Check it out pensively.

BitTorrent, a revolutionary technology, is making file sharing over the Internet much easier and more accessible. Comcast is far from pleased, however. Digital guru Andy Carvin breaks down the new process for Andrea Seabrook.

Listen to it all.

Old wood benches quaked under the thunder of the pipe organ at Calvary Episcopal Church, fully awakening the overflowing Easter morning crowd.

As light filtered into the sanctuary through an elaborate stained glass window portraying Jesus on the cross, a traditional service, unyielding to time, unfolded.

But for those who couldn’t make it to Easter services, even some of the most traditional churches offered other options.

As more churches are creating an online presence with podcasts, Web streaming and cyber-giving, worshipers don’t have to leave the comfort of their homes to get religion.

Nevertheless, local clergy say virtual worship did not reduce Easter turnouts this year, but may have helped bolster numbers on one of the largest church attendance days of the year.

Read it all.

The anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders is testing the limits of the Internet.

Promotions for his film purportedly condemning the Koran, that were posted on YouTube in February led the government of Pakistan to block the site in its entirety.

Wilders also created a stir when he announced that he would premier the film on his Web site, fitnathemovie.com, hosted by Network Solutions (best known for its domain name services). Network Solutions suspended fitnathemovie.com, saying that it did so to investigate whether the site’s content violated its “acceptable use policy.”

Under that policy, material that is “harassing, abusive, threatening, harmful, vulgar [or is] hate propaganda” is prohibited.

Predictably, on the blogosphere in the United States, Network Solutions is being called a censor and a coward, with scores of posts praising the Internet for its “anything goes” culture. Some are arguing that if Wilders’s movie is offensive and prompts violence, so be it – that’s the price of Internet freedom.

But do we really permit anything on the Internet? Of course not.

Read it all.

Dear Kendall: [My husband] and I are in [a certain geographical locale] for six weeks this year. Going to a small but orthodox Episcopal church and a wonderful non-denominational women’s Bible study, but other than that, it has been a hard six weeks spiritually away from my home parish and diocese. Wanted to let you know what your posting the last couple of days have meant to me. They have been profound and life changing, almost like reading sermons or hearing great preaching. Thank you so very much.

On Good Friday I did take my…dog… over to the ocean to watch the riptides and listen to Christian music. Out of the blue came 30 pelicans, my favorite bird, and it was like a glimpse of the beauty and joy we will experience in Heaven.

Bless you and your family with a glorious Resurrection Day.

Hi Fr. Kendall –

Best wishes for a fruitful Triduum.

I really value your blog and the truth it exposes, and, like another recent e-mailer, I value many, but not all, of the comments. When I see only a few improper comments, I ignore them. When I see too many, I ignore the thread and the other valuable comments that may be in the thread.

I manage a topical list…and I am somewhat familiar with people hijacking threads and not staying on topic, and community emotions running high, and otherwise reasonable people acting out.

Technically, I don’t know what is available to you to help manage things, but here are few suggestions:

1. Forbid anonymous posters

I think one big factor in run-away comments is a lack of perceived accountability on the part of certain commenters. Forbidding anonymity would go a long way toward making people feel more accountable, but I don’t think it would solve the problem completely.
At a minimum, the person should not be anonymous to you. Ideally, I think a poster should not be anonymous to anyone.

2. Take action immediately when someone acts out

This can be difficult when you don’t have someone monitoring the blog at all times. Maybe you need more help. Ideally there is a graduated system of responses: a) moderate the user, b) moderate all comments,
c) ban the user, d) ban all comments (the situation currently in force, at least for Lent). If someone does something bad, they should be moderated immediately. A discussion can follow, but in this case, the community needs some immediate protection.

When you nip things quickly, many otherwise reasonable people who would act out don’t — they simply don’t reach their boiling point.

Some people won’t like this, but I think it will benefit the whole community, and the laissez faire system currently in force does not seem to be working.

Hi Kendall

I hope you and the Elves are enjoying the break from comments. I have to say though that I am missing them. Not the fiery robust ones — but the many thoughtful and helpful ones. I have realised that I rely on the commentators to analyse the significance of the posts and to point out how they fit with the overall pattern of what is going on. I am looking forward to the return of these kind of posts, which have always been the greater proportion of all the comments on your site.

