Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side ”” on most days, it was fastened to his belt ”” to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

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Is God indeed our shelter in the stormy blast? The churches on Wall Street are full. More and more young people are putting themselves forward for ordination to the Church of England. Politicians are calling for a return to spiritual values and bankers are demonised for their pursuit of Mammon. Has the economic downturn driven the West back to religion? Or are we merely seeing a plaintive echo of Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”?

Counting the numbers who go to church is a poor measure of faith: in Britain, at least, religion has become a contentious political issue, with argument raging more on television, in the press and on the internet than from the country pulpits of the Church of England.

And it is from the internet that a striking statistic has just emerged: some 71 per cent of those surveyed by Faithbook, a new multifaith page on Facebook, believe that a spiritual recession is more worrying than a material recession. And 80 per cent do not see the financial situation as a crisis but an economic watershed with moral and social opportunities.

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The Anglican Church of Canada, looking for a new way to reach the faithful, has launched its own official page on the popular social networking site Facebook.

“It’s an exciting new step for us,” Brian Bukowski, Web manager for the church, told the Anglican Journal.

“We’ve been waiting for the right time to step into social networking, and Facebook is so well established at this point. We know our page can be effective there.”

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Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there’s good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

And that’s why there’s so much angst today among the blogging set. As The Economist observes in its new issue, “Blogging has entered the mainstream, which – as with every new medium in history – looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death.”

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During past downturns, layoffs were mostly a private affair. Big companies tended to issue vague press releases filled with jargon about “downsizing,” and start-ups often gave people the pink slip without telling the world anything at all.

Not anymore. In the age of transparency, the layoff will be blogged.

Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., said that he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company ”” even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs.

Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog owned by Gawker Media, had already published the news, and it was being picked up by traditional media reporters, Mr. Musk said. “We had to say something to prevent articles being written that were not accurate.”

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The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview.

The 42-year-old web guru, in an effort to show Wikipedia’s impact thus far, referenced a recent trip to a slum in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”

“Wow, that’s really cool, right? We’ve had some impact, even in such a place where I’m talking to this guy, and there’s mud streets, and cows, and it’s really quite a different environment from London.”

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This translates into a moment of opportunity for alternative sources ”” but only if it turns out that readers value alternative sources and are willing to keep them afloat during these stormy times. Pajamas Media is an example of an alternative source that is making an impact. PJM reaches millions of people and they sent a video camera to me in Afghanistan. Please stand by for videos of our folks and Afghans telling you directly what they think. Perhaps PJM will host us live from Afghanistan from time to time, and then you can ask soldiers and Afghans what they think and get a live, completely unedited answer.

This is a challenging period: The Afghanistan-Pakistan situation is deteriorating rapidly. Panglossian op-eds, such as this 2006 piece in the Wall Street Journal, would have encouraged investors to toss money into Afghanistan with hopes of high return. For a bit of time travel into coverage from Afghanistan, please read “A Virgin Market.” Afghanistan is neither virgin nor innocent.

But just as my 2006 pieces on Afghanistan explicitly warned that chaos was descending upon the land, I write it here clearly again: during 2009, we likely will see more fighting in Afghanistan than we have experienced to date. Come spring and summer, friendly casualties from all sides will likely be at an all-time high. There is no end in sight. I would not doubt that, given time and barring some extreme unforeseen changes in the situation, the Afghanistan-Pakistan war might well devolve into something far worse than we ever saw in Iraq.

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I was mortified when, last week or so, I posted a comment on Titus One Nine that had to be edited by the elves. That has never happened to me, and I pray it will never happen again, but in my haste to post something and in my anger and revulsion at a story I made a comparison that I should not have made.

Why does it appear that the vituperation index here and on other orthodox blogs is on the rise? I’ll posit that fear is a prolific generator of venom. And, certainly, there is much for us to fear right now. The economic news gets worse almost daily. Our nation may be poised to elect the most liberal president we have ever had. The Episcopal Church House of Bishops and the Presiding Bishop are actively opposing orthodox bishops and dioceses, and do not seem to be constrained by plain canon language.

