­tion­ship with a young Friend as some­one who has had more expe­ri­ence with Quak­erism and can nur­ture a young Friend’s spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment. A young Friend who was in Ore­gon with me relat­ed her expe­ri­ences with a men­tor she has at Earl­ham (she is a second-year there, cur­rent­ly), and how she sees him about once a week; often she even receives books to read from him.

As the only active young Friend at my school (I’m sort of the ‘token’ Quak­er around), I usu­al­ly do not have any­one to talk to about my spir­i­tu­al find­ings and lead­ings. As I have con­tin­ued to devel­op spir­i­tu­al­ly, I find more and more I need oth­er Friends to talk who are famil­iar with my struggles.

These are issues not only with­in Durham Friends Meet­ing, but in Meet­ings across the coun­try. I rec­og­nize that there are efforts to improve youth pro­grams every­where, but it nev­er hurts to start locally.

As a grad­u­at­ing senior this year, and as an involved Friend, I would like to improve my rela­tion­ship with the Meet­ing as a whole and make way for bet­ter rela­tion­ships between mem­bers and young Friends in the future. This, how­ev­er, needs to be ful­ly a double-sided effort.

FGC Gathering program is up, whew…

March 23, 2005

Thank you to every­one who refrained from com­ment­ing after 9pm last night. I final­ly slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gath­er­ing pro­gram online in my role as FGC web­mas­ter. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gath­er­ing is a week-long con­fer­ence held at dif­fer­ent loca­tions each sum­mer: this year’s takes place Sev­enth Month 2 – 9 in Blacks­burg, Virginia.

Now I guess it’s time to think about work­shops. Zach Moon and I are offer­ing up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppen­heimer aka the The Good Raised Up is lead­ing one called “Quak­er Iden­ti­ty: Yearn­ing, Form­ing, Deep­en­ing” that I sus­pect will be informed by her “own expe­ri­ence of step­ping into a Quak­er iden­ti­ty”. There’s also an excit­ing his­to­ry work­shop being led by Bet­sy Caz­den, “Dilem­mas from Our Quak­er Past” (I have to admit when I saw the list­ing I won­dered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers work­shop on his own so I could take Bet­sy’s). Oth­er men­tions: my wife Julie real­ly liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh work­shop she took a few years ago.

As always there are work­shops whose lead­ers I know to be more sol­id and ground­ed than the work­shop they’re propos­ing; con­verse­ly, there are work­shops that sound more inter­est­ing than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plen­ty whose appeal and/or rel­e­vance to Quak­erism I just don’t com­pre­hend at all, but that’s the Gathering.

Any rec­om­men­da­tions from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridi­cul­ing all of the work­shops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detrac­tion. We will only get to King­dom by mod­el­ing Chris­t­ian char­i­ty and wear­ing our love on our sleeves.

Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement

October 30, 2004

A 2004 Denom­i­na­tion­al Web­site Report

When I wrote this in the Fall of 2004, I was work­ing as the web­mas­ter for Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, the US/Canadian denom­i­na­tion­al body for the lib­er­al branch of unpro­grammed Quak­ers. As web­mas­ter, I felt that one of my most impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ties was to under­stand how reli­gious seek­ers use the inter­net and how our non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion could ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing these patterns.

My 2004 report on the three FGC web­sites touched on a lot of these issues. I offer it here because I hope it can give oth­er non­prof­it and denom­i­na­tion­al web­sites some ideas about how to mea­sure their site’s use. Too often we put up web­sites with­out any follow-up analy­sis of their use. You just can’t make an effec­tive web­site like this and if your work is min­istry you don’t want its reach con­strained by minor nav­i­ga­tion­al design issues. Please feel free to use the com­ment page to start a dis­cus­sion on any of these issues.

State of the Websites

Report for FGC Cen­tral Com­mit­tee, Octo­ber 2004
By Mar­tin Kel­ley, webmaster

It’s impor­tant to start off with a lit­tle edi­to­r­i­al about why we need reports like this. We put up a web­site and we know peo­ple use it. Why both­er spend­ing time col­lect­ing data?

The inter­net is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly vague and pre­cise. We can say defin­i­tive­ly that the FGC web­site received 114,097 “unique vis­i­tors” in the past fis­cal year. But how many peo­ple does that rep­re­sent? Is that a high num­ber or low num­ber? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to them­selves “whoops, not what I want” and leave, or did they go “wow, what’s this FGC?, hey this is great.” LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.

Every­one who reads this report is by def­i­n­i­tion an insid­er. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowl­edge­able seek­er. In my study of usage pat­terns, I have found that the dif­fer­ences in web­site use between Quak­er insid­ers and seek­ers is so great that they might as well be look­ing at dif­fer­ent web­sites, if not dif­fer­ent media alto­geth­er (see How Insid­ers and Seek­ers Use the Quak­er Net.