“In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.” That’s the assertion of Richard Edelman, the founder and CEO of one of the world’s largest public relations companies. The work of PR professionals has always caused concern from people who believe in the importance of truth-telling. But Edelman’s observation suggests that in the communications ecosystem that is the Internet, where everyone is a spinmeister, the very idea of truth becomes less and less plausible. The quote from Edelman is in a new book by journalist Andrew Keen called The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday/Currency). “Today’s media,” writes Keen, “is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile.”

Andrew Keen hasn’t always been so negative about the Internet. He almost made a fortune in the 1990s by founding Audiocafe.com, one of the first digital music sites. Keen got involved in that project because he wanted to make the world’s best music more available to more people. But the more time he spent among the digirati in Silicon Valley, and the more he heard the utopian pronouncements of its most energized leaders, the more he realized that his view of culture and theirs were at odds. He wanted to expand the audience for great music. The Web enthusiasts wanted to make money by allowing more people to distribute home-made music, no matter how unimaginative and insipid it was, and collect revenue for all of the web advertising that accompanies the narcissism-enabling websites.

Read the whole thing.

Kendall,

You are doing the right thing in closing comments on Titus[onenine]. For some of the correspondents on the blog, it would appear there is something compulsive about their need to sound off in bombastic terms about virtually everything. One of the things I have done over the years is compare the tone of some of the secular blogs with those in the Christian family and, frankly, there is very little difference in tone even if most of the times believers have their language under better control.

It grieves me that believers do not have the self-control necessary to carry on a sane and measured conversation.

God bless you this Holy Week.

Kendall+

Thank you so much for your blog. It really is the best source of information on TEC available. I also greatly appreciate your various “off topic” posts that remind one and all that we live in a real world, most of which has never heard of TEC, nor would care if they did.

I left ECUSA about 12 years ago when I was working for an educational institution and did not have a cure. I could easily see where the church was headed and determined that my first ministry was to my family who should be protected from so much that goes on in the church. Years later, through a chain of events that only God the Holy Spirit could have orchestrated, I am the rector of a fledgling church plant. Although events in the Episcopal do not directly affect me any more, they do have an indirect effect. So I believe I have to keep posted on what is transpiring, and your blog is one of my best aids in this effort.

Please be encouraged that your blog is an encouragement to many.

Regarding the flaming… [comments by some] to your blog, my suggestion is that you require all who post to use their real names. That would change things considerably, although likely not completely solve the problem.

Peace in Christ this most holy of weeks,

Dear Father Harmon,

I never comment; however, I have almost stopped reading comments because I find so many of them rude.

Thank you for letting this lay fallow this week. I hope you have a most blessed Holy Week and the break is good for you. Your blog is the only one I read daily. It has been tremendously important to me.

May God bless you and keep you with us,

Hi Dr. Harmon,

Sorry to hear that comments have been taking a downward turn recently. Will be praying for you all this week as you prepare for Easter (we live in…[ ] and celebrate Easter on the Orthodox calender, so it’ll be another month for us). I really enjoy reading your blog, and I hope people, like you said, will use this time in the church calender to reflect on the holiness and humility of our Savior.

Peace to you,

I was so very troubled by the deterioration of the comments recently that having said my prayers about it I believe it prudent to take Holy Week and have no comments on any thread for a week.

This achieves several things:

(1) It gives all of us space to step back and focus on the most important week of the Christian year.

(2) It allows some perspective on life, the blog, the news, and our comments thereon. One of the sayings I use in parish ministry is “no one is indispensable,” by which I mean sabbaths need to be taken and ultimately it is up to God. Some people commenting on this site who have been asked to take a time out based on their comments have protested to us by email for months afterward, as if the site depended on what he or she had to say.

(3) It allows some reflection to be taken on what to do about the comments when we return to allowing them during Easter Week. It looks as if after a warning we may need to turn to a more aggressive editing policy at a minimum. Any suggestions you have are welcome.

(4) It gives the elves and me a break in this area (which really does take a lot of work).

