Chris Abraham » favoritism

How Smart Does Your Music Make You?

Chris Abraham — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:16:52 +0000

I am really surprised about how jazz fans rank. That said, Radiohead and U2 (classic) are at the top of my faves and my favorite piece of music ever is Eroica by guess who? (Via WSJ)

I think I committed suicide in Twinity

Chris Abraham — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:07:05 +0000

My CEO, Mark Harrison, downloaded and installed a new 3D virtual world called Twinity, based in Berlin, that will recreate the world’s coolest cities, starting with Berlin. Mark loves Berlin more than anything, so he tried exploring his #1 home from his #2 home, Mauritius, and here is his story, as reported in an email to his Berlin posse, I think I committed suicide in Twinity:

Mark Harrison – Mauritius – 22 February 2008, 14:05 — After over a week of trying – endless module and update loading, and countless crashes - I finally got logged into Twinity.com, a 3D virtual world, a la Second Life, but set in renderings of real cities. The first of these Twinity cities is Berlin, my favorite city in the world, and my summertime home (and apparently the best-mapped city in the world, as well as the home to Twinity’s headquarters).
I was incarnated as a completely physically average white guy in his late 30′s – quite accurate in many respects except for the color and quantity of hair, and the hue of my eyes. The statistically average white guy, even in Germany – counter to stereotypes – has brown hair and brown eyes. Average Guy Mark was dropped into existence at Hackischer Markt, which is a good place to come into the world, since it is essentially the center of the universe, if your universe consists of only Berlin, you are a wired hipster type, and you are a provincial just arrived in this big, big city and instantly lose your bearings if you can’t see the TV tower on Alexanderplatz.
I decided to walk home – to my apartment in Moabit – and take the path along the Spree river that I take on almost a daily basis in my real-life Berlin when I am there. I walked over to Monbijou park (eventually figuring out how to run by holding down the shift key, which reduced my impatience a bit), bouncing off a few trees, but successfully oozing straight through a pissoir. I walked over to the railing at the edge of the river, looked around, then took one more step. To my surprise, I found can walk through railings just as effectively as I can walk through pissoirs.
I fell a couple meters and found myself standing knee-deep in the Spree – not very realistic at that point in the Spree, considering that it’s a major shipping channel, but convenient for me as an avatar in the river. I could still walk.
I walked along the river a bit, thinking I could perhaps just walk all the way home in the river, maybe climbing up one of the stone staircases I knew should be coming up along the way, if Twinity’s mapping of Berlin is indeed that comprehensive. After a few steps I came to what I assume was the end of the universe… a wall of beige halfway through Monbijou Park, cutting across the river, and t-ing into the riverside wall of the Boda Museum. The end-of-the-universe wall was insurmountable, as was the vertical, stone wall bank of the river. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my virtual life knee-deep in a fetid central European river, so I hit the “map” button, assuming that there could well be a way to fly, or teleport or something like in Second Life.
This hubris clearly angered the gods. I guess I should have accepted my humaness and walked back up the river looking for a ladder or something rather than thinking I might game the laws of the universe and escape the limitations of my corporal form. My world was wiped from existence with a cold Windows dialog box announcing that Twinity was no longer responding to anything I might ask it to do. Then Vista went looking for Answers as to the Reason for this caprice of the gods, and unfortunately came back, giving me only more questions. Quite realistic, that part of Twinity.
A restart of the program, and a surprisingly quick login process later (considering logging in took me a week of trying and failing, then a good 10 minutes when it finally worked today), I was again granted a view of my Twinity existence.
I think I am dead.
I have only a setting sun in a golden sky, adorned with a few evening clouds and the pregnant belly of a pale, twilight three-quarter moon. I have a 360 degree view of my heavens, and when I spin on my axis – my only remaining mobility in my gentle, but solitary, god-forsaken purgatory – the clouds tremble as if in silent horror at the eternity of loneliness I have been damned to by my unforgivable, cardinal sin of suicide (is self-murder through clumsiness officially suicide? Anyone know a theologian?) in the murky virtual waters of my beloved Berlin.
Life is so short. So meaningless. So incomprehensible.
Mark Harrison
Born: February 22nd, 2009 18:52 Berlin, Germany
Died: February 22nd, 2009 19:04 Berlin, Germany
“Well, there’s always LinkedIn.”

Thank You Fresh Air Fund Camp Counselor Bloggers!

Chris Abraham — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:06:19 +0000

Fresh Air Fund not only needs host families, donations, and children every year, FAF also needs camp counselors to staff the summer camps every year. The Fresh Air Fund and Abraham Harrison LLC reached out and over 120 bloggers and Twitterers responded to the call. We thank you all very much and we appreciate all of your hard work on Fresh Air Fund’s behalf! Much obliged!

Fresh Air Fund Looking for Help via Three Rivers Episcopal
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via The Abraham & Harrison Blogger blog
Fresh Air Fund via All Said and Done
Fresh Air Fund via Reflective Ponderings
banner via Spectrum, Apex College
Now Hiring: Fresh Air Fund Summer Camp Staff via Assertagirl
Old-School Fun via Half the Sins of Mankind
Fresh Air Fund Looking for Summer ’09 Counselors via Best View in Brooklyn
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 via Ghana for a While
Fresh Air Fund, Non Profit, Now Accepting Applications from Gen Y for Summer Jobs via The Orrell Group
Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for Summer 2009! via Chris Abraham
The Fresh Air Fund via Brilliance or Madness
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via Chris Abraham Social Media PR & Blogging Expert
Hiring For Camp Counselor Jobs via Chris Abraham’s Weblog
The Fresh Air Fund! via Around the World in beautiful Shoes
the fresh air fund JOBS via Around the World in beautiful Shoes
Information via Because I’m Cool Like That…
Fresh Air Fund Now Accepting Applications for Counselors via Danny Fisher
Fresh Air Fund via Chen Chow
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via April 24th Blogging Basics
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer via My Blog
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via Chris Abraham
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer via Chris Abraham Ceci N’est Pas Un Blog
Help inner-city kids enjoy a summer vacation via Christifideles
Fresh Air Fund and saying no to buracracy via My Time in Cape Verde with Peace Corps
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via Official Colexica Blog
The Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for the Summer of ’09 via Make it Happen
Senator John Cornyn;Texas’ Embarrasment! via Dicky’s Doodles &Scribbles
Michael Steele; The Putney Swope Of The GOP via Dicky’s Doodles &Scribbles
From the Mailbag: Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for Summer 2009! via Epluribus Media
Rethinking Fresh Air via Rethinking Life
The Fresh Air Fund: Needs Counselors for the Summer of ’09! via Faithful Progressive
Your Money: The Fresh Air Fund via Cute, Cuddly, and Cannibalistic
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via Fresh Air Fund
Hiring Camp Counselors for the Summer via Fresh Air Fund Blog
Do Something Good: The Fresh Air Fund via Gingerbread Latte: The E! True Hollywood Story
2009: THE FRESH AIR FUND: VOLUNTEERS NEEDED via Tom Glover’s Hamilton Scrapbook
2/4/09 PRESS RELEASE: Fresh Air Fund via Greenwich Roundup: This Just In ……
From Ashton Kutcher to Soup: Super Bowl Giving via Have Fun Do Good
Fresh Air Fund via The Common Room
Fresh Air via The Hosanna Road
Link via Whole
Fresh Air Fund via Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 via In the Direction of my Daydreams
The Fresh Air Fund via About.com Internships
A Peal via Jakartass
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 via Happy at HFC
The Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors via Jewels of My Heart
The Fresh Air Fund via Following My Heart
THE FRESH AIR FUND 2009 via Whykay’s Happenings
Fresh Air Fund via Keokuk Radio News Blog
Kill Jill Turns One! :D via Kill Jill Goes to College
Volunteering= Good for the Soul via La Petite Fashionista
The Fresh Air Fund Wants You! via I Say Hella
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via Memes.org
Looking For A Summer Job? Give Back! via Micah Jesse Blog
via Mind Warriors
Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for Summer 2009! via Blah Blah Babycakes
Fresh Air Fund via Money Amulet
Philanthropy: The Fresh Air Fund via Movable Hype
The Fresh Air Fund via Beyond the Clouds
Fresh Air via Neringa’s Corner
The Hot Club of San Francisco takes audience to a simpler time via Ocolly.com
Make a difference this summer: leave home via Our pdx Network
Monday Afternoon Dept of Failures & Such via Page One
Long overdue… via Fijate que…Life of an El Salvador RPCV
My Favorite Links via Peace Corps Diary: Botswana 2008
Link via Pine Ridge Reflections
Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors: Summer’09 via Pro Equestrian World Edition
Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors: Summer’09 via REVISTA PROEQUESTRIAN ROMANIA
Get a Job! The Fresh Air Fund via Punk Rock
Fresh Air Fund Looking for Counselors via Ned Resnikoff
Hot fun in the city… via RoadTurn: Reflections on Life
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via The Russell Pike Blog
Banner via Salamu Kenya!
FRESH AIR FUND COUNSELORS via Samotalis
Make a Difference – Support the Fresh Air Fund! via In The South, We’re Not Crazy…We’re Eccentric!
The Fresh Air Fund via Shamazing
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via SMNR Social Media News Room
Wanted: Counselors who enjoy Fresh Air via Star City Harbinger
FYI – summer camp counselors needed via Steph in Burkina Faso
Volunteer as a Fresh Air Fund Counselor via System 13
Banner via Tangocherie
Link via Livin’ la Vida Loca: Peace Corps DR!
Sure, I’ll Support Your Camp, As Long As It Isn’t Jesus Camp via The Political Blog For Cynical Millennials
“Fresh Air” for Children via The Buddha Diaries
LINK via Third Mom
Fresh Air Fund is looking for a few good counselors via Left of Centre
Tweet via Blog Business World
Who says there are no jobs? Get a summer one! With Fresh Air Fund. http://tinyurl.com/6qkwwp via Young Manhattanite
Tweet via Lindsey Pollak
Tweet via Thoughts from Meggie Poo
Tweet via Deb’s Search and Rescue Stories
Fresh Air Fund Job Opportunities via Volunteer Boston: Get On Your Feet
Fresh Air Fund via Winny & B
Fresh Air Fund Camp Counselor Opportunities via Boarding School Blog
The Fresh Air Fund via Novel Inspiration
Camp Out & Change Lives! via Bare Essentials
The Fresh Air Fund needs Summer Counselors via Blogging for Business
banner via Bloody Brilliant
Counselors for 09 Summer Camps Required via Cop Recruiter
Change a Young Life this Summer via Everyday Giving Blog
The Fresh Air up There via Laura in Botswana
HIRING CAMP COUNSELORS FOR THE SUMMER! via Peter Geisheker’s Small Business Marketing Blog
For the kids… via Golfgal
Banner via Gotham Unleashed
Fresh Air Fund Is Hiring Counselors via Granby 01033
banner via Jewish Donor Blog
Doesn’t Everyone Deserve a Breath of Fresh Air? via Mamanista
The Fresh Air Fund is Looking for Camp Counselors via Math Me Thinks
So…what are YOU doing this summer? Here’s an idea…that pays! via The Online Degree Dorm Room
Fresh Air Fund Needs Camp Counselors via Outskirts:Life and Times in Charlottesville
General Discussion Message Board via Ram Nation
THE FRESH AIR FUND IS SEEKING COUNSELORS FOR THE SUMMER OF ’09 via Republica Update
Summer jobs with Fresh Air Fund (now accepting applications) via Secrets of The Job Hunt
Fresh Air Fund Counsellors via Servant of Chaos
A Breath of Fresh Air via TMT
Fresh Air Fund Needs Camp Counselors via The Diva Network
The World Needs Camp Counselors via Thoughts from Meggie Poo
SUMMER OPPORTUNITY: FRESH AIR FUND via Writing on the Mall
Hiring Camp Counselors for This Summer! via The Xyience Diet Resource
Fresh Air Fund via Yoga and Judaism Center
Fresh Air Fund Needs Counselors for Summer 2009! via Young Manhattanite