Because of this gap we can­not design the site based on whims or per­son­al pref­er­ences. It is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how new­com­ers might nav­i­gate the site. We can only con­sid­er the design of the site after we’ve exam­ined in usage, both in detail (actu­al users mov­ing through the site) and in aggre­gate (pages and links vis­it­ed over peri­ods of time). See also: How to mea­sure the peace move­mentLESSON: We can only effec­tive­ly design the site if we incor­po­rate sophis­ti­cat­ed and detailed data about how the site is being used.


Part 2, Googlization

By far the most sig­nif­i­cant change in our web­sites over the past year has been the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er, both of which now have over four times the vis­i­tors they were get­ting last year.

The Google Prob­lem: Both Quaker­books and Quak­erfind­er have had great con­tent from their start. The for­mer lists the entire inven­to­ry of FGC’s book­store, along with book descrip­tions and read­er com­men­tary. The lat­ter has our list of meet­ings – address­es, wor­ship times, and con­tact infor­ma­tion. But on both sites the bulk of the con­tent was locked up in data­bas­es. Before users could ben­e­fit from the sites, they had to find them. This lim­it­ed much of the use to peo­ple who already know about FGC and our resources. Because inter­net search engines can’t search web­site data­bas­es (a prob­lem known as the hid­den or deep web), they could index only a lim­it­ed num­ber of pages on these sites and they made refer­rals on only the most gener­ic search phras­es (e.g., “quak­er book­store” “quak­er meet­ing directory”).

We made var­i­ous changes to both sites (tech­ni­cal details below) that have made them search­able by Google and the oth­er search engines, which now return our sites for very spe­cif­ic search queries, e.g., “Quak­ers in con­flict Ingle” and “Quak­ers Poughkeepsie”.

A Wider, More Inclu­sive Audi­ence: What’s great is that this has giv­en us not just a big­ger audi­ence, but our tar­get audi­ence. Most of these vis­i­tors don’t know enough about how Friends are orga­nized to even know where to look for infor­ma­tion. With Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books, we’re now be vis­i­ble on their terms.

We’re giv­ing them the basic infor­ma­tion they’re seek­ing and we’re doing it when they are active­ly seek­ing it. This last point is impor­tant. I spend a lot of time watch­ing how peo­ple use web­sites. If you email some­one out of the blue with a link to a web­site, they might fol­low it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five oth­er things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the web­site’s resources. When some­one comes to a site via a search engine they’re much more like­ly to look around: this is the vis­it that they are ini­ti­at­ing because they have some­thing spe­cif­ic they’re try­ing to find.

Hav­ing a “googli­fied” Quak­erfind­er means we’re actu­al­ly reach­ing peo­ple who are ready to try out a Quak­er meet­ing and we’re giv­ing them that most basic infor­ma­tion that’s often hard to find. With a search­able Quaker­books we’re sell­ing books to peo­ple who might not even have thought about Quak­ers as a pos­si­ble spir­i­tu­al path. I sus­pect that both sites are doing more out­reach about Quak­erism than any of us expect.

Update, 11/29/04: I recent­ly met some­one who came to Friends after read­ing the Quak­er entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of reli­gious denom­i­na­tions in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his con­di­tion. In the past month FGC has got­ten 57 vis­i­tors from Wikipedia.

The Fixes

In the offi­cial com­mit­tee report I tried to steer clear of too many tech­ni­cal details since I want­ed peo­ple to read it. So I’ll expand on them here on the web­site version.

Unique Domains: I don’t think it real­ly helped to give Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org their own domains, at least ini­tial­ly. In last year’s report I not­ed that most of the traf­fic to those sites came from the main FGCQuak​er​.org site and that the sep­a­rate domains weren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. Now the sites do have their own sort of iden­ti­ty, thanks to the “googliza­tion,” which was a dif­fer­ent process for the two sites.

Quaker​books​.org: Vis­i­tors to the Quaker​books​.org site are giv­en ses­sion IDs to allow us to fol­low along with them as they make their selec­tions. Since some users don’t allow cook­ies, this ID some­times appears in the URL (it appears as some­thing like “?sessionid=1514” append­ed to the end of the address). Google real­ly hates ses­sion IDs because its auto­mat­ed soft­ware does­n’t know if the dif­fer­ent URLs are dif­fer­ent pages (to be indexed sep­a­rate­ly) or mere­ly dif­fer­ent ses­sions look­ing at the same page. So Googles just ignores any­thing that looks like this. The eas­i­est fix is to have the soft­ware look to see if the vis­i­tor is Google and take of the ses­sion IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Non​vi​o​lence​.org dis­cus­sion board.)