How may this cycle of fear and anger be broken? The Scriptures teach us. Perfect love casts out fear. We are forbidden to judge. Worry is sinful, and betrays a lack of faith.

In practical terms, what does that mean for blog stewards and those of us who comment on blogs? I think it means we must encourage and build up one another. We must exhort one another to pray, and to pray particularly for those we perceive as enemies– I would argue strenuously that those we tend to think of as enemies are actually victims of our enemy. And we must pray for ourselves, for mercy and forgiveness for thinking of ourselves as less sinful than our opponents, and for the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. In short, the answer is to turn to God, the only source of true peace, true wisdom, and unconditional love.

Kendall, yours has been a voice of reason, love, and faith. You have an exemplary gentle spirit that provides the rest of us with a great witness. May our Lord richly bless you, and bring you peace.

Kendall, Bless you for your work and ministry, but I’m having to take your site out of my news reader and of my bookmarks. The anger of so many commentators has become too much for me, and anger is contagious.

The sheer hatred directed against ++Rowan is especially depressing, at a time when I don’t need anything else Anglican to lower my spirits. I don’t know how we reasserters expect others to be attracted to the Gospel if in “standing firm” for it we exemplify so few of the fruits of the Spirit.

We are going through another one of those cycles again where some commenters are failing to observe the blog guidelines. I know there are stresses in the Anglican Communion and the global economy, and that a major election is roughly a week and a half away. But if you wish to comment could you please–PLEASE–stick to the topic of the thread and keep in mind that what matters is not simply what you say but how you say it. Disagreement–including with yours truly–is fine; I am not running a blog echo chamber here, I expect people to think for themselves and understand I post things I agree with and those I don’t. What I refuse to give up on is the need for courtesy and civility, and with some commenters it is once again falling by the wayside. Thanks–KSH.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Roman Catholics in North America and Britain are calling for a series of YouTube videos showing a Canadian teenager destroying Communion hosts to be removed from the Internet.

The Quebec teenager named Dominique, who tags himself “fsmdude,” has posted more than 40 videos featuring him desecrating the host, the small circular wafer that Catholics ingest during Eucharist service.

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Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, said third-quarter profit climbed 26 percent as more customers used Web search ads to spur sales in a slowing economy, sending the shares higher….

Advertisers are shifting budgets away from TV and print media toward ads that run alongside search listings, targeting online shoppers. The Internet will account for 8.7 percent of the $284 billion in U.S. ad spending this year, up from 7.2 percent in 2007, according to Barclays Capital.

“This was exactly the kind of shot in the arm that investors need,” said Jeff Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “People lost a lot of faith in the Internet, but this is exactly what the doctor ordered.”

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After Compline, the cathedral is hushed. Some kneel in shafts of light tinted by stained glass. Others leave quietly, a few stopping to light a candle on the way out.

In the courtyard, the mood is lighter. “Nice outfit. How did you get it?” “How did you get it? Shouldn’t the question be where?”

This is the Anglican Church in Second Life’s virtual cathedral, so the answer involves computer keys and Internet links. And those who’ve stopped to chat do so in the form of animated characters — many elaborately costumed — they’ve created to represent themselves on the computer screen.

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Not long ago I received the following email:

Kendall,

I have to say that I’m surprised by what I would call the level of secular/partisan posting on T19 of late.

You are certainly free to post and say whatever you like – it’s your blog. But on a blog which is nominally focused on things Episcopal/Anglican, the number of items posted regarding the federal bailout, politics, and various secular issues may well make readers think that you have a political agenda.

There can well be disagreeing opinions on how the federal government should approach the meltdown of financial institutions, and related topics. When you post items endorsing a particular perspective/resolution, you change the focus of T19 from religion to sociology. Please – think about what your priorities are. And if they’re socio-political – well, that’s fine. But you should say so.