Michael Signer for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia

Chris Abraham — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:47:23 +0000

My friend Mike Signer is running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia and has started his campaign. Please be sure to support this fine gentleman in his campaign — please check out Mike Signer’s web site and read the information I just received from him via email, announcing his campaign:

This weekend in Richmond, I’ll join Democrats from across Virginia at our annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner. From the decade-plus I’ve been working in the trenches of Democratic politics around the Commonwealth, I know the JJ is one of Virginia Democrats’ favorite events. But this year in particular – on the heels of the victories of President Obama, Senator Warner and Representatives Perriello, Nye and Connolly – the JJ will be a particularly exciting opportunity to share my vision for the future of the Commonwealth with activists from across Virginia.
As you may know, I recently decided to run for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. I’m running because I strongly believe that our problems today are so urgent they demand something more from the office of Lieutenant Governor. If we turn this office into a public advocate for all Virginians rather than just a placeholder it’s been under the Republican incumbent, Bill Bolling, we can take on great challenges together, including:
Strengthening our economy while cracking down on predatory practices,
Getting our priorities on energy and the environment right and creating thousands of new green jobs,
Meeting the sacred contract we have with veterans and their families and
Strengthening our democracy here in Virginia.
Although the Lieutenant Governor candidates will not be speaking, I wanted to make sure you know about the event and – most importantly – that you’re invited to our reception afterward. Immediately following the dinner, we’ll be hosting a hospitality suite with a great band and refreshments in the Greater Richmond Convention Center, room E22-A.
If you’re attending the dinner, I hope you’ll join us – and encourage others you meet at the dinner to do the same – to stop by, meet me, and make the acquaintance of other Virginia Democrats who will be joining our fresh, exciting new campaign.
After JJ Reception with Mike Signer
Greater Richmond Convention Center – Room E22-A
February 7, 2009 – Immediately following the conclusion of the dinner
RSVP today for the reception so that we know you’re coming
I hope you’ll join this cause. I’d also be grateful for early investors in this exciting venture. Even your $5 donation today will help with critical early steps such as purchasing lapel stickers and our banner for the convention hall.

Thanks and hope to see you soon. I’ll be in touch with more news about the campaign in the coming days.

Successful SNS’s Will Be Modeled on the College Campus

Chris Abraham — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:34:36 +0000

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

Social Media Reputation Management

Chris Abraham — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:32:53 +0000

My buddy David Gelles writes for the Tech section of the FT, my favorite paper. Check out his latest article, New corporate firefighters. Sadly for me, he can’t shamelessly promote my company, Abraham Harrison LLC, because he has ‘journalistic integrity;’ however, it is awesome he works there because he writes awesomely-accessible articles about my space, including social media marketing, social media PR, blogger engagement, Twitter, and also the world of online and social media crisis-response. It is amazing! I beat up Pepsi Max over on AdAge and a couple weeks later, Gelles writes an article about the space. I am both amazingly proud and a little paranoid!

New corporate firefighters By David Gelles

When advertisers launched a campaign last September for the pain reliever Motrin, they hoped to attract the attention of mothers whose backs might be sore from wearing baby-carriers. The advertisements implied that while baby-carriers might be fashionable, hauling a child around could be painful.
Mothers were not amused. Soon after the ads were released, anti-Motrin campaigns appeared on Facebook and blogs. Outraged mums, furious at the suggestion that their babies were a hassle, posted rebuttal videos on YouTube. Through Twitter, the micro-blogging service, thousands of people attacked the company.
Motrin was caught off-guard. For days, no company representative replied. Critics accused the company of being not only insensitive but also unresponsive.
Eventually a marketing executive at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that markets Motrin, e-mailed individual bloggers to apologise for the campaign. But the damage was done.
Jeanette Gibson of CiscoThe “Motrin moms” episode illustrates the power of social media — the expanding network of websites that allow users to interact with each other and, increasingly, with companies. It also demonstrates the perils for enterprises that are unprepared to interact with social media.
But now a growing number of companies, including Ford Motor, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo and Dell, are creating new high-level jobs to ready themselves for engagement with social media, with titles such as director of social media, head of communities and conversation, vice-president of experiential marketing and digital communications manager. The role of these new executives is to monitor and influence what is being said about their companies on the internet.
Johnson & Johnson made its own appointment in the wake of the Motrin debacle. Having already dabbled in social media, in December the company promoted Marc Monseau, a 10-year company veteran and former director of media relations, to director of social media. “My responsibility is to work with the corporate office and the individual companies to better interact online,” Mr Monseau says. “It underscores the fact that we realise this is an important audience and one that we need to develop relationships with.”
These new jobs represent a broad shift in media relations strategy at large companies. “Corporate communications has radically changed,” says Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. “It’s no longer just companies talking to the press, and customer service talking to customers. All these other people showed up in the middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels.”
The essence of social media is conversation. Rather than a one-way stream of information, where companies make announcements to the press and customers, social media enables a great deal of interaction, where companies are in constant dialogue with the public. “We’ve seen a shift from doing things the old way to now having conversations with our customers,” says Jeanette Gibson, director of new media for Cisco Systems (pictured).
Ms Gibson, who began her job in 2007, says there is now a mandate at Cisco that all staff be attuned to what is being said about Cisco online. “It has definitely shifted how we’ve done communications,” she says. “Our executives are video blogging every day. Everybody’s job is now social media.”
Dell, the computer maker, has one of the most robust corporate social media programmes. Bob Pearson, former senior vice-president of corporate communications, became vice-president of communities and conversation for Dell in 2007.
He now has 45 people working for him. The core team works on “blog resolution” — trawling the web for dissatisfied customers, then attempting to contact them to make amends. Others on Dell’s social media team manage the company’s 80 Twitter accounts and 20 Facebook pages. Still others manage IdeaStorm, Dell’s forum for customer feedback.
Dell is taking its customer feedback seriously. When the company launched the Latitude laptop last summer, six of the features, including backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader, were ideas that came from IdeaStorm. “It’s always worth talking directly with your customers. It’s always worth listening to them,” says Mr Pearson. “It’s the wisdom of crowds.”
Peter Shankman, a social media expert and founder of Help a Reporter Out, a service that broadcasts reporters’ requests to a network of experts, says many companies are still reluctant to get involved: “Companies are slow to adapt because they’re still not 100 per cent sure they can make money with social media,” he says.
Yet Dell, for one, has made a business of it. By broadcasting discount alerts on Twitter, it says, it has generated more than $1m in sales. And in the US, 59 of the 100 leading retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart, now have a fan page on Facebook, according to Rosetta, an interactive marketing agency.
Other savings can be realised through the Web’s ability to reach many people at once. “If you solve someone’s problem on the phone, nobody knows,” says Mr Sernovitz. “If you solve that same problem in writing on a blog, it costs you no more, but thousands of people are satisfied. And then, if 100 people never call because they found the answer, you very, very quickly get to multimillion-dollar savings.”
Other companies are using Twitter to douse public relations fires before they erupt. Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to appease users who were angry after the carmaker sued an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford merchandise. When fans of the enthusiast site posted angry messages, Mr Monty “tweeted back” to explain the company’s position.
Bonin Bough, who was appointed director of social media for PepsiCo last year, also used Twitter to defuse a brewing crisis after the company released a series of advertisements depicting a cartoon calorie character committing suicide.
“Social media is much more than getting out there and having conversations,” says Mr Pearson of Dell. “It transforms a business if you use it correctly.”