Quak­erfind­er: On Quak​erfind​er​.org, the prob­lem was that vis­i­tors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the con­tent. Google’s not that inter­ac­tive and only fol­lows links. Until recent­ly, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alter­na­tive way to nav­i­gate the site: from the home­page you can now fol­low a link to lists of Quak­er Meet­ings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more con­ve­nient that we don’t sus­pect many live peo­ple will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alter­nate lookup ser­vice, one that does­n’t depend on peo­ple find­ing our site beforehand.


Part 3, Comparing the Sites

Visitors

The basic mea­sure used to mea­sure web­site traf­fic is that of the “unique vis­i­tor,” which counts user ses­sions. Here are this year’s com­par­isons to last year’s. Num­bers rep­re­sent the month­ly aver­age “unique vis­i­tors” to each of our three websites.

     Site        FY 03/04 total  FY 02/03 total  Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    114,097         82,747           38%
     Quakerfinder.org  48,084         23,964          100%
     Quakerbooks.org   69,924         19,332          262%

The last two sites have tru­ly remark­able jumps. The num­bers are a lit­tle mis­lead­ing, how­ev­er, as the increase in traf­fic has­n’t been grad­ual but sud­den and climb­ing. Com­pare the last full month (Sep­tem­ber 2004) with the same month the pre­vi­ous year and all three sites have high­er jumps.

     Site             Sept 04         Sept 03         Increase
     FGCQuaker.org    9459            8254             15%
     Quakerfinder.org 8782            1997            340%
     Quakerbooks.org  7498            1611            366%

While the inter­net grows in use every year, the increas­es on Quak­erfind­er and Quaker­books rep­re­sent a quan­tum leap over that incre­men­tal increase. They rep­re­sent “search engine opti­miza­tion” of those sites, or what we all refer to the “googliza­tion” of the sites.

Links:

One way of mea­sur­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of a web­site is to count how many oth­er web­pages link to it. Here are

     Site              October 2004    October 2003    Increase
     FGCQuaker.org     496             396              25%
     Quakerfinder.org  196              46             326%
     Quakerbooks.org   151              96              57%

For com­par­i­son: Quak​er​.org is up to 11,900 links, Phi­la. Year­ly Meet­ing is 248, Pendle​Hill​.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Non​vi​o​lence​.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Mis­cel­la­neous & Notes at end to see how num­bers were obtained. See How Can We Mea­sure the State of the Peace Move­ment? for more on this method of measurement.


Part 4, The FGCQuak​er​.org Site

Visitors

blankUse of FGCQuak​er​.org con­tin­ues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fis­cal year com­pared with last’s. The site received over 114,000 unique vis­i­tors from Octo­ber 1, 2003 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2004.

To the right is the chart show­ing unique vis­i­tors by month for the past three years:

Referrers: Where did visitors come from?

In Sep­tem­ber 2004, there were 9459 “unique vis­its” to the FGCQuak​er​.org site, still our most-visited site. Here’s where they came from.

1021 from Quak​erfind​er​.org. One sur­prise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred vis­its. This is due of course to the phe­nom­e­nal vis­i­bil­i­ty of that site. In a recent one-month peri­od, FGCQuak­er received 983 vis­its from Quak­erfind­er links, two-thirds of which came from the “googlized” Quak­erfind­er pages. About one in ten vis­i­tors are now com­ing to FGCQuak­er through Quak­erfind­er. Up 288% from last year.

842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traf­fic because we have a lot of con­tent on our site: dozens of pam­phlets, years worth of FGConnec­tions, large parts of the old Fos­ter­ing Vital Friends Meet­ings resource binder. Vis­i­tors via search engines often don’t know FGC exists but they want to know about our pro­grams and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we pub­li­cize it online!), many of our resources answer ques­tions peo­ple have. I think this is great outreach.

Here’s an exam­ple. This Spring I noticed that we were get­ting vis­its on fair­ly gener­ic search­es for racism. Here’s a list of search inquiries that brought peo­ple to the CMR pages on FGC:

“end­ing racism”
“racial­ly diverse communities”
“quak­er racial diversity”
“diver­si­ty in friends”
“eth­nic diversity”
“respon­si­bil­i­ties to racism”
“pas­toral care racism”
“activ­i­ties for end­ing racism”
“tes­ti­monies racial unity”

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing list pre­cise­ly because these are gener­ic search­es. Peo­ple aren’t look­ing for “Quak­ers end­ing racism,” they’re look­ing for any­one “end­ing racism” and Google is bring­ing them to us (we’re num­ber 6 on that search term). This is sur­pris­ing: I would think the much big­ger denom­i­na­tions would all have com­mit­tees end­ing racism that would come up high­er just because of their larg­er insti­tu­tion­al clout. That we are so high sug­gests that this work is not as com­mon as I we might hope and that Friends might have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a role in larg­er faith dialogues.