In the meantime you can feel free to share any thoughts you have to me by email at: E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com. It is possible that any really important emailed comment may be posted in the main blog if I think it appropriate–KSH.

Does it strike any of you as it does me what a model thread we have this morning on the HOB vote canonical question? We have reappraisers and reasserters, we have questions and disagreements, but no venom, no sidetracking, and no personal attacks.

My dilemma is how to get all threads to be like this one. Suggestions are welcome….–KSH.

Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits passing through the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

Read it all.

One of the country’s most popular arts festivals, “South by Southwest” in Austin, Texas, hosted a mind-bending series of technology conversations this week, ranging from global political activists using mobile technology in novel ways to fighting the paucity of American women in the tech sector.

For highlights from “South by Southwest ”” Interactive,” Michele Norris talks with Omar Gallaga, who covers technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman.

Listen to it all and note carefully here the highlight of the conference is seen to have occurred.

The Web site Apple.com attracted nearly 16 million American visitors last month. Some of them got there by typing in the address directly; others used a search engine, linking to company’s site via nearly 25,000 different keywords, including “iTunes,” “iPod” and “iPhone.”

So says Compete, a company based in Boston that tracks Internet traffic. How does it know? It has installed its software in the computers of 100,000 Americans – with their permission – allowing the company to track their every movement on the Internet. It gets additional, anonymous data on about two million American Web users from Internet service providers.

That is a lot of people, but a far cry from the total U.S. Internet population – more than 200 million, according to some estimates. Like other monitors of Internet traffic, including Nielsen Online, Hitwise and ComScore, Compete extrapolates total Web audience figures from such samples, in a system similar to the panel-based research that is used to measure television audiences.

Marketers rely on these numbers because they are skeptical about data submitted by individual Web publishers, which often seem to overstate their own audiences, at least by comparison with independent measures.

Read it all.

Good for them–check it out.

An interesting and important discussion.

We have had problems with comments on the blog in the last two weeks, particularly in regards to tone. I do not know if it is Winter, the national mood in America, the Anglican church struggle fatigue, or what, but I really do want to encourage people to try communicate in a Christ like way. Also, please remember our strong preference for the use of real names–KSH.

For Beliefnet, these are busy times. Super Tuesday, which featured two-dozen state primaries and caucuses, was followed hard by Ash Wednesday. In addition to political coverage, Caldwell and her team were juggling features on chronic pain, the top 10 spiritual moments from American Idol and the Beliefnet Film Awards. Someone had also proposed reviving the annual I Hate Lent blog. “A lot of people do hate Lent,” Caldwell agreed.

The morning meeting was a reminder of the ubiquity of religion in American life ”“ from politics to pop culture ”“ and hinted at the currents that are propelling Beliefnet. Each month, more than three million visitors flock to the site, according to ComScan, the media metrics company, making it the most popular religion destination on the internet.

One measure of Beliefnet’s influence is that it managed in this hectic election season to land exclusive interviews with several of the top US presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee, John McCain, John Edwards and Barack Obama. Edwards talked about the importance of faith after the death of his son. Huckabee disclosed that the Lord gave him wisdom for the Iowa debates. And Obama reiterated that he is not Muslim, and said he prays each night that he is “an instrument of God’s will”. The two candidates who refused Beliefnet ”“ Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani ”“ were among the first to drop out of the race. All this from a site that did not exist a decade ago.

Beliefnet’s clout seems destined to grow….

Read it all.

In an era of declining attendance, churches across the country are scrambling to embrace modern marketing tools: Web sites, podcasts, billboards and the like. But a backlash is forming, as critics argue that while these megachurch-inspired tactics fill the pews, they sometimes lead to a weakened Christianity and ecclesiastical bait-and-switch.

At the center of the debate is the Web site ChurchMarketingSucks.com. With more than 40,000 unique visitors per month, the site aims to “frustrate, educate and motivate” churches into communicating effectively in a religious environment. But it’s also a little tongue-in-cheek.

“If churches were doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they wouldn’t need advertising,” says the site’s founder Brad Abare. He contends that if churches were more active in the community and addressing its needs, they would grow naturally from the original form of marketing — word of mouth.

Read it all.