Reverend Joseph Lowery Inauguration Benediction Transcript

Chris Abraham — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:31:28 +0000

I was amazed and impressed by Reverend Joseph Lowery’s Inauguration Benediction from yesterday, the2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, so I asked the Twitterverse for a link to a transcript of the speech and@raygunner came back with a link to the Chicago Sun-Times with the goods. Thanks, man!

Reverend Joseph Lowery Inauguration Benediction Transcript
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right.
Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.
AUDIENCE: Amen!
REV. LOWERY: Say amen –
AUDIENCE: Amen!
REV. LOWERY: — and amen.
AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)
END.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog

Chris Abraham — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:10:28 +0000

This is my favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time and a cartoon that I mention every time I speak with someone about the Internet. I had better post it — I need to make sure it remains a well-known cultural and geek reference point.

The Social Mediasphere is Truly Global

Chris Abraham — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:05:54 +0000

Please enjoy my latest AdAge Global Idea Network blog post, Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook: (Via Adage)

Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook
Recently, I was a speaker at a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, called Daily Web. Everybody there was super-connected. Everyone was on both Facebook and Twitter. While I was at the conference, I received invites from my fellow attendees get connected on Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.
During a break, I was told that there are about 60,000 Slovakian users of Facebook, using a mix of the available Czech interface and the English. They were all much newer to Twitter, but the conference did have a Twitter profile and I chose to create the hash tag for the conference, #dailywebsk. I was told Facebook is beginning to bogart the populations of local Slovakian communities and there are plans to localize Facebook into Slovakian the way that it is localized in the Czech Republic and Germany.
This got me to thinking. All of the Brits I have been meeting in Berlin are more keen on getting my “Facebook e-mail,” the e-mail that would allow them to easily find me on Facebook, rather than asking for a business card. Are cards going obsolete? Or, at the very least, are your Twitter and Facebook credentials more important on your site, your business card or your name tag than your e-mail, phone and fax?
All of my German friends are on Facebook as well, sharing images and adopting the social network with as much dedication and abandon as we do in the U.S. Same thing goes with my friends from Mexico and Colombia. When I attend conferences these days, I am likely to be recognized as @chrisabraham as I am by my name.
However, I admit that I live in a rarefied air and so there might be issues of connectivity, class and access that I am not addressing here. That said, I am still amazed whenever I take some time to click on over to Twittervision to watch a global representation of the whole Twittering world.
Because of the nature of Facebook and Twitter, localization works very well. Since both social networks allow you to easily communicate with your friends, and your friends are generally a lot like you. There isn’t a lot of cross-talk between English-, German- and Spanish-speakers.
There are no barriers, of course, between the different locales and the different languages. The barriers are emergent. Since I have quite a few Facebook friends and Twitter followers, 2,707 and 2,374 respectively, I get a lot of cross-talk between languages, and that pleases me. What makes me even happier is when I visit someone’s Wall, sort of like the publicly visible whiteboard that lots of students hang outside their dorm room. I often see a mixture of Spanish, German and English, all mixed up, according to each particular relationship.
The feeling I have, however, is that Twitter and Facebook are not perceived, worldwide, as American imperialism. And I think this is fantastic. Why is that? I think it’s because Facebook and Twitter created relatively neutral platforms and then got out of the way. This is especially the case with Twitter, which is perfectly inert: 140 characters. No context, only essential conversation.
After being a part of the Twitter community for a little while, the whole nature of it falls away and it becomes invisible, a simple communications vehicle, disassociated from its origins: like the phone, texting, TV, electricity, e-mail, the internet! Who cares who invented these things, after all, when each nation, culture and people ultimately make it their own. And this is what is happening with Twitter and Facebook — people are making them their own.
I really don’t use MySpace very much at all. In fact, I embarrass myself every time I look at my MySpace profile. That said, every band in Berlin has a MySpace profile, just like every other band in the entire world. Globally, you’re likely to see a MySpace address if the band you’re digging on has an internet presence. Even if your favorite global brand has its own website, there’s a good chance that they also have a MySpace address. A couple weeks ago, I checked out three bands here in Berlin and they all has MySpace URLs: Orchestre Miniature in the Park and Tim and Puma Mimi.
None of these bands think about the gross imperialism associated with their decisions; they have adopted all of this American innovation with complete ease. Back in the day, Friendster had a terribly time sorting out its business model internationally. Its success in Asia bogged down its servers while confounding its salespeople on how to make any money from all these community members who were dedicated participants but not generating any local revenue. It was probably because the worldwide ad networks and the global sales of ads were not there yet, focused mostly on the U.S. market. Now times have changed. Here I am in Berlin being served not simply German ads but also geo-targeted ads based on exactly where my data is being served.
I have taken all of this in due course and just considered it normal; however, I realized tonight that it isn’t normal. It occurred to me that folks might not know how thoroughly adopted these Web 2.0 platforms are worldwide. How many people around the world refresh Facebook and Twitter many times an hour at their workplace, the same way everyone does it, even among an ever-growing population in the Slovak Republic.

Boing Boing Wolves Take Out a Comment Spammer

Chris Abraham — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:06:04 +0000

I was just farting around Boing Boing Gadgets, enjoying the fine work over there, post amusement over seeing my business partner become immortal in a Boing Boing post and referred to as “a globe-trotting alpha male who spends winters rubbing elbows with bikini models down in Mauretius and summers either indulging in sport in Berlin or piloting yachts around Cape Horn.” Well, I started reading comments and there were some funny ones, and then an obvious comment spam about the Motorola Krave. Then, the wolves circled and the entire comment thread started mocking the shiller. Ultimately, Joel Johnson wrote the following awesome blog post, entitled, Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?

Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?
In John’s post about Steve Jobs’ purported tantrum, a commenter “MGOODE08″ made this remark:
I’m so glad my boss isn’t like that! I’m working with Motorola right now, and became a huge fan of the Krave (motorola.com/krave). I especially like the full touch screen display and html web browser. It’s awesome!
On the 14th, he made this comment:
Oh man this looks awesome! I hope they release a version for the Krave by Motorola. Ever since I started working with Motorola I have became a huge fan of the phone (motorola.com/krave). With a full list of features, like a full touch screen, I can’t stop obsessing over it.
“M Goode” loves this phone so much that he posted this at GigaOm:
This is a very good idea. I think it could be applied to any phones with a similar format. Ever since I started working with Motorola I have become a huge fan of the Krave. It has some of the same features, and I think a built in micropayment system would be great. It’s a fairly new phone, so if you haven’t seen it yet it’s online at motorola.com/krave. I wonder if they will jump on the bandwagon when/if a micropayment system is implemented.
When he’s not on tech sites, though, “M Goode” loves to relax with a good game:
I wish this game would get released for a mobile gaming platform, especially the Krave. I have been a fan of this franchise since it’s first release, and would love to have it on a cell phone, especially the krave. Ever since I started working with Motorola, I have become a huge fan of the krave. Has anyone else seen it?(motorola.com/krave) It’s so loaded with features, most important of which is the full touch screen layout. It’s DEFINITELY worth checking out.
He’s also really into the indie gaming scene:
I can’t wait to see this on a mobile phone platform! it would be so cool to see ti on a Krave! Has anyone else seen it? (motorola.com/krave) It’s a flip phone with a touch screen, 2 MP camera, full html browser and bluetooth functionality. Definitely worth checking out.
But uh oh! He might be considering switching from a Krave to the new Nokia:
My favorite phone right now is the Krave by Motorola. I became a huge fan of the Krave once I started working with Motorola. You can check out the full spec list online at motorola.com/krave. It’s definitely strong competition with it’s full touch screen
(He is also apparently working for Cirque Du Soleil, but we’ll let them pass for the moment because I love acrobats.)
“Follow the money,” they say, but in this case we don’t have to, because all we have to do is follow the link. Motorola, if you could be so kind as to tell your viral marketer to fuck right off we’d sure appreciate it. Perhaps you could spend the money instead on making your phones something that people actually want to buy.
P.S., I love our readers. Check out the replies they immediately started making:
I’m so glad my boss isn’t like that! I’m working for Burger King right now, and became a huge fan of the Mushroom and Swiss Steakhouse Burger. I especially like the cheese and mushrooms. It’s awesome!
I’m so glad my boss isn’t like that! I’m working for a pimp on the corner of wellwood and barrington and became a huge fan of Allie and her turrid backstroke technique. I especially like the pop and rock. It’s awesome!
I’m so glad my boss isn’t like that! I’m working with Cryptozoologia right now, and became a huge fan of the Trepanasaurus (Cryptozoologia.com/ Trepanasaurus). I especially like the way that, after the dinosaur-anteater hybrid rips off the top of a person’s head with its sharp teeth, it can suck out its victim’s brain with its nose. It’s awesome!

Abraham Harrison Case Study of International Medical Corps

Chris Abraham — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:22:33 +0000

CHALLENGE: This was a two week, high pressure campaign focused on getting International Medical Corps (IMC) into the final five of the American Express Members Project $2.5 million giveaway competition. 1,190 projects were nominated for participation in the competition, Amex cardholders could vote for their favorite project, and the top five projects receive a portion of the $2.5 million in grant money.

The challenge that Abraham Harrison faced was to take IMC, a relatively low-profile $100MM per year organization that gets all its money from government grants and had essentially no support base among the general public and activate a mass wave of support and votes for the organization – in two weeks.

International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training, relief operations, and development programs.

STRATEGY: Abraham & Harrison has developed strong relationships with a large group of bloggers interested in humanitarian issues who in turn act as influencers in their communities of readers. The goal, as with all online influencer outreaches, was to earn these bloggers’ support and their willingness to act as repeaters and amplifiers of our client’s message, get their implicit or explicit endorsement, and motivate their readerships to action – in this case to vote for IMC in the Amex Members’ Project competition.

Abraham & Harrison was in constant consultation with the client, advising International Medical Corps on their message copy, their use of widgets, their posting of banner ads, and guiding their broader strategic decisions.

TACTICS: Abraham & Harrison reached out to close to 4000 bloggers across a spectrum of demographics. The Abraham & Harrison team reached out to these bloggers multiple times over the course of two weeks directing them to the Members Project website and the helpful, blogger-friendly Social Media News Release that made blogging on the topic an easy cut-and-paste action. http://internationalmedicalcorps.smnr.us/

Abraham & Harrison also turned to its strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, and several other social networks, building groups and messaging followers as well as the broader Abraham & Harrison community. To drive SEO and further traffic, every one of the over 190 blog posts was posted on Digg and several other social bookmarking platforms.

RESULTS: Within two weeks the team at Abraham & Harrison had achieved close to a 10% response rate to the outreach emails, leading to over 190 blog posts with more trickling in daily. Millions of impressions were made, and given the permanent nature of blog posts and the resultant presence on the search engines, impressions will continue to be made into the future.

International Medical Corps was able to fend off challenges from those organizations in 6th and 7th place, finally finishing in the top five, guaranteeing them a portion of the $2.5MM in grant money.

"Abraham & Harrison has been a tremendous asset to International Medical Corps during our American Express Members Project campaign. Their online strategy and outreach helped introduce International Medical Corps to many new audiences and raised our visibility during this time-sensitive campaign. International Medical Corps was written about in more than 170 blog posts.
"Abraham & Harrison brings a unique approach to online public relations. The worldwide web is a vast space, yet Abraham & Harrison has found a formula to reach out to target audiences, effectively raise awareness and get online readers and activists to take action.
"The entire Abraham & Harrison team has been fantastic. Each team member brings creativity and passion to the cause. Without a doubt, International Medical Corps would engage Abraham & Harrison for another campaign."
Rebecca Milner
Vice President, Institutional Advancement
International Medical Corps

A Report from PodCampOhio by AnnOhio

Chris Abraham — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:43:14 +0000

I have been trying to think of the best way to convey the weekend at PodCampOhio but my ~~virtual friend~~ new friend Ann Miller did a much better job of honoring the weekend! And, yes, I was one of the folks who received hand-made cookies! And here, below, is Ann Miller’s (AKA AnnOhio‘s) Introduction to Pod Camp…

Introduction to Pod Camp…
I never ever ever thought you would hear from me, I’m going to Pod Camp Ohio. Yet, yesterday morning I was up and out the door at 7:45 to drive to Columbus for the first ever Pod Camp Ohio. I’ve seen a lot of people on my Twitter list talk about Pod Camp experiences…and I admit I have liked the idea of having so many friends in one place to get a chance to meet. But the rest of it? The sessions? Meh…
I probably would not have gone at all if I hadn’t seen a status message from Chris Abrahams–going to Pod Camp Ohio–I sent him a message, are you serious. That was the nudge I needed to sign up and make plans to go. I kidded pre-conference that I would be in the corner with the giant panties over my head tied up with a cat5 cable. :o)
With the help of Andrew I found the location without any difficulties, it was close to the highway and very easy to get to. A gold star for the Pod Camp Ohio planners for finding such a great location. The facility was nice, free wifi a geek’s paradise! I spotted Ms. Sangs, @KaitSwanson as soon as I got in the door. I had to give her a hug even before I checked in for the conference. That hug and that chance to finally meet her made my day, could it get any better than this?
I started wandering around, getting my bearings, pulling out the lanyard for my name tag, writing @AnnOhio on it and getting myself organized. As I made my way back to the room for the first address of the day, I passed a lady with pink streaks in her hair–I knew right away it was @AlisonL. I gave her a big hug and delivered the promised homemade cookies. It was nice to finally get to meet her in person. As a I am talking to her I see a few more familiar faces @BarbaraKB and @DanielJohnsonJr–more hugs delivered.
I found a seat about mid-way back and made myself comfortable. I love to people watch, and I took a look around and didn’t see anyone else that I knew. I hear someone behind me talking to the person next to him. “Hi, I’m Chris Abraham.” I turned in my seat… “Chris? AnnOhio!” Naturally I jumped up to give him a big hug to welcome him to Ohio.
I looked through the session list, trying to find the non-geekiest session to go to. First up a session by my twitter pal (who I constantly harass for being a geek) DanielJohnsonJr. When I got to the room Chris was standing outside, he was planning to attend the same session. Alas, the door was locked. I pull out my cellphone and send Daniel a text message–the door is locked dummy. I made my way to the back of the room, I planned to knit during the session. The room filled quickly with people and I was glad to have a seat with a table to spread out all of my stuff. There was about 10 minutes before the session started, it gave Chris and I a chance to talk a little more. Daniel then had people do introductions, you know the usual name, where are you from blah blah blah…when it was my turn I said, “My name is Ann I’m here to see Daniel and to knit”.
It really was a great session, I have to confess that I learned about a few new things, and it was fun to see a Twitter pal in a new light. (That does not mean that my constant harassment of the guy is going to end!) I noticed during the introductions a familiar name and stopped him. “Oh Mr. tw3nty3ight? I saw PreppyDude talking about me to you last night I’m AnnOhio. “
“AnnOhio! I have to take a picture for PreppyDude.” Acckkkk I iz on BrightKite! But it shows me knitting so the guy is ok in my book. (Sheesh BrightKite?)
The next session in the room was on viral marketing, I was comfortable and decided the topic sounded interesting, as did most of the other people at the unconference, we moved to a larger room which put the presenter 10 minutes behind. I could have actually stayed in this session for another hour, I have a feeling that the period after the presentation, the time for questions and responses would have been just as valuable as the session. Next up..LUNCH!
There were some challenges for lunch, but in no part due to the organizers of the event. The catering company forgot a few of the ingredients for the tacos. It might have also helped to make things go faster to pull the tables out from the wall and to let people go through the line on both sides, it was a narrow hallway that may have been a challenge. I honestly heard no one complaining at any point during the day. It was a well run event, and the organizers should be proud of what they accomplished.
Lunch, was my favorite part of the day–not because the food was amazing, it was sitting down and connecting with friends. Talking, laughing, sharing stories…and seeing the circle of people grow and grow. I made a few new friends–people who I added to my Twitter list with the caveat that if they weren’t adding to my life I was subtracting them. I saw people sitting off alone, laptops open, Twittering and doing a variety of online social media. Excuse me? You are in a room full of people, many, if not most with the same interests as you and you are ONLINE? I’ve been known to stick a cellphone down my shirt at tweet ups when people were tweeting, not even my bra is big enough to hold a laptop. :o) I had someone from the conference add me on Twitter–he said he did the add during lunch. I later teased him “Why didn’t you come find me at lunch and sit at the cool table and have a real conversation with me?”
After being entertained by Paull Young and Luke Armour I had to stay for their session about what not to do in social media. They made me giggle, and I would give them two thumbs up as my favorite session of the day.
Then..it happened…I attended a session at the very edges of geekiness, what I thought pod camps were all about. As more and more html code popped up on the screen I felt the energy, the very life leaving my body. I turned into pod camp zombie. The presenter was full of lots of helpful information, but it was clearly the wrong session choice for me. I hit the geek wall and crumbled to the bottom in a pile.
Yikes, it was time to escape and make my way back to my corner of the cornfields. I passed out a few hugs on my way out the door and headed home in the pouring rain. I saw several tweets from friends who went out to dinner and or drinking afterwards, and that made me wish I was still there.
A few things I would have done differently–I would have made hotel reservations and stayed in Columbus on Saturday night. In reality I didn’t even plan to be there at lunch time, I thought I would be long gone. I would have left the session that sucked the life out of me and just wandered the halls connecting with people. I’m used to going to conferences and feeling the need to attend as many sessions as possible.
All in all..a day much better than expected and a chance to connect with friends.
tw3nty3ight