When peo­ple use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC web­site. Search­es might pull up some four-year arti­cle on FGConnec­tions, or one of the “Friends And…” pam­phlets that we’ve put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more vis­its from region­al Google sites.

434 from Quak​er​.org. Most of these peo­ple are com­ing direct­ly from the Quak​er​.org home­page to the FGCQuak​er​.org home­page. I esti­mate that about 60% of these vis­i­tors leave the FGC site with­out click­ing on any links. They’re prob­a­bly just super­fi­cial­ly curi­ous about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.

253 from oth­er search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).

81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a pop­u­lar “Belief-o-Matic” quiz that will mag­i­cal­ly tell you what reli­gious faith you should join. It’s rigged in such a way that a lot of peo­ple unex­pect­ed­ly come up as Quak­er. The qui zthen directs peo­ple to an infor­ma­tion page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet vis­i­tors are com­ing from that infor­ma­tion page direct­ly to the FGC home­page. Up 200% from last year.

69 from UVa’s Reli­gious Move­ments site. This is a pret­ty good descrip­tion of Quakerism

60 from Quaker­books. Our own book­store web­site attracts a lot of new peo­ple who aren’t part of the estab­lished Quak­er net­works and many of them first learn of FGC this way.

53 from Reli­gious Tol­er­ance. A pop­u­lar web­site from a Cana­di­an Uni­tar­i­an that pro­files religions..

52 from Quak​er​In​fo​.org. This is the Philadel­phia Quak­er Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter, a joint project of a num­ber of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing FGC.

Where did people go?

Top Des­ti­na­tions in Sep­tem­ber 04:
* To the home­page: 2396;
* Library’s “Wel­come to Quak­erism” pages: 463;
* A&O “Resources for Meet­ings”: 320 (promi­nent­ly linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gath­er­ing pages: 309;
* “Silent Wor­ship Quak­er Val­ues” tract on the Library section;
* Gath­er­ing’s pic­tures from last year: 149;
* Reli­gious Ed: 149;
* FGConnec­tions arti­cles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School”: 127;
* Advance­ment & Out­reach home­page: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Pub­li­ca­tions: 100;
* Devel­op­ment 97.

These are pret­ty typ­i­cal num­bers. The only sig­nif­i­cant vari­a­tion over the year comes in Spring, when traf­fic to the Gath­er­ing pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 peo­ple vis­it­ed the Gath­er­ing home­page, and 355 vis­it­ed the work­shop listings.

Forget the Aggregates: How Do People Use the Site?

So far I’ve looked at tallied-up num­bers: how many peo­ple vis­it­ed, how many pages were looked at. The prob­lem with this sort of sta­tis­tic is that it does­n’t give us a feel for how indi­vid­u­als are actu­al­ly using the site. Look­ing at usage explodes the pre­con­cep­tions that many of us “Insid­er Quak­ers” might bring to the web.

The first les­son: most peo­ple don’t come into our site via the FGC home­page. Even more shock­ing: close to half nev­er even see the homepage!

This blew me away when I first real­ized it. We spend so much time design­ing the home­page and won­der­ing how we’re going to direct seek­ers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.

Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC home­page, most of them leave the site imme­di­ate­ly with­out fol­low­ing any link whatsoever.

Let’s splice this anoth­er way: 70% of the peo­ple who hit our site (wher­ev­er they enter) don’t look at any page oth­er than that first one. They don’t click on any­thing but the back button.

What are some of the lessons on this: one is that con­tent is all impor­tant. Those major­i­ty of vis­i­tors who bypass the home­page to para­chute direct­ly inside the site are com­ing for spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion. Many of them don’t know any­thing about FGC and most of them don’t care to learn about FGC the orga­ni­za­tion. They’re look­ing for some spe­cif­ic piece of infor­ma­tion on Quak­ers (“paint­ing of Penn­syl­va­nia Abo­li­tion­ist Soci­ety Quak­ers” and “Quak­ers prison reform”), or on reli­gious edu­ca­tion in gen­er­al (“reli­gious meet­ing”), or on how church­es are deal­ing with racism (“racial diver­si­ty” and “do blacks wor­ship with only blacks”). These are all search phras­es that have brought vis­i­tors to FGCQuak​er​.org. So it’s great that we have our pam­phlets online and FGConnec­tions and RE mate­ri­als and A&O brochures.

There are hun­dreds of pages on our site, most of which we prob­a­bly for­get are there, but Google knows them and will dis­play them up when the query is right.

Anoth­er les­son is that we should­n’t rely on our home­page to help vis­i­tors nav­i­gate. We should­n’t even wor­ry much about using how its design will work for both insid­ers and seek­ers: most of the seek­ers nev­er even go there. Most of the peo­ple com­ing to the FGC home­page are look­ing for FGC the orga­ni­za­tion.

