While you were posting vacation photos and messaging your friends, Facebook just became the world’s fourth largest “nation.”

Pause for a moment to consider that fact. In the last year, Facebook, the social networking site to which you likely already belong, has seen its membership rolls triple in the last year . . .to a total of 300 million members. And, if those trends are continuing, Facebook today will add another 3 million members ”“ that is, the population of a city the size of Berlin, Madrid or Buenos Aires ”“ today.

Three hundred million members is a mind-boggling number. In terms of population, it would put Facebook on the list only behind China, India and the United States ”“ and just above Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. It is almost as big as the entire population of the European Union, of sub-Saharan Africa, or South America. And, incredibly, it is equal to the entire population of the world in 1000 A.D..

Read it all.

P.Z. Myers’ Twitter bio reads, “godless liberal biologist.”

The avid atheist is far from alone in the cyber world. He has more than 7,700 followers who subscribe to his atheism- and evolution-themed Internet updates.

When Myers led about 300 like-minded evolutionists to the Creation Museum, thousands more followed along via the Internet, avidly anticipating each 140-character “tweet” about the Kentucky center, which renounces evolution in favor of a Bible-based view of natural history.

“It’s a very peculiar medium,” Myers said of Twitter. “I can also see that it is quite useful.”

Read it all.

Lance Maggiacomo was out of work, bored and lonely when he started hiding his online relationships from his wife.

There was no affair, only chatting through e-mail, yet it felt like cheating just the same.

A few years later, a reformed Maggiacomo has an in-house check on his impulses. He and his wife Lori, like other Christian couples around the country, share one e-mail account as a safeguard against the ever-expanding temptations of the Internet.

Read it all

While some preachers may frown upon the use of cell phones and laptops in church on Sundays, one Katy-area pastor is encouraging people to keep their wireless devises on so they connect through the Internet and social networking sites during a new service.

Starting Sept. 12, Church of the Holy Apostles, 1225 West Grand Parkway South, will kick off its first Saturday evening service called The Gathering Place. The 6 p.m. service will feature the same elements of traditional church including music, preaching, communion and prayer as well as an interactive component that will allow members and visitors to ask questions or make comments via the Internet.

“There’s a virtual community out there and we’re going to tap into how that might work for the church,” said Rev. Darrel Proffitt, the church’s lead pastor. “It’s more than just a virtual interactive service where you can ask questions through Twitter and Facebook, but will encourage people to develop a community throughout the week.”

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have allowed people to stay in touch with friends and family, even celebrities and political officials, while keeping up with what they’re doing at the moment. By posting frequent updates to their sites, people stay connected and informed instantaneously.

Read it all.

The head of Google’s operations in China quit on Friday, ending a controversial four-year tenure that saw the company censored version of its search engine to gain a foothold in the most populous internet market.

The departure of Kai-Fu Lee comes close on the heels of a renewed debate inside the company about whether Google should pull out of China ”“ a discussion prompted by the latest flare-up of its battle with the Chinese authorities, according to people close to the situation.

Read it all.

Interesting to see this with our son just beginning his freshman year.

Goofy videos weren’t on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.

Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.

There’s still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.

Call it a mid-life crisis.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church provided a bulletin insert for August 23 that discussed the ECUSA’s use of Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with Episcopalians across the country (and, conceivably, around the globe). My home church doesn’t use bulletin inserts; consequently, if I did not regularly read Episcopal Life Online, I would not have known about it.

I’m a member of the Facebook group for St. Paul’s in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, I’m only one of 94 members. For a church with nearly a thousand baptized members, that number seems pretty insignificant. I did a search of Facebook and only found one other Episcopal Church in the Oklahoma City Metro with a group ”“ St. John’s in Norman, and they only have 41 members in their group.

Read it all.

Young United Methodist clergy see the elephant in the sanctuary ”“ the fact more ministers are headed for retirement than the pulpits ”“ and they are grabbing the mops.

The concerned under-35 crowd is doing what comes naturally. It is using social media ”“ Facebook, Twitter and blogs ”“ to form an online community to search for ways to draw more young people into ministry and into the pews.

A core group of 10 young clergy met with the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry in February. As a result, hundreds of young clergy are now talking and creating relationships in cyberspace through their own Web site, www.umcyoungclergy.com.

Read it all.

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

Read it all.

All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline.

Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress””and send well wishes and support””thanks to a Web page his mom created for him.

But there’s a danger here, too. If we’re not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.