CokeTag Facebook Application is Fun and Useful

Chris Abraham — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:22:25 +0000

I just spent some time setting up my own CokeTag for my Facebook Profile after hearing about it from CC Chapman.

What I like about it is that it isn’t nefarious. One just sets it up to reflect one’s interested, passions, properties, and there you go! There’s a lot of fun there because you can set up the CokeTag to reflect who you are, instead of just biting everyone and sucking their blood. So, I chose to reflect myself through my favorite TV shows, movies, sites I own, sports I do, and my favorite foodie sites. Then, after you install the CokeTag application, set it up, and so forth, you can start grabbing other people’s CokeTag or you can even check out who is checking you out via the Click Tracker. At the end of the day, I don’t have the vision for the CokeTag application; however, CC does and so here’s what his vision is,

“Trying to make people realize how kick ass this would be for musicians to create a CokeTag and then fans can take it and share it on their sites. or a brand could.”

Here’s the Social Media News Release for the campaign…

Coca-Cola Launches CokeTag Facebook Application With Olympic Tie-In

CokeTag Application Empowers Anyone to Promote Themselves and Their Interests With a Do-It-Yourself, Portable Application.
June 6, 2008
Facts
What is a CokeTag?
A CokeTag is a personal, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, and companies to share links to content they want to promote and drive traffic to anywhere on the Web.
Empowers users to bundle links to on- and off-Facebook content in an attractive convenient package, which is associated with and accessible from their Profile or Fan Pages and shared via Facebook private messages or Wall posts.
Coca-Cola released CokeTag to provide an engaging and relevant online experience for consumers. The useful application is another way that Coca-Cola is leveraging innovative technology and social media to reach consumers where they are increasingly spending time online.
One of the first uses of a CokeTag will be to promote the we8 recording artists. we8 is an artistic and cultural exchange, uniting eight of China’s most exciting artists and design firms with eight of the West’s most progressive musicians to design a vision and soundtrack that celebrates the infinite possibilities that await when the doors are flung open from East to West. The we8 program is being launched as part of The Coca-Cola Company’s 2008 Bejing Olympic Games marketing activities.
The CokeTag application is being launched as a beta. Among others, the goal is to watch, listen and learn from consumers to determine how the community wishes to use the application and to gather suggestions on how to improve it as it expands outside of Facebook.
The Coca-Cola Company aligns itself with delivering the promise of a cross-platform web experience, consistent with Coke’s brand value of bringing people together for social connections across cultures.
CokeTag is the result of a partnership between The Coca-Cola Company and Linkstorm, which is an advertising technology company that is pioneering a new approach to social networking, online marketing and publishing.
Benefits and Features
Includes a self-service editor that puts the creator in control of the CokeTag content and skin.
Every CokeTag packs several levels of easily navigated, expandable menus in a stylized, compact design that allow visitors to instantly navigate to specific content that they are interested in and want to see more about.
The built-in click tracker lets creators know every time someone looks at their CokeTag and which links they visited. This data is only viewable to the creator of the CokeTag.
Sharing and posting features facilitate viral distribution via highly targeted personal networks for friends and fans.
Distribution
Initially built for Facebook, the plan is to allow for a CokeTag to live beyond those walls and will soon be available across OpenSocial sites (i.e. MySpace, Bebo, etc.) and eventually to the greater Internet on Blogging platforms and elsewhere. The goal is to empower users with ubiquitous Web distribution for sharing the information that matters to them and maintaining it one place.
Facebook users can add a CokeTag to both their personal profile as well as to any Facebook Fan Page. This opens it up so that a company, band or special event can build a CokeTag full of links about them and then fans can take that CokeTag and add it to their own profiles.
Current Facebook distribution options includes:
Create and post your CokeTag on your personal profile page
Create and post a CokeTag to any Facebook Fan Page you administer
Grab and post any CokeTag that you discover on to your own personal profile
Send a CokeTag as Facebook e-mail attachment
Post a CokeTag as a Facebook Wall post
Quotes
Attributed to Michael Donnelly, Director, Worldwide Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company :
“The Coca-Cola Company’s social networking approach has been one of very sincere respect for the communities we participate in. We prefer to politely enter and let the already existing ecosystem help guide us in the right direction as we continue to learn what works best for our brands.”
“I’m excited about the CokeTag program, because while we are starting small and simple, we look forward to quickly growing it beyond Facebook with feedback, advice and counsel from consumers.”
“While Facebook may be the starting point for CokeTag, it is only the beginning. We are excited to be working towards the potential of expanding the use of the CokeTag application throughout the web and we are now working on the best way to leverage the OpenSocial platform. We are looking forward to the day when anyone could potentially create a CokeTag and have it on all of their social network profiles and their blog and only have to worry about updating it in one place. That excites me.”
“We made a distinct decision not to overly brand this application. We want this to be a helpful utility that connects consumers in a way that is all about them, not us.”
Attributed to David Sidman, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Linkstorm:
“Coke is the inaugural partner of our Portable Universal Profile (PUP™) platform for social media. Their vision and commitment have brought the platform to life in the form of a CokeTag. The platform is a unique way for brand marketers and advertisers to add great value to social media users’ experiences with a fun, unobtrusive and useful tool.”
“Unlike many other social media marketing programs which force themselves between the users and what they really want to be doing, the PUP enables the brand to become a conduit for user communications. The brand message can be as subtle as the sponsor and its community may wish, but the application is designed to enhance the user experience of connecting and sharing with friends without intruding”
Multimedia
In addition to the website, www.coketags.com ,we have assembled the following links and multimedia that will assist you in informing others about the application.
IMAGES
Musician / Band CokeTag
Sci Fi Fan CokeTag
Causes CokeTag
Triple CokeTag Shot
CokeTag Logo
Coca-Cola Banner
The Coca-Cola Company Logo
Linkstorm Logo
CokeTag Facebook Application Page
we8 Fan Page
http://del.icio.us/coketags
About
About Coca-Cola
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I Hope a Whale Beaches Itself On You

Chris Abraham — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:23:20 +0000

My friend Momotaro, the fellow who created the banner for Memes.org, was so amused by the first comment that someone posted onto my blog post, Don’t Save the Whales and Don’t Save the Rainforest Either, that he created the following anthology of really intelligent put-downs, I Hope a Whale Beaches Itself On You — it is bloody brilliant!