Com­mit­tee Page Case Study: One com­mit­tee, Advance­ment & Out­reach, is con­sid­er­ing redesign­ing their com­mit­tee page. In prepa­ra­tion I’ve looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O com­mit­tee gets the most vis­i­ble link on the FGC Home­page (top left, it gets this posi­tion because the com­mit­tee list is alpha­bet­i­cal). Despite this promi­nence, almost no vis­i­tors actu­al­ly fol­low this link. Only 1.5% of vis­i­tors to the FGCQuak​er​.org site ever get to the A&O home­page and even at that it’s the most vis­it­ed com­mit­tee page on our site!

Most of the vis­i­tors that did get to the A&O page
left with­out click­ing on any­thing. It is safe to say that most of those
vis­i­tors did­n’t thor­ough­ly read through the page. The most-followed
link is the first one, for the “Inreach/Outreach” review. In the one-month peri­od I exam­ined only 9 peo­ple fol­lowed this link! This does­n’t mean A&O mate­r­i­al isn’t used: Quak­erfind­er is very suc­cess­ful and the pam­phlet “Resources for Local meet­ings” is pop­u­lar. And over 300 peo­ple in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Com­mit­tee pages are use­ful for the rel­a­tive trick­le of Quak­er insid­ers who vis­it the page, but we should focus more on the con­tent com­mit­tees are producing.

The les­son is clear: vis­i­tors are pri­mar­i­ly look­ing for 1) good use­ful con­tent from the “Quak­er Library” resources and 2) prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about the Gath­er­ing. Pages about com­mit­tees and inter­nal FGC work­ings are not well used. We need to con­tin­ue the focus on prac­ti­cal resources. We also have to accept that peo­ple will not be look­ing at what we think they should be look­ing at. Through these vis­its we will slow­ly build up FGC’s rep­u­ta­tion but many peo­ple only dim­ly know what they’re look­ing at.

What I didn’t say in the report

In my offi­cial FGC report, I only hint­ed at the dif­fer­ences between insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and focused online new media sites.

One sur­pris­ing find that did­n’t make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quak­er Ranter site were seen by more peo­ple than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuak­er are the home­page and the Wel­come to Quak­erism page. Three of the pages on “Quak­er Ranter” are seen by more peo­ple than any oth­er page on the FGC web­site. FGC’s Reli­gious Edu­ca­tion and Advance­ment and Out­reach and Pub­li­ca­tions pages all are more obscure than my home­page or my “resources on plain dress” directory.

Insti­tu­tion­al web­sites by their very nature have too many con­flict­ing audi­ences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a ref­er­ence resource. The Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence web­site is prob­a­bly more friend­ly to seek­ers than most oth­er insti­tu­tion­al web­sites out there but even it gets a lot of peo­ple hit­ting the “back” but­ton as soon as they hit the homepage.

Reli­gious seek­ers are look­ing for indi­vid­ual voic­es with some­thing to say and I sus­pect new media seek­er web­sites will only become more impor­tant as time goes on. I sus­pect this will come as a sur­prise to insti­tu­tion­al insid­ers as it hap­pens. Sort of relat­ed­ly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the gen­er­a­tional aspects of this shift. My Books and Media sec­tion col­lects sim­i­lar sorts of essays.

One more piece in this: the FGC web­sites did­n’t get a lot of blog traf­fic. If all I were was the web­mas­ter of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, I’d assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the “Quak­er Ranter” I know that a pop­u­lar blog and/or per­son­al site can get a lot of read­ers. The les­son here is that there’s lit­tle cross-over. Blogs seem to send lit­tle traf­fic to insti­tu­tion­al web­sites and vice ver­sa (actu­al­ly insti­tu­tion­al web­sites can’t real­ly send peo­ple to blog­gers for a vari­ety of rea­sons). I’ve had a num­ber of peo­ple read my blog and declare they’ll be com­ing to the next FGC Gath­er­ing so I know per­son­al blogs can help raise orga­ni­za­tion pro­files but that inter­est does­n’t man­i­fest itself as an immediately-followed link. I sus­pect the com­mu­ni­ty being formed by the blogs is far more impor­tant than the raw num­ber of refer­ral links.


Part 5, Quaker​books​.org and Quak​erfind​er​.org

Quaker​books​.org

blankThe first of our two sites to be “googli­fied” was Quaker​books​.org. I had long hoped to have our book list­ings show up on the search engines, espe­cial­ly since we car­ry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up the dis­cus­sion board of my peace site to Google and been hap­py with the results.