Like many people, I’m experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I’m tired of loved ones””you know who you are””who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts. (“Anyone know a good restaurant in Berlin?”)

Read it all.

Google is to be sued for $15 million (£9 million) by an anonymous blogger who was unmasked by the internet search company.

Read it all.

This is just wonderful.

When Maya Rupert wrote an article frowning at several Southern states for officially celebrating Confederate History Month, Internet critics lined up to fire back.

But this time, they arrived with more than harsh words.

The 28-year-old Los Angeles attorney’s detractors dug up a photo of her and posted it, along with details of political contributions she’d made, in an online discussion of the article she wrote for the L.A. Watts Times. They called their finds evidence of her bias on the emotionally charged subject.

Read it all.

Twitter works for the middle class, the middle-aged and for work-weary wannabe trendies because it lets them feel they’re part of a big happening club, when in fact all they are doing is exchanging mindlessness. If I want to know whether a show is worth going to at the Edinburgh Festival, or if Bonnie Prince Billy’s latest album is worth buying, I certainly don’t want a 140-character Twitter; I want an intelligent review written in real sentences, not some bastard lingo that’s the ugly love-child of texting and abbreviations. Interestingly, teenagers have already sussed Twitter is crap and aren’t taking it up. According to a Nielsen survey, only 16 per cent of the people twittering are under 25, while a whopping 64 per cent are between 25 and 54. The largest group of users are aged 35 to 49 ”“ and that’s enough to deter the young. The use of social networking is already dropping among teenagers as the number of 25-34 year-olds using sites such as Facebook increases. In fact, ITV might have sold Friends Reunited in the nick of time, because at this rate the only people trying to meet up via websites like it will be so middle-aged, dreary and dull that no one will bother logging on.

Twitter panders to all that is shallow and narcissistic in our society…

Read it all.

Never mind the perils of cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying and posting photos that could endanger your future job prospects: Facebook could be ruining your relationship and driving you toward compulsively jealous behavior.

Social psychologists from the University of Guelph in Canada queried college students who were in romantic relationships about their Facebook use. Their preliminary findings, described in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, suggest that rather than enhancing communication between romantic partners, Facebook use may be fueling wild flights of jealous investigation, as users in relationships perceive hints of potential infidelity and then scramble to find evidence of a partner’s unfaithful thoughts or behavior.

Read it all.

Google has been working on a monumental project to scan millions of library books and put them online. Many of those books are not yet readable, because of a copyright lawsuit filed by authors and publishers. That lawsuit has been tentatively settled, and if a judge approves the deal this fall, millions more books will be available to browse through and read.

It would be the world’s greatest virtual library. But some authors have mixed emotions about its effect on the act of reading.

Read it all.

I wish my memory worked differently. I’d like to be able to conjure up an accurate image of my consciousness from, say, 25 years ago. You know what 25 years means: No cellphones, no e-mail, no Internet, no social networking (except with an actual drink in hand), and only the most primitive of personal computers. What I want to answer is a single question: Was I as addicted to the future then as I seem to be now?

Read it all.

There are rules of etiquette on the social web, too – rules derived from developing social and cultural norms that businesses likely should be aware of before taking the plunge.

Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford Motor Co., explained it this way: “It’s just like offline social networking.”

“You wouldn’t show up at a cocktail party, burst through the door, hand your business card to everyone and leave,” he said. “You see what the atmosphere is, do a lot of listening, work your way into conversations, and understand how you can provide value.”

Mihaela Vorvoreanu, a former Clemson University professor soon to be teaching at Purdue, recently authored a paper on social norms she observed and studied among a select group of college students.

“Just from what I read and hear about among public relations circles, it seems that everybody wants to get on Facebook, and that Facebook is trying to build all these features so corporations can get on – but nobody quite understands what to do there,” Vorvoreanu said. “It’s uncharted territory.”

Read the whole article.

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.

“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.

Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.

Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand ”” and even cool.

Read it all.

i was on your site just a while ago reading your roots of the roots piece, how do you know your father if your not taught by him, his word. I agree with basic, but once you know basic you really want to increase that. Interesting piece got me thinking a lot….

i am actually surpised you don’t write more, your style of writing seems to promote good and deep thought, I would enjoy reading more of your pieces, I am sure many more would agree

In response to Archbishop Nichols’ comments on social networking and youth, an interesting take on “thick” and “thin” communities. Listen to it all (approx. 2 3/4 minutes).

