Friends Council Social Network

November 25, 2008

FriendsCouncil.netThis is a Ning-based social net­work for Friends Coun­cil on Edu­ca­tion, a Quak­er orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to sup­port­ing Friends Schools across a very wide geo­graph­ic area. I set the site up and did ini­tial train­ing. The members-only site now boasts over 700 mem­bers and dozens of member-uploaded videos and photos.

Bike ride to Pleasant Mills

June 28, 2008


Bike ride to Pleas­ant Mills — a set on Flickr, orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by martin_kelley.

Fran­cis and I had a nice 22 mi. bike ride on Sat­ur­day. Lots of back
roads through blue­ber­ry fields, and a good off-road jaunt past
car­niv­o­rous plants, orchid-filled bogs and mos­qui­toes galore. Full set of Flickr pic­tures here. (Julie & Theo were busy hang­ing out with the bish­op instead),

Neat idea: postcard for World Peace

February 22, 2007

A project from Esto­nia, a “blog of post­cards for world peace”:http://postcardworldpeace.blogspot.com. From the site:
bq. The idea is sim­ple: Send us a post­card from your country/city (or any post­card you want) writ­ing in the back­side a mes­sage of peace to the World. All the post­cards will be uploaded in the blog, and there will be a record of how many post­cards per coun­try we receive (includ­ing a map show­ing the coverage).

Pete Seeger gets YouTubed

February 12, 2007

pete seeger album coverThis morn­ing I’m work­ing on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ sec­tion of Quak​er​song​.org, the web­site of Annie Pater­son and Peter Blood (I’m their web­mas­ter). Parts of their site are amaz­ing – the “Quak­ers and Music”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakers_and_music/ page has become a direc­to­ry of sorts for all the many Quak­er musi­cians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still most­ly a col­lec­tion of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.
So I was won­der­ing what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and start­ing surf­ing around. There’s a great “fan page”:http://www.peteseeger.net/ which is reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed but has brave­ly decid­ed to main­tain its orig­i­nal design since it was found­ed eleven years ago. And “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_seeger does its usu­al fine job at a biog­ra­phy. But the “gold mine is YouTube”:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pete+seeger&search=Search.
A year ago a user uploaded three clips from _Rainbow Quest_, a short-lived TV pro­gram Pete put togeth­er for a low-wattage UHF sta­tion out of Newark in the mid-60s (it’s now a Tele­mu­n­do affil­i­ate broad­cast­ing recy­cled Mex­i­can soaps for its prime time sched­ule). I don’t know what kind of copy­right issues there are on some­thing like this but it’s great fun to see these old clips. Mak­ing this mate­r­i­al wide­ly avail­able is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watch­ing “recap­tur­ing the inno­cence of our over-commercialized youth”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-shed-20-years-in-20-seconds.html). I’ll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and John­ny “I’m soooo stoooned” Cash a few years before they married.

Quaker Blog Watch by email

October 18, 2005

It start­ed when I began book­mark­ing the more inter­est­ing Quak­er posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the side­bar on the “Quak­er Ranter”:/martin home­page, which then turned into the “Quak­er Blog Watch”:/quaker page. Now, as an exper­i­ment, I’m mak­ing it avail­able as a dai­ly email:

Enter your Email: 

More info here: “Quak­er Blog Watch by email”:http://www.nonviolence.org/quaker/email/
I do rec­og­nize that this site has mut­li­ple fan bases. While I was on pater­ni­ty leave a col­league emailed me to ask when I would post more pic­tures of Baby Fran­cis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last pic­ture to my Flickr account. Aaayy­ee!, the dan­ger of increas­ing expec­ta­tions! Well, you can now get a dai­ly email con­tain­ing any new pic­tures of “Baby Francis”:/francis or “Big Kid Theo”:/theo: go to either of their home­pages for the sign-up form (they share one sub­scrip­tion). One small step in self-indulgent par­ent­hood, ain’t tech­nol­o­gy great?