Over the past 4+ years, I think only two or three days have gone by where I haven’t posted. That’s a pretty good record — but not perfect. When that much time passes and I haven’t posted, I feel I’m neglecting the blog, and if I let one or two days go by, it’d be easy to let a week go by without posting. On the other hand, I’m trying to say things actually worth reading rather than posting just for the sake of typing practice.

Looks like I got accepted as a 9rules member. I forgot I had applied to the network back in November, but am happy to be in.

9rules is a collection of blogs representing good writing in a variety of categories. As they put it, “We find the best content from the independent web and pull it all together in one location.” And the 9 rules? Those are:

I’ve upgraded my WordPress install from 2.2.3 right up to 2.7 now, including updates to several plugins and a few plugin changes as well (add this, drop that). Turns out I had an improper MySQL query, and the changes I’ve made seems to have overwritten it. Like the shoemaker’s son who wanders around town in the worst shoes of all, I keep falling behind in the updates to my own website. Kind of embarrassing how long I let it slip because of some necessary database changes that I wanted to avoid. I won’t be doing that again.

Blog Moment of The Year: Andrew Jones stops using the term “emerging church”. This one generated its fair share of buzz around the blogosphere, and no small amount of controversy over the term and the question of whether or not Emergent was all but done. I don’t think the term “post-emergent” came up in the aftermath at all, but the whole thing was a noteworthy moment to be sure.

As I’ve done for 2005, 2006 and 2007, it’s time to review my posts for 2008 and see just what I’ve been posting about — and what’s worthy of mentioning in a year-end summary. In my mind I’ve not been posting anything particularly good for a while now, but a few other people mentioned me in their year-end bloggers-worth-mentioning summaries (David Fitch and Bill Kinnon, your cheques are in the mail), so dang, I must have said something worthy of note. Let’s see.

I don’t normally do straight tech posts, but this one is worth it: if the title didn’t quite give it away, WordPress 2.7 was released today. I’ve already been running WordPress 2.7 on a couple of blogs I’ve been readying for another project, and I must say I’ve been quite pleased with it. Huge changes in the admin area, enough that I will no longer need to add admin themes to make the interface more easily navigable. Not only that, the admin screens are easily customized. Other major enhancements include automatic software updates, threaded commenting, and more — it’s quite a significant upgrade. If you’re not running WordPress, it’s time to switch. Seriously.

This weekend, on November 30^th, I will mark four years of blogging. And just today, I’ve discovered that I’ve been nominated for “Best Religion/Philosophy Blog” in Canada. Wow. And voting closes tomorrow, so what can I say? Vote now? I’m kinda late getting my “campaign” started, but I only just found out I was even in the race at all. Shows how oblivious I can be — but thanks, whoever nominated me. I even get a fancy badge of honour to display. Now, in the unlikely event that I actually make the cut into the final round of voting, I’ll need y’all to go and vote again next week, okay?

Does your blog bite?
Nice bloggy.
[blog growls, snaps]
I thought you said your blog did not bite.
That is not my blog.

Confused? At least halfway? Me too. I ran my blogs (this one and my non-psedonymous one) through the Typealizer, which looks at your blog and tells you what Meyers-Briggs type you are. Or it is. Turns out my blog and I have less in common that I thought, or that one of us is not who we think we are. If my writing style turns out to be different than my actual MBTI-type, does that mean I’ve been false with my readers? Or is it just that I’m not who one of us thinks I am? When taking something a little closer to a real test, I come out pretty clearly as an INTP, which makes the results of the Typealizer a little suspect if you ask me. My result, both times:

Mike Todd caught this the other day as well… Seth Godin asks, What happens when we organize? Seth opens his post with the observation that “Most power occurs because one side is better organized than the other.” This is a good description of an imbalanced power structure such as happens in the church where a divide exists between clergy and laity (Seth gives other examples). These structures are being upset in the present changing environment where Internet tools and a shift in values toward egalitarian ideals drive collaboration and spontaneous organization around a goal rather than simply falling into a rigid power or authority structure. Books such as Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us and Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations fill out the rest of the picture. The message is that the power structures are beginning to crumble under the realization that they really aren’t necessary, and their reaction to the changing milieu appears to be confusion — for the most part, there’s an instinctive desire to oppose this new disorganized organization, this “grassroots” movement that threatens to upset everything. Unfortunately for them, they are ill-equipped to meet this challenge; Ori Brafmann and Rod Beckstrom’s book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations gives a good explanation of why this is so. Boiling it down to a single sentences though, one might latch onto the one which Seth Godin ended his post with, as I believe it to be highly accurate: “The system doesn’t know what to do with a movement.” They’re as ill-prepared for what’s coming at them as “Officer Opie” was.

So today I got spammed by Logos software to tell me that their product line now includes a version of Logos Bible software for Mac OS. () I have several responses to this.

1. I’ve refrained from buying products that would otherwise have interested me from companies I might otherwise support simply because the product came to my attention through spam. In some cases, I’ve take the information from the spam and searched for a competing product.

Well, I finally succumbed and signed up for a Twitter account. I don’t know… maybe it’s because Seth Godin and Clay Shirky spoke so well of it in books I’ve read recently, or it could be that I was chatting with some friends earlier today and the subject of Twitter came up. It wasn’t the inevitable “twit” pun that did it, but the conversation about translating a synchroblog onto twitter: a synchrotwit. A good laugh was had by all us missional twits. Two of us went out and signed up for twitter since that conversation.