Do you work for a fractured organisation that is busy avoiding the difficult issues? Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, does which is why I have been looking at anglican websites this week. And guess what ”“ they are fractured and busy avoiding the issues too.

The Archbishop said last week that people may be able to seek justice in the UK under different legal systems, including Sharia. This caused quite a stink, and the news bulletins soon announced that he had published clarification on his website. I would guess it has never seen anything like the traffic.

The site, which is pleasantly designed if unremarkable, has a link under Latest News labelled “What did the Archbishop actually say?”. The explanation is subtle, as one might expect from Dr Williams. I wouldn’t criticise his office for that, but I would suggest that a bit more emphasis should be given to the issue. ”˜What did he say?’ is a clear line, but it is tucked away among other links and could easily be missed by (for example) a journalist in a hurry. At the least it suggests that Dr Williams does not want to draw attention to the issue.

Read it all.

I just wanted to take advantage of a (relatively) slow news day to make a quick point about comments. They are, ideally, ideas, not rants; content, not therapy. They’re at their best when you’re sharing something somebody else might want to read ”” a fact, an opinion, an argument.

A good reminder. Read it all.

Let’s consider two recent, related pieces in the University of Miami newspaper.

The first announces the appearance, in selected classrooms, of a new technology called SYNCHRONEYES.

Synchroneyes is the sort of thing universities all over the country are spending your tuition dollars on.

Instead of doing something about disruptive in-class laptop use that costs nothing ”” banning them ”” many universities are starting an expensive war with them.

Synchroneyes marks a major escalation in the classroom technology battle: The professor as spy-master.

With Syncroneyes, the professor can “view all the computer screens in the classroom and redirect the student’s attention if they digress from the lecture topic.”

Elegantly put. Let’s see this interaction in practice.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Watch it all from NBC.

For generations of Roman Catholics in the United States, the ritual of attending Mass on Sundays has been intertwined with slipping a numbered envelope into the collection basket.

But in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, churchgoers are letting the basket pass them by in favor of donating online, part of an effort to meld time-tested fund-raising with 21st-century technology.

In October, the archdiocese, which includes 221 parishes in 19 southwestern Ohio counties, became the first in the nation to put in place a comprehensive Internet donation system for its weekly collections. The goal was to generate consistent revenue and to cater to parishioners who have grown accustomed to paying their bills online.

The practice is catching on throughout the country, with the Archdiocese of Chicago allowing parishes to opt into a similar plan, and individual churches experimenting with similar technology.

Read it all.

Yahoo’s board of directors says it is looking over a $44 billion bid from Microsoft to buy the company. Microsoft has been quietly trying to acquire Yahoo for at least a year in its attempt to become a more formidable challenger to Google. But even a combined Microsoft-Yahoo will have a hard time overtaking the nation’s dominant search engine.

When it comes to search and the ad revenue related to it, Google is No. 1, hands down.

“Google has become a verb,” notes David Smith, an analyst with the research company Gartner. “People think they’re going to go Google something, and it’s become just basically part of the lexicon of the way people talk and act today.”

Google now has around 60 percent of the search market, and its share is growing. Yahoo is a distant second, with about 16 percent. Smith says Microsoft can’t seem to win much more than 4 percent of that market, so the company is buying it.

“They had to make a big change and make a big investment and basically buy a large amount of market share,” Smith says.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Hackers who launched a massive online attack against the Church of Scientology are now turning to real-world protests to draw attention to what they call a “vast moneymaking scheme under the guise of ‘religion.”‘

The loosely organized group of hackers, who meet up and coordinate attacks through Internet Relay Chat channels, have set Feb. 10 for a wave of protests at Scientology locations worldwide.

In anonymous postings on the group’s Web site, organizers said they are trying to raise awareness about the threats to free speech posed by the church’s lawyers, who, the group claims, aggressively try to silence critics by threatening lawsuits. The church said its lawyers follow standard procedures for protecting copyrighted materials.

The first wave of attacks began earlier this month with hackers bombarding the church’s Web site with traffic to cripple its servers. The church appears to have fortified its Web site since then, deploying technology that helps protect against so-called denial-of-service attacks.

Read it all.