Back in ear­ly 2003 we installed new soft­ware by Steve Beuret to pow­er the book­store web­site, one that would allow easy trans­fer of infor­ma­tion between the web­site and our inven­to­ry pro­gram. The web­site could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go direct­ly into the sys­tem (no more retyp­ing them!). Once the new sys­tem was run­ning smooth­ly, I emailed Steve about opti­miz­ing it for Google. There were two parts to this: hav­ing the books show up (Steve) and link­ing them in such a way that Google would index them prop­er­ly (me). It took awhile to get ito all work­ing but on Decem­ber 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.

The most vis­it­ed pages are the intro­duc­to­ry ones:

  • Wel­come to Quakerism
  • Becom­ing a Member
  • Basics for Everyone

The search phras­es that are bring­ing in vis­i­tors used to be gener­ic (“quak­er book­store”) they now are very spe­cif­ic. Sep­tem­ber’s list is typical:

  • crash by jer­ry spinnelli
  • Andrew Goldswor­thy
  • cel­e­bra­tion of discipline
  • the mis­fits by james howe
  • rufus jones

I knew we’d show up high in the Google rank­ings for obscure books but I’ve been pleased that we’re right up there with Ama­zon and Barnes and Noble even with main­stream books.

Our online best sell­ers are pretty

  • Ground­ed in God: Care And Nur­ture In Friends Meetings
  • Friends for 350 Years
  • The Quak­er Way
  • Philadel­phia Faith and Practice
  • Lis­ten­ing Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty Vol­ume 1
  • Silence and Witness
  • The Jour­nal of George Fox

The book­store inven­to­ry soft­ware is not very good at pulling mar­ket­ing sta­tis­tics. While it’s very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won’t tal­ly up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The book­store report should include more infor­ma­tion on actu­al web sales.

Anec­do­tal­ly it appears as if about half our web orders are new cus­tomers. Many of them are from geo­graph­ic areas which are not tra­di­tion­al­ly Quak­er. A&O has pro­duced a fly­er which goes into orders for new customers.

Quak​erfind​er​.org

blankAfter we saw how suc­cess­ful the “googliza­tion” of Quaker­books was, I thought we should try it for Quak­erfind­er. It took a lit­tle sea­son­ing to get every­one on A&O to sign off on the project but I am delight­ed to say they saw their way clear. The result has been noth­ing sort of amaz­ing. Use of the site has grown by 340%. But the actu­al num­bers are even more impor­tant: by my best esti­mate, over 6000 a month are using Quak­erfind­er who would not have even found the resource if we had­n’t made it search engine friend­ly. That’s 72,000 peo­ple a year – twice FGC’s mem­ber­ship, and these are the EXTRA peo­ple com­ing. Alto­geth­er at our cur­rent rate, this site is being used by over 100,000 unique vis­i­tors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a Meet­ing, that’s a lot of people.

In last year’s report I point­ed out that most of Quak­erfind­er’s traf­fic was com­ing from the FGC site. At that point, it did­n’t look­ing like giv­ing the loca­tion look-up util­i­ty it’s own domain name was pay­ing off in any tan­gi­ble way. Now it’s clear­ly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so vis­i­tors Quak­erfind­er is throw­ing to FGCQUaker​.org site makes it worth it! Horray!

blankTwen­ty Times the Google-Linked Vis­its: I com­pared two typ­i­cal months, one before and the oth­er after the “search engine opti­miza­tion.” In May 2004 Quak­erfind­er received 241 vis­i­tors from Google search­es (foot­note 1). In Sep­tem­ber, it received 3813 vis­i­tors – that’s over twen­ty times the vis­its. Over­all vis­its almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra vis­i­tors direct­ly attrib­uted to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows dai­ly Google-referred vis­its since the mid­dle of March.

More Than Just Google: Oth­er search engines were affect­ed too: all togeth­er search engine vis­its went from from 311 in May to 4134 in Sep­tem­ber. For those inter­est­ed, the top five search engines for Quak­erfind­er traf­fic are:

  • Google​.com 83%
  • AOL: 5%
  • Google Cana­da: 3%
  • Yahoo: 1%
  • Com­cast: 0.8%

As you can see, Google far over­whelms every­one else, which is why we often just call this “the googliza­tion” of Quakerfinder!


Part 6, Miscellaneous and Notes

Miscellaneous

Mail­ing Lists

Late in the fis­cal year, we pur­chased bulk email soft­ware. No, we’re not going to try to sell Via­gra or a new home mort­gage. This pro­gram will help us get infor­ma­tion out to our book­store cus­tomers and com­mit­tee lists. Our occa­sion­al book­store emails (“Book Mus­ings from Lucy”) have been very well received, with only a tiny frac­tion of recip­i­ents ask­ing to be tak­en off the list.