Here’s the content of the book — the manuscript if you will — and here’s the source:

1. jenn wrote:
  i think you are a fucked up person considering you dont care about anything but your self i hope a whale beaches it self on you
  Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 6:46 pm #
2. Saul wrote:
  One thing is true if you are an extremist you are off balance. If you are a fundamentalist in any direction you are off balance. All this needs is a holistic approach. Make money, but don’t sacrifice your children for it. Save whales but make sure to not be depressed by the fact that you might not. Fucked up is what happens when you forget what is most important to your existence and your families existence – which is in the here and now.
  Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 7:14 pm #
3. johndoe@aol.com wrote:
  blow me, bitch! you need a brain.
  Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 4:04 am #
4. Chris wrote:
  johndoe@aol.com »
  Charming.
  Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 5:06 am #
5. Jessie wrote:
  I just happened to come across this essay because I was looking for an animal to write about for English class. I clicked on the logo because I am absolutely terrified of whales. I think your writing is very good, and I do agree that one should not focus on one single cause, forgetting about one’s loved ones. However, there are a large host of people who manage to care very deeply about vital causes such as hunger or poverty, and still put much devotion into family and personal life. I think I am going to traverse your writings, Chris.
  Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 10:38 pm #
6. taylor wrote:
  u r sick and u should not be so cruel u selfish thing!
  Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 10:17 am #
7. John wrote:
  Good job! A+
  Friday, February 8, 2008 at 6:19 pm #
8. noneyabuisness wrote:
  YOUR STUPID. YOU MUST BE AN ANIMAL HATER YOU FACKOO. how can you not feel bad for them? your such a…gosh
  P.S. (save the polar bears) wolfs are awesome!
  Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 3:00 am #
9. logan wrote:
  save the d*** whales this guy dosen’t now what he is talking about the dumb A** what the H**l is your prob. beach a whale on him.
  Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 6:57 pm #
10. logan wrote:
  jhon shut the heck up you dumb A** gosh!
  Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 6:58 pm #
11. logan wrote:
  jessie you shut up to what is your guyzes problem save whales
  Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 7:00 pm #
12. Jennifer wrote:
  WAT DA HELL IS UR FUKIN PROBLEM U DUMASS UR SICK AND STUPID!!! HOW DO U NOT FEEL BAD FOR THEM, U DON’T HAVE A FUKIN HEART AND AND UR SELFISH SO GO TO HELL!!! IT’S FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU THAT WHALES ARE IN DANGER
  GO SUCK A DICK!!!!!
  Sunday, February 24, 2008 at 10:53 pm #
13. Saul wrote:
  Jennifer – you really made me laugh. You are so eloquent in your deep discussion of a relevant topic. What have you done for the whales today?
  Monday, February 25, 2008 at 8:48 am #
14. Chelsea wrote:
  I think you are the biggest low life i have ever heard of the Whales and the rainforests deserve to be saved. how dare you write that appalling colunm it’s disgusting!!!!!!! I’m 13 and i think thats saying something
  Monday, March 3, 2008 at 8:12 am #
15. Chris wrote:
  Chelsea »
  Cheslea, did you read the article?
  Monday, March 3, 2008 at 10:00 am #
16. Emiily Scott wrote:
  Hey you need to seriously sort ya self out! Why the hell don’t you care about anything but yourself! I hope you sometime need a transplant and dont get one and then ypu need someone but nooo we shouldn’t SAVE YOU!
  Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 3:00 pm #
17. Nancy wrote:
  YOUUUUUUUUUU ARE GAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 3:01 pm #
18. Abe wrote:
  BAHHHH HUMBUG!!!
  SAVE THE WHALES!
  NOT YOU!
  YA STUPID WITCH
  Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 3:02 pm #
19. Ben wrote:
  Not that i agree with him, but he has every right to express his opinion on the subject, he does have some good points, but…
  Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 12:51 am #
20. Sydney wrote:
  KILL THE CHRIS!! KILL THE CHRIS!! cMON EVERYBODY, DONT SAVE THE CHRIS ABRAHAMS!!! considering he doesnt care about anything but himself. hes gonna ruin the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 1:42 pm #
21. Sydney wrote:
  SCREW U TOO BEN!!
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 1:42 pm #
22. Chris wrote:
  Sydney, you mean “Kill the Humans,” right? I never named any particular whale, such as Shamu or Willy, right?
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 6:19 pm #
23. Chris wrote:
  Oh, and I should also add, “Don’t Save the Humans,” either.
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 6:19 pm #
24. Cecily wrote:
  I AGREE WITH JENIFER!!! WHOO-HOO! I SAY EVERTHING SHE SAYS!!!
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 9:00 pm #
25. sydney wrote:
  u r a total psycho!!! If u dont want to help save the wonderful, beautiful, gorgeous planet god gave u to live on, u have mental issues!! U shouldbe locked up somewhere in SOLITARY DETENTION!!!!! SAVE THE WHALES!!!!!!!! and dont listen to this stupid idiot fag chris abraham, who says “kill the children!!” u were a kid once, how would u feel if u were a kid browsing the web, and came cross a site saying ‘kill the children’?? Whats wrong with you?? ur momma musta dropped u on ur head or something when u were a kid. peace!!
  Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 9:22 pm #
26. korney wrote:
  ur a fag it is porple like u that kill the world off!! if someone to have there world stay around for awhile then that is there buisness dont tell them how to live there life so go kill ur self
  Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 12:01 am #
27. Tookie wrote:
  i think that u should have a heart for creatures lives and u should balance it out with ur family. whales and other animals have lives just like us and have families too but r being hunted and seperated from them. u can do simple things at home too u know. by the way, why did u bring this subject up anyway sam? is it something related to u?
  Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 8:40 am #
28. Tookie wrote:
  hey jerks! leave him alone! mhe can freely express himself. i dont agree with but dont put him down for his personal opion!
  Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 8:55 am #
29. Bobby wrote:
  Tookie, we are not jerks, WE are just freely expressing ourselves, and i think that when Chris was a baby his momma dropped him on his head, fed him stupid juice, and then sucked his brain out with a vaccum. TO CHRIS: YOU ARE A STUPID RETARDED A** H***!!! I hope one day, you need serious help, but the people say “No we are using that to save the whales.” Than ‘technically’ we are not sayng “KILL THE CHRIS” But we are still killing you. Go to hell. I agree with anyone who says chris is a dick.
  Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 3:59 pm #
30. Thomas wrote:
  I agree with Bobby, if he means a DIRTY dick.
  Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 5:23 pm #
31. Andrew wrote:
  You are a FART, SHIT
  Monday, March 10, 2008 at 8:21 am #
32. and wrote:
  You DA BIAN
  Monday, March 10, 2008 at 8:22 am #
33. Chris wrote:
  I call all you crazy 14-year-olds the Whale-Qaeda!
  Monday, March 10, 2008 at 12:10 pm #
34. Melissa wrote:
  okay i think there needs to be a balance. You should be able to spend the majority of your time in your life, but also take the time to help others, including the whales. Yes, the theme of saving yourself first and the world will follow suit, is a popular one, and if you think about it, it makes sense. You can do your best and until you can be your best, and that includes home life.
  so i agree with you Chris (guys don’t freak out on me), but maybe you could have said this in a less offending and extreme way.
  Save the whales, but save yourself and the people in your life too, is what i think you’re trying to say.
  okay i’m done ahha
  Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 8:36 pm #
35. Sydney’s BFF wrote:
  Whatever Chris you’re a jerk. There’s a difference between expressing your opinion gently and then there’s just insanity. You’re nowhere in between, you’re a psycho person. In your quest to kill off the children and whales and all things beautiful just because you’re not, you have proved to everyone who visits this psycho site that you actually do care by attracting more attention to the cause. Thanks Chris, for helping save the whales, but you still belong in a strait jacket somewhere until you see a poor whale being harpooned and you’ll see what it’s really like. Until then, read all these messages people leave you and PLEASE, PLEASE reconsider you opinion. Suppose someone was looking for a house in your neighborhood and shot and killed you because they wanted your house to be yours. Well that’s what it’s like to be harpooned by some jerk-off fishermen