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the Archbishop of Westminster also voiced his concerns about the loss of loyalty and the rise of individualism in British society which he said threatened to undermine communities. He picked out footballers for acting like “mercenaries” and expressed his fears over moves to relax laws on assisted suicide.

He said that relationships are already being weakened by the decline in face-to-face meetings and conversations over the phone.

“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.

“We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

“Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.”

The archbishop blamed social network sites for leaving children with impoverished friendships.

Read it all.

Ancient Greece had the Oracle at Delphi. The Shang dynasty had oracle bones. Contemporary America has Google.

Earlier this month, Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, unveiled a new class of tea leaf to gauge the direction of the American economy: Google searches. The number of queries for “Great Depression,” which surged earlier in the year, had declined sharply, Mr. Summers noted. Economic anxiety is abating. The economy is probably turning the corner.

It was not the first time Google was invoked to show us the way. The company has a tool to track the path of the flu virus by looking at geographic trends in Internet queries for related terms. A study by Google researchers suggested search patterns could be used to track everything from home sales to the popularity of tourist destinations, and add to the accuracy of forecasts for new-home starts and car sales.

Read it all.

(1) Comments are supposed to be about the content of the post on the blog. A number of people are doing what I call “leapfrog” comments where they take the basic subject of a post and then leap off on their thoughts about that particular subject. This soon takes the thread too far afield, and makes it incoherent. We really are interested in your thoughts about the content of the posted article, sermon or whatever it happens to be.

(2) There is a continued problem with the tone of posts. Biting sarcasm is not appropriate. Neither is cyncism drifting into despair. Ad hominem comments are to be avoided. Jumping to conclusions without evidence is not helpful. A good example of this latter activity took place on a post about a priest who went to California from Louisiana, whereupon a number of posters made accusations about what the Bishop of Louisiana did or did not know on the basis of no evidence.

(3) Threads are sometimes being diverted because of the subagendas of posters. If you want to interact with another poster on a personal level for example, we can, with their permission, help you do that off blog. But we have posters making numerous comments recently about other posters, their activities and in some cases their ministries. To say this is off the playing field is to put it mildly.

(4) It really would be a good idea if you not only prayed after you wrote your post (which I hope you are doing in a word processing program before you post it here anyway since putting it in WordPress first can cause it to be lost), but also if you considered what someone would think of what you were about to post were they of a very different viewpoint than yours. We have enough “shock jock” stuff and gotcha journalism in other venues, I do not want it here.

In closing, let me say that I very much appreciate each blog reader and the opportunity for this joint endeavor….

Read it all (and if you have a moment the comments are fascinating)

–Honest to God, I thought titusonenine was Kendall Harmon’s day job, or some significant part of it. I mean, wouldn’t publication be part of the role of a Canon Theologian?

Fellow blogger Marshall Scott

Hello Canon Harmon,

I wanted to take a minute to say thank you for closing the comments on… [a certain thread]. I very much enjoy coming to the site to visit and find much of what I read by you and others enlightening, but the current state of affairs is such that passions are inflamed. The vitriol at times is breathtaking and depressing. One of the gifts of being a conservative is a certain amount of reserve when dealing with trying circumstances. That has been lost both in political and now church dialogue.

I thank you for trying to keep things at a level that is respectful but allows for a range of ideas and opinions to be expressed.

Yours in Christ,

Things went smoothly for the first hour of the Twitter experiment at Trinity Church in Manhattan on Good Friday in April.

While hundreds of worshipers watched the traditional dramatization of the Crucifixion from pews in the church, one of New York’s oldest, thousands more around the world followed along on smartphones and computers as a staff member tweeted short bursts of dialogue and setting (“Darkness and earthquake,” “Crucify him!”).

The trouble began in the second hour….

Read it all.

It is working very well for me so far.

A conference called ”˜Christianity in the Digital Space”˜ will take place at St John’s College, Durham, England from 13th -15th July. This conference is trying to answer all sorts of questions such as what discipleship looks like in a digital world and what the church may look like as a result of us being in a digital age.

Sixty Christians who are engaged with online ministry will listen to keynote speeches from Rt Rev NT Wright, Bishop of Durham; Mark Brown (Arkin Ariantho in SL), CEO of Bible Society in NZ; Andrew Graystone, Director of the Churches’ Media Council. There will also be short talks given by practitioners including Mark Howe of St Pixel’s, Pam Smith of i-church, and me, Ailsa Wright (Helene Milena in SL) of AoSL.

Read it all.