Web Host Changes

A big project, though not very excit­ing, is that we’re chang­ing our web host­ing com­pa­ny. FGCQuak​er​.org is with the new com­pa­ny (OLM) and Quak​erfind​er​.org and Quaker​books​.org will be mov­ing short­ly. The new com­pa­ny orga­nizes our accounts bet­ter and we hope that their ser­vice is bet­ter. (We’d rec­om­mend avoid­ing Data Realm also known as Serve​.com.)

Notes

Pro­grams I Use to Col­lect Stats:

  • For over­all num­bers, I used a extremely-common pro­gram called Webal­iz­er, which gives use­ful month­ly summaries.
  • For details I used a pro­gram called AXS Vis­i­tor Track­ing Pro­gram, which lets me watch indi­vid­ual users as they nav­i­gate the site. With AXS I can also get details on where vis­i­tors to spe­cif­ic pages come from.
  • I have a list of key words which I watch on Google; every few weeks
    I record where our sites stand on those phras­es and watch how
    nav­i­ga­tion­al changes I make affect our Google rankings.
  • I also use Google to see what oth­er web­sites are link­ing to us. I
    look at what they link to (often not our home­page) and how many sites
    there are linking.
  • I also fol­low links using more spe­cif­ic search engines such as Tech­no­rati, which index­es blogs (“web blogs” or per­son­al diary-like sites).

Mea­sur­ing Links:

I use Altavis­ta’s search engine to mea­sure how many links a site has. For good rea­sons, Google does­n’t list obscure web­sites and also counts how a site’s links back to itself. Here’s a sam­ple Altavista query:

link:www.fgcquaker.org/ ‑site:www.fgcquaker.org
See How Can We Mea­sure the State of the Peace Move­ment? for more on this method of measurement.

Unique Vis­i­tors:

The most stan­dard mea­sure of web­site usage, here is a def­i­n­i­tion: “A real vis­i­tor to a web site. Web servers record the IP address­es of each vis­i­tor, and this is used to deter­mine the num­ber of real peo­ple who have vis­it­ed a web site. If for exam­ple, some­one vis­its twen­ty pages with­in a web site, the serv­er will count only one unique vis­i­tor (because the page access­es are all asso­ci­at­ed with the same IP address) but twen­ty page accesses.”

Scandal du Jour: Vice President leaking CIA Names

October 2, 2003

In the last year scan­dals seem to fol­low a curi­ous pat­tern: they rise up, get a lot of talk in Wash­ing­ton but lit­tle else­where and then dis­ap­pear, only to come back three months lat­er as mas­sive pub­lic news.

Back in July, we post­ed a num­ber of entries about White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower’s wife. For those who missed the sto­ry, diplo­mat Joseph Wil­son had trav­eled to the African nation of Niger to inves­ti­gate the sto­ry that that Iraq had tried to buy ura­ni­um from it. Wil­son eas­i­ly deter­mined that the sto­ry was a hoax and report­ed this infor­ma­tion back to Wash­ing­ton. Despite the debunk­ing, Pres­i­dent Bush used the alle­ga­tion in his State of the Union address and Wil­son lat­er came out and told reporters the Pres­i­dent knew the infor­ma­tion was false. A short time lat­er some­one in the White House let a con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist know that Wil­son was mar­ried to an oper­a­tive for the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, expos­ing her name and endan­ger­ing both her mis­sion and the lives of those help­ing her.

We called this a trea­son­able offense but the news blew over and few peo­ple out­side Wash­ing­ton seemed to fol­low the sto­ry. Last week it blew up big again and it’s been cre­at­ing head­lines. Rumor has it that the White House leak came from very high up in the Vice President’s office and the ques­tions have mounted:

  • who leaked the information?
  • what did the Vice Pres­i­dent know?
  • what did the Pres­i­dent know?
  • did the Pres­i­dent and his advi­sors know the Niger sto­ry was false when he addressed the nation and use it to call for war in Iraq?

The in’s and out’s of the renewed scan­dal are being ably tal­lied by Joshua Michal Marshall’s Talk­ing Points Memo. He’s sit­u­at­ing the leak in the back­drop of an ongo­ing war between the Vice President’s office and the CIA. As we’ve been doc­u­ment­ing for a year now, the Vice Pres­i­dent has been pres­sur­ing the CIA to skew their find­ings to suit the polit­i­cal needs of Admin­is­tra­tion. Most of the pre-war reports from the CIA found no evi­dence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, for exam­ple, which made Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney furi­ous and he was some­what sucess­ful in get­ting them to rewrite their sto­ry. Now of course we know the CIA was right, and that Sad­dam Hus­sein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.

We have inde­pen­dent intel­li­gence ser­vices pre­cise­ly so we will have the best infor­ma­tion pos­si­ble when mak­ing deci­sions of nation­al secu­ri­ty. To politi­cize these ser­vices to serve the agen­das of a pro-war Admin­is­tra­tion (who sali­vat­ed over an Iraq inva­sion long before the 9/11 bomb­ings) is wrong. It’s the kind of thing a banana repub­lic dic­ta­tor does. It’s not some­thing that the Amer­i­can peo­ple can afford.