And just to make things clear – I’m a Republican through-and-through; well, actually, a “Libertarian” – I believe in the “Federalist” approach which was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. But I believe that everyone should have the right to make their voices heard – and I fear that you are espousing a position which some may believe equates with doctrine, which is certainly not the case.

My response was as follows:

[Dear xxxxxx]:

This is a response which illustrates (a) a surprising lack of understanding of the blog [“A free floating commentary on culture, politics, economics, and religion based on a passionate commitment to the truth and a desire graciously to refute that which is contrary to it”¦”] and (b) a strange interpretation of the posts themselves.

There is no way I am going not to post about one of the larger financial crises in American history. It is something all Christians have to engage with, and I am not letting my readers off the hook.

I am posting perspectives, also, from both “sides,” hence the J.K. Galbraith piece and the piece saying it all started on Main Street. If you think there is a certain perspective, which it sounds as if you do, I would be interested to know what that is. And please do not confuse the commenters with the main blog entries.

As I have said numerous times, I am registered with neither party; though I grew up in a staunchly democratic family that is only where I began. And for this election, it is very clear the Republicans deserve to lose and the Democrats do not deserve to win.

But my main goal remains the original purpose of the blog, to think and pray all of life through and with Christ. When a major crisis hits, as it does now, then that becomes one of the places the blog will focus.

This has happened numerous times in the past, and will again in the future.

Thanks very much for the response.

Warmly

When people think of religion on YouTube, most probably flash to “gotcha” videos of Sarah Palin’s old church or Barack Obama’s old pastor. But the video-sharing site is also being used by a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople ”” like Roman Catholic Steve Silvia, who made the video above ”” to celebrate and explain their creeds. These aren’t glitzy televangelists. In keeping with the YouTube ethos, many simply fire up camcorder and go. But low cost and infinite range, plus the mini-video’s ascent as one of the culture’s preferred ways of imbibing information, means vastly increased exposure for clerics who would otherwise have tiny flocks. “For years, people in my business talked about how the Internet was going to revolutionize religion the way the printing press helped create Protestantism, but it didn’t happen,” says Steve Waldman, founder of the multi-faith website Beliefnet. But with the rise of YouTube, he thinks the unassuming, grass-roots religion clips like the ones that follow “could be the beginning of that kind of transformation.”

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Google has launched an enhanced blog tracking service that helps people mine a growing mountain of online commentary for gems worth reading.

The Google Blog Search tool rolled out this week competes with Techmeme, Polymeme, Wikio and other “memetrackers” that sort and organize blog posts into categories.

“Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week?” Google product manager Michael Cohen wrote in an Internet posting of his own.

“We’re pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere.”

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I’m posting this here and on Anglicana, as I’m really scratching my head here, and would be grateful for any sensible explanation of what’s gone wrong and when and how it will be remedied.

I have two questions:

1) What happened to epiScope?…

2) What on earth has happened to the Episcopal News Service?….

And while I’m thinking of it, that leads to a third question:

3) Where’s the accountability?

Read it all.

Krish Kandiah, executive director of Churches in Mission, said: “These commandments are virtual rather than set in stone, but are offered to the blogging community as a way to link the Ten Commandments with the art of blogging.

“In the ever-changing information age, what we need is wisdom for life, and God communicates wisdom to our culture through the Bible on every issue from social justice to social networking.”

Mark Meynell, senior associate minister for All Souls Church, Langham Place, said: “The internet is merely the latest step in the evolution of human communication ”” and so like any other new medium, it presents us with huge opportunities as well as challenges.

“It is essential that Christians make the most of it because we believe we have good news that is as relevant to those in cyberspace as it is for those in real space.”

Read the whole thing

I have not had a chance to link to this yet.

Parry Aftab, an Internet security and privacy lawyer, said the most important thing parents and adults can to is teach children good judgment and that “the most important filter is the one between their ears.”

“Teach them the people who are too good to be true are too good to be true and if an adult wants to meet them it’s not for love and affection and to marry them some day — they’ve got one thing in mind and one thing only and not all kids come home in one piece & out of a body bag,” Aftab said.