  SERIOUSLY DUDE TAKE SOME DEEP THINKING TIME FOR YOURSELF AND RECONSIDER. SAVE THE WHALES!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 11:55 pm #
36. Sydney’s BFF wrote:
  Oh and in my previous message I meant to say they wanted your house to be theirs.
  Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 11:56 pm #
37. Lasse wrote:
  wow, thats what i call a discussion! @ all you radical americans talking about saving the world while driving huge ass cars to the next steak house drive-in; whales are just animals and they deserve to live and than to be eaten like any pig and cow you guys have for breakfast. enjoy everybody
  Friday, March 14, 2008 at 4:49 pm #
38. elly wrote:
  ur an ass.fuck u
  Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 9:14 pm #
39. Chris wrote:
  What does “ur” mean and what is “u?” Fuck University? What are you trying to say to me, Elly?
  Monday, March 17, 2008 at 12:04 am #
40. fsdasjkfsdfjk@hotmai wrote:
  thats rite dont save those bastards
  Monday, March 17, 2008 at 2:51 am #
41. Sydney wrote:
  “ur” is an abbreviation of youre and “u” is an abbreviation of you. idiot.
  Friday, March 21, 2008 at 5:04 pm #
42. Chris wrote:
  Duh.
  Friday, March 21, 2008 at 7:16 pm #
43. What the hell wrote:
  u sicko how could you be so fucking fucked up in the head. whales deserve a right to live, unlike you. fuck you
  Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 10:33 am #
44. Chris wrote:
  You did not read the article, did you? Can you read? I am beginning to think that we need to save the children, save the teens, and work on sub-literacy and illiteracy in the US, Australia, and other English-speaking nations that suffer under the weight of such ignorant activists.
  Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 12:31 pm #
45. Syzmatomtia wrote:
  98% of all species on earth have fallen to extinction, without the help of man. The other 2% will eventually face extinction as well. It is indeed a natural progression of any ecosystem for old species to pass away and new species to be born.
  Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 4:17 pm #
46. Ashley wrote:
  U R A ass hole 4 not saving the whales u should be more caring. U need to get a life and a personality.&&&&&&U should go and fuck yourself…………….
  ……………………
  THANK 4 NOT CARING ABOUT ANYTHING BUT YOURSELF (((((NOT))))
  Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 2:48 am #
47. J. Miller wrote:
  Request permission to use the image ‘don’t save the whales’ for a university newsletter cover with theme ‘taboo’. Please.
  Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 4:34 am #
48. Chris wrote:
  Yes, please use it as often and as freely as you like!
  Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 10:46 am #
49. Lila wrote:
  People’s pathedic lives are not half as important as that of the whales, rainforests, and etc. Go fuck yourself and save the fucking whales you cock sucker
  Friday, March 28, 2008 at 12:04 am #
50. Monica wrote:
  Is this a social experiment?
  Friday, March 28, 2008 at 12:16 am #
51. sarah wrote:
  Dude, love the whales and stop being a hater. How would you feel if people took you out of your home and killed you?! It wouldn’t feel good would it?
  Friday, March 28, 2008 at 5:10 pm #
52. Chris wrote:
  sarah »
  That was a very persuasive argument.
  Friday, March 28, 2008 at 5:50 pm #
53. Ashely wrote:
  WHAT THE SAM HELL R U THINKING DUMBO IF U WANNA THREAT THOSE ENDANGERED CREATURES U’LL HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME AND THE OTHER PEOPLE THAT WROTE ABOUT UR STUPID PARAGRAPH AND JUST SO U KNOW WHALES R MY FAVORITE ANIMALS SO INSTEAD OF NOT SAVING THE WHALES LET’S KICK U OFF OF EARTH AND NOT SAVE U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!U SHOULD DO A WEBSITE CALLED http://WWW.CHECK OUT HOW STUPID I AM.COM U SHOULD REALLY DO THAT U WILL NEVER WIN
  Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 12:08 am #
54. Chris wrote:
  Did you read the article? Do you know how to spell? Can you take your finger off the shift key, please?
  Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 8:58 am #
55. Smilee wrote:
  rele have u got nuffin better to do wiv ur life than write horrible stuff about whales. if u hate whales so much y not keep it 2 urself?? anyways i love whales and i dont kno how any1 can want them 2 b killed … so plz stop writin horrible stuff!!!
  Monday, April 7, 2008 at 5:25 pm #
56. alley wrote:
  You are a sick person. Don’t save whales? How cruel. You should think twice.
  Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 2:15 am #
57. Aman wrote:
  Chris Abraham kill that bicth.
  Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 3:24 pm #
58. Aman wrote:
  Theres a bicth named Chris Abraham
  He should die
  Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 3:25 pm #
59. Aman wrote:
  Chris Abraham does not have the right to live.
  Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 3:28 pm #
60. Chris wrote:
  Whale-Qaeda!
  Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 4:32 pm #
61. nunyabusiness wrote:
  Chris, I understand the ability to express your feelings, but maybe you should do it in a better way. I AM A CHILD, AND WHAT YOU JUST SAID SICKENS ME!!! I also feel the need to say that whales are my favorite animals, and this is so out of line and wrong. They are part of our ecosystem and you should be ashamed of yourself. What people are doing is taking mothers away from their babies, or taking away a wife or husband. Do you have a wife? A kid? A mom? How would you feel if someone shot one of them? Not to good, huh? I think that you should really reconsider and think about how whales are one of the smartest mamals and have feelings and families too before you write such things.
  Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 3:49 pm #
62. nunyabusiness wrote:
  oh, by the way, I’m not the same “NONEYABUSINESS” as one of the earlier ones, I didn’t see that one. By the way, I also agree with sarah.
  Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 3:52 pm #
63. Chris wrote:
  What you you mean by child? 8? That is the age of a child.
  Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 10:30 pm #
64. nunyabusiness wrote:
  actually, I’m seven. so think of how smart i am— unlike you. i was looking for whales because i like them, and i found this.
  Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 11:46 pm #
65. nunyabusiness wrote:
  oh, and you also, you must have no come back because all you said was the child thing.
  Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 11:47 pm #
66. chris abraham wrote:
  It was not a come back. 7 is very young and you are brilliant. No, I would not want my family to be shot. And, if you’ll read the article I wrote, I never said one thing about hurting whales. I sort of said, “don’t let your family get shot before you save the whales.” My blog is too sophisticated for someone your age. I am pretty sure my site is blocked by the net nanny software your parents should be using.
  Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 9:11 am #
67. bree wrote:
  wow ur fucked up whales are the best and its because of ass holes like you that our animals are becoming endangered and extinct
  Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 12:11 am #
68. Dannii wrote:
  You are so mean, and i hope u rot in hell bcoz u r so mean n u dont vcare about anyone but yourself bcoz ur so selfish!!!!
  Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 11:04 am #
69. Kaitlyn and McKenna wrote:
  CRAP YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Monday, April 28, 2008 at 8:02 pm #
70. Chris wrote:
  Crap me?
  Monday, April 28, 2008 at 9:26 pm #
71. shmo wrote:
  YES U!!!! WHAT DO U THINK!! U ARE SOOOOOO RETARDEDLY STUPID!! I WISH I COULD MEET U IN PERSON WIT SOME OF THE PEOPLE THAT HATE YOU SO WE COULD SERIOUSLY DAMAGE UR FACE!!!!!
  Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 10:23 pm #
72. SHMO wrote:
  good job nonyebussiness, i spelled that wrong. its good that young people are taking an intrest in saving our world!! keep it up!
  Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 10:25 pm #
73. shmo wrote:
  hey anyone who hates chris lets almost kill him to see howq he likes it them feed him to the whales!!!! that will show him!!!
  Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 10:30 pm #
74. Chris wrote:
  Yes. That would be fantastic, you Whale-Qaeda!
  Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 11:52 pm #
75. Chris wrote:
  Shmo, you amuse me.
  Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 11:54 pm #
76. shmo wrote:
  glad i do cause i will be writing stuff quite often. FYI!!!
  P.S. what does Whale-Qaeda mean?
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 12:04 am #
77. shmo wrote:
  ugh.. u piss me off soooo much!!!! u arogant, retarded, stupid fool!!!!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 12:05 am #
78. Chris wrote:
  