It will be there in decline our entire lives

August 1, 2003

A lot of the gen­er­a­tional prob­lems I see affect­ing Quak­erism are not unique to us. The val­ues of the Six­ties gen­er­a­tion have become the the new oppres­sive ortho­doxy. In Quak­erism, our “free­dom from” (the past, Chris­tian­i­ty, the tes­ti­monies under­stood as the reflec­tions of faith) has become near­ly com­plete, which means it’s become bor­ing, and sti­fling. There’s a refusal to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for mat­ters of faith and so all truth is judged by how it affects one’s own indi­vid­ual spir­i­tu­al­i­ty (we’re all Ranters now, hence my web­site’s name). Where Friends once talked about the death of the rebel­lious self-will and the bear­ing the cross, we now end­less­ly share self-absorbed sto­ries of our “spir­i­tu­al jour­neys” (does it real­ly mat­ter, has­n’t Christ got­ten us all here now and isn’t that the point?), while we toss out pseudo-religious feel-good buzz­words like “nur­ture” and “com­mu­ni­ty” like they’re par­ty favors.

I often feel like I’m talk­ing to a brick wall when I talk about these issues (can’t we just all be nur­tur­ing with­out being told to, sim­ply because it’s the right way to be?). For­tu­nate­ly, there are some fas­ci­nat­ing sites from thirty-somethings also see­ing through the gen­er­a­tional cri­sis affect Chris­tians. Right now I’m read­ing Pas­toral Soft­ness, a post from Jor­dan Coop­er, a pas­tor in a com­mu­ni­ty church in Saskatchewan, and this para­graph just hits me so hard:

The mod­ern church is not going to lis­ten to us, it won’t affirm us, or give us any of its resources there is no point any­more in let­ting it get to us. It will be there in decline our entire lives and will prob­a­bly go down fight­ing and wast­ing a lot of lives and mon­ey but to let that define us spir­i­tu­al­ly will be an even big­ger loss. We can’t blame it for being what it is and if we are going to have a long term future in serv­ing God, we need to stop look­ing at our envi­ron­ment and instead in our hearts.

Seri­ous stuff, indeed, and I sus­pect some Friends would elder me for even repeat­ing it. But its real­ly the same mes­sage that Christ gave a young man 350 years ago:

When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had noth­ing out­ward­ly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy con­di­tion”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my con­di­tion, name­ly, that I might give Him all the glo­ry. (Jour­nal of George Fox)

Every­one knows the first part but it’s the last sen­tence that’s been speak­ing to me for at least the last year. Does Christ make the insi­tu­tions fail us just so He can direct our gaze to the true Source? And isn’t this what Quak­er sim­plic­i­ty is all about: keep­ing our minds as undis­tract­ed as pos­si­ble so we can see the real deal?

Coop­er did an inter­view with Robert Web­ber, an author I know noth­ing about but who’s appar­ent­ly writ­ten a few books deal­ing with the new gen­er­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals. I some­times stum­ble across peo­ple and won­der if there’s not some kin­dred cul­ture out there that’s just out of reach because it’s sup­pos­ed­ly on some oth­er side of an the­o­log­i­cal rift. Any­way, Web­ber says:

The prag­mat­ic church­es have become insti­tu­tion­al­ized — with some excep­tions. They respond­ed to the six­ties and sev­en­ties, cre­at­ed a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Prag­mat­ics, being fixed, have lit­tle room for those who are shaped by the post­mod­ern revolution.

A lot of these evan­gel­i­cals are reach­ing for some­thing that looks very much like ear­ly Quak­erism (which self-consciously reached toward ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty). I’d like to think that Friends have some­thing to offer these seek­ers and that there could be a dynam­ic re-emergence of Quak­erism. But to be hon­est, most Quak­ers I know don’t have any­thing to offer these wea­ried seek­ers except more of the same hashed out insti­tu­tion­al­ism, with dif­fer­ent fla­vored top­pings (dif­fer­ences of social stands, e.g., paci­fism, atti­tudes towards gays). I know John Pun­shon­’s been talk­ing a lot about Quak­ers’ pos­si­ble inter­sec­tion with a larg­er renewed evan­ge­lism but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read Rea­sons for Hopeblankyet. I’ll do that soon.

Update:
Com­par­i­son chart of tra­di­tion­al, prag­mat­ic, and younger evan­gel­i­cals from Robert Web­ber by way of Jor­dan Coop­er. Very interesting.

More Online Reading:
Lead­ing Dying Churches
Jor­dan Cooper
The Ooze
“Indieal­lies” Meet­up to con­nect with local read­ers of these sites