It’s a horrible topic but one that cannot be ignored. Read it all being aware that the subject is disturbing.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A few days ago, I received a press release for GodblogCon, the annual gathering of Christian bloggers. The September 20-21 meeting in Las Vegas (it is scheduled to coincide with the mainstream BlogWorld and the New Media Expo) will feature several prominent Christian bloggers, like Tall Skinny Kiwi’s Andrew Jones, La Shawn Barber, and ScrappleFace satirist Scott Ott.

But at the top of the list, the press release mentioned that a key speaker would be “Joe Carter, the Christian blogosphere’s very own Bono.” Carter, formerly of Family Research Council, World Magazine, The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the Mike Huckabee campaign, The East Texas Tribune, and the U.S. Marine Corps, is perhaps best known as the creator of EvangelicalOutpost.com.

The five-year-old site became one of the most prominent evangelical blogs and was in many ways was as influential on its own as several of the organizations on Carter’s resume. (Not too many Christian bloggers’ views on bioethics have been profiled by The Washington Post.)

But there’s a new wrinkle. Carter is no longer speaking at GodBlogCon, and is no longer blogging at EvangelicalOutpost.com.

And according to a farewell post on Evangelical Outpost, Carter wonders about the future of independent sites like his.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman said other clues would have made it clear to a human reader that the story was old, including a reference to UAL’s 97-cent share price (it was trading around $12 on Monday) and comments from readers further down the page that were posted in 2002.

“It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself,” he said.

“Despite the company’s earlier request and the confusion caused by Googlebot and Google News earlier this week, we believe that Googlebot continues to misclassify stories,” Tribune said.

Read it all.

I was musing this morning about the way the internet is perceived as being real or not-real… to what extent can you say it’s “real life” or that you have “real” interaction with people via the screen?

Yesterday I posted about my son falling ill. I wasn’t really looking for a reaction, but i was nonetheless heartened when, within a couple of hours I had not just comments but phone calls and emails offering prayers and help from far and near. I wasn’t expecting such a rush of reaction, but it was lovely to feel supported and prayed for, and it left me reflecting that the internet world is not nearly as impersonal and unreal as we sometimes think. (and thankyou again to all who did think of us and pray; my son is very much on the mend and happily playing on his DS Lite on the sofa as I write.)

Read it all.

September 6, 2008: Internet security officials just got another shock, when a British survey of network administrators (the people who run the networks, and Internet access, in large companies) revealed that 88 percent admitted they would take company Internet secrets (passwords, system layout and the like) with them if they were ever suddenly fired.

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The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Google shares tumbled 5.5%, or $24.30, to $419.95 in 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Yahoo shares were up 18 cents to $18.26.

For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

Read it all.

Does the world really need another Web browser?

Google thinks so. Chrome, its new browser, was developed in secrecy and released to the world Tuesday. The Windows version is available for download now at google.com/chrome; the Mac and Linux versions will take a little longer.

Google argues that current Web browsers were designed eons ago, before so many of the developments that characterize today’s Web: video everywhere, scams and spyware, viruses that lurk even on legitimate sites, Web-based games and ambitious Web-based programs like Google’s own Docs word processor. As Google’s blog puts it, “We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser.”

What this early version of Chrome accomplishes isn’t quite that grand. But it is a first-rate beginning.

Read it all.

The browser war is back on.

This time, Microsoft’s opponent is Google, a familiar foe.

On Tuesday, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser.

In a curious twist, Google made its online announcement after its plans appeared as a digital “comic book” that was posted by Google Blogoscoped.com, a Web site that tracks the Internet search giant. Google said it had accidentally sent the comic book to the blog.

The browser is a universal doorway to the Internet, and the use of Internet software and services is rapidly growing. Increasingly, the browser is the gateway to the Web on cellphones and other mobile devices, widening the utility of the Web and Web advertising. Google, analysts say, cannot let Microsoft’s dominant share of the browser market go without a direct challenge.

Read it all.

Check it out.

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence ”” and conceivably military ”” consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

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Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Read it all.