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 12:35 am #
79. wafflez wrote:
  i cant believe that u would make a website based on not saving the whales…u wanna kill whales? u might as well just fuckin kill me! better yet, kill urself! the world doesnt need bastards like u here to ruin it! ppl wanna help keep the world a better place and help the enviornment!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 12:44 am #
80. SHMO!!!! wrote:
  WOO HOO!!!! I LOVE U WAFFELZ! ( THATS ONLY CAUSE I KNOW U!) WE SAID! WE DONT NEED TO CHRIS, GO DIE IN A HOLE. AND I AM VERY LITERATE THANK U VERY MUCH!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 1:33 am #
81. SHMO wrote:
  ooops! spelling errors. it says well said.
  and we dont need u chris
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 2:05 am #
82. Cola wrote:
  you are one fucked up person. people like you should be extinct. i’d much rather have whales, rhinos, manatees, pandas, koalas, tigers, dolphins, elephants, ect. than assholes like you!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 2:58 am #
83. LOEN! wrote:
  seriously.. where does all this hate cum from? answer that!! ugh u r so fukin retarded! GO TO REHAB!!!!!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:02 am #
84. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:15 am #
85. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  [IMG]http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii46/xoxlucylou11xox/my%20sayings/whales-1.gif[/IMG]
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:18 am #
86. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:18 am #
87. SHMO!!! wrote:
  GO TO THIS AND READ IT!!!! IT TOTALLY APPLIES!!!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:19 am #
88. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  GO TO HELL!!!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:22 am #
89. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  CLICK ON MY NAME AND READ IT U BASTARD!
  Friday, May 2, 2008 at 3:22 am #
90. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  Click on this! how does that make you feel? what if you were a whale? do u want me to HARPOON u?! huh?!
  http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/whales-sl-06_small.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/whales.html&h=273&w=200&sz=9&hl=en&start=46&tbnid=Ea4oBdMsazeAsM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=83&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkilling%2Bof%2Bwhales%26start%3D40%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 1:50 am #
91. Queso wrote:
  you are a fucking dick hole and you need to go die in hell!!!!!!!! how would you feel if i came to your house and used all your fat for oil ( the world would never run out) so wat we cant save our own problems ( im 14 i dont have a family so if i want to save the world nothing is stopping me) go to HELL FAG
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 2:01 am #
92. SHMO!! wrote:
  WOO HOO!!!! U SAID IT QUESO! ugh!! chris u r such an asshole!! i f dont care about this planet, then y dont u die!!! cause noone would miss u and its people like u killing the world, while my frends and i are trying to save it!!
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 3:19 am #
93. kerryraine@yahoo.com wrote:
  you are pathetic, and i was not going to respond at all, you are one person, on this planet, you are just a protazoa, a germ, and most of all insignifficant , do you honestly thibk that what you say means anything to anyone.
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 10:10 am #
94. Chris wrote:
  No, Kerry, I don’t.
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 5:23 pm #
95. Chris wrote:
  You guys make me crazy but I just laugh. Please, read the article.
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 5:57 pm #
96. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  I LOVE WHALES!!!, those photos make me hungry. I only eat dolphin aggressive tuna.
  Queso and SHMO!!, the world doesn’t need your saving. Get over your sense of human importance. Get over the idea that extinction isn’t natural. It is natural. We are natural superpredators and it is our purpose to cause extinction. 98% of every life form that has ever been on this planet has become extinct, even before we arrived.
  yes Kerry, we are all unimportant, so is the whale in the ocean, and the sea turtle, and the great bald eagle. They are just species waiting for the natural end, and that end is extinction. It will come with or without us.
  Death is normal. Creatures attacking and eating other creatures is natural. This is life. This is nature. And as part of nature this is also what we do.
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 9:09 pm #
97. Queso wrote:
  we make a choice to kill or not so if i want to save the world I WILL AND I CAN so you can go fuck chris abraham! you are perfect for each other! how can whales and dolphins taste good? they are blubber…you are a disgusting pig!
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 10:08 pm #
98. I LOVE WHALES!!! wrote:
  are you kidding me?! THOSE PICTURES MADE ME GO FUCKING VEGETARIAN YOU FAT CANIBLE! YOU MIGHT AS WELL GO EAT YOUR DOG OR YOUR MOM! AFTER SEEING THAT MEAT IS DISGUSTING AND I REGRET EVER EATING IT! OMFG YOU MOTHER FUCKER DICK SUCKERS ARE SO GROSS!
  Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 10:12 pm #
99. SHMO!!! wrote:
  WHAT THE HELL IS UR FUCKIN PROBLEM PHILIP!!! YES EXTINCTION IS NATURAL, BUT THE REASON THAT THE WHALES ARE GOING EXCTINCT, IS BECAUSE OF FUCKIN DICK SUCKERS LIKE YOU THAT EAT THEM!! THAT IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO PREVENT! WITHOUT ASS HOLES LIKE YOU!, THERE WOULD BE NO PROBLEM!! YEA… U AND CHRIS SHOULD GO OUT, ITS PERFECT. UGH!!! U PEOPLE ARE SO FUCKIN SCREWED UP!! GO DIE IN A HOLE U ASS HOLES!!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 1:05 am #
100. Chris wrote:
  Mark, is that you? Mark, are you SHMO? You’re SHMO, right? Come on, you can tell me. It’s so good! You almost had be fooled. Good one!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 2:46 am #
101. Shmo! wrote:
  WHAT THE HELL U RETARD?!?!? MY NAME IS NOT MARK! I SWEAR TO THE WHALES THAT WE ARE TRYING TO SAVE!
  I’M NOT MARK
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 2:59 am #
102. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  We are natural too. It doesn’t matter if we’re the cause for extinction or not, because all species meet extinction at some point or another. It is normal and natural for species to become extinct.
  Also, I (like two thirds of the world) have no problem eating dog meat. A dog is just another beast and just more food for me.
  The world doesn’t need saving, because the world will continue without you, without whales, without any of what is now. All that is now will fade away. All that is now will move on into non-existence. It is normal. It is natural for what is to pass away, to give way to what comes after.
  Let me say this one more time:
  Extinction is natural.
  We are natural.
  We are a natural cause of natural extinction.
  It is okay for things to die and species to end.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 7:50 am #
103. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  It is only the human ego that makes us believe we are the caretakers or destroyers of the world. We are not so important.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 8:03 am #
104. Queso wrote:
  God made us to be the caretakes of the world he did not want us to be the destroyers of this wonderful world we have made into a a living HELL for every thing that we think is not as smart as us so yes it is up to us to save animals from dum fucking dicks like you all.Phillip, if your so hungry why i dont come HARPOON you and your family so then you all and have a nice big dinner! how would that make you feel! oh you would be ded so i guess that would not matter!!!!! and i would feel just fine!!!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 2:23 pm #
105. shmo! wrote:
  Phillip, it is niot our ego that wants to save the world, we simply want to preserve it! becuase of retards like u and chris, the world and many of it animals are going to die, NOT IN A NATURAL WAY!!! THEY ARE DIYING BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LKE YOU THAT WANT TO EAT THE WHALES! WITHOUT PEOPLE LIKE YOU IN THIS WORLD… THERE WOULD BE NO PROBLEM!! get it? or is that to confuzing for your stupid little head? u r such a fuckin pig!! u need help if u want to eat ur dog. yea y dont we just cum harpoon u and chris and them feed u to the whales?? HUH??? how does that sound?
  and dont talk to us like we are five! we are very intellegent teenagers THAT ARE TRYING TO PRESERVE OUR WORLD UNLIKE DICK SUCKER LIKE U!!!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 4:22 pm #
106. penny wrote:
  so u Kill the Manatees, Kill the Children, Kill the Tigers, Kill the Dolphins, Kill the Bay, Kill the World, Kill the Koala, Kill the Pandas, Kill the Rhinos, Kill the Elephant or Kill the Whales. Y???? if u kill them, then u will die too! ever thought of that smart ass? yea cause even if we loose plankton, our whole ecosystem will be screwed up!! so if u kill all those animals then u will die and go to hell! God would not want u to be in his kingdom later for u to screw that up to.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 5:08 pm #
107. penny wrote:
  so u Kill the Manatees, Kill the Children, Kill the Tigers, Kill the Dolphins, Kill the Bay, Kill the World, Kill the Koala, Kill the Pandas, Kill the Rhinos, Kill the Elephant and Kill the Whales. Y???? if u kill them, then u will die too! ever thought of that smart ass? yea cause even if we loose plankton, our whole ecosystem will be screwed up!! so if u kill all those animals then u will die and go to hell! God would not want u to be in his kingdom later for u to screw that up to.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 5:09 pm #
108. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  It does not matter if humanity becomes extinct. We are also a natural creature and that is an end we must face. So, no I don’t care if the current world passes away. There is no problem. People cause extinction, like any dominant animal in an ecosystem it will cause a hardship on the other creatures. This is normal and natural. We are natural creatures and eating and killing other creatures is natural behavior for human beings. Stasis is not natural. The world changes. Life forms and species pass away and new species are born from what is left behind. The survival of any species currently on this planet (including the human species) is not of paramount importance. The ecosystem will recover. It will change into something new, with life forms that have never existed before. Species die out and it is normal and natural. When they die out from us (a natural creature just like any other creature) it is also normal and natural. When we meet our own extinction it will be normal and natural. Life on this planet does not need us and will continue despite what we do to the current set of plants and animals on this planet. The worst we can do is end what is, but that does not end the future of life on this planet. Life has survived ice ages, meteors, volcanic ash laden skies, and more. This world will survive us. the individual species that exist now do not matter. Their fate, our fate, it is of no consequence. The world will simply change and grow, old will pass away and new will thrive. Weak will become extinct and strong will evolve. What you lack is a full vision of the world, of life, of the universe.
  Humanity is a natural creature.
  Extinction is natural.
  Extinction caused by a natural creature (such as humanity) is natural, normal, and okay.
  The extinction of the human species (or any species) is of no great importance in the world.
  The continuation of the human species (or any species) is of no great importance either.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 7:25 pm #
109. shmo wrote:
  SHUT THE HELL UP!! O my god.. yes it is natural, but the way that the whales and other animals are dyeing is NOT! so shut up! idc if its natural, th whales and other marine animals cannot go extinct if we want our ecosystem to survive without major issues. stop acting like a smart ass!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 7:59 pm #
110. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  The current ecosystem will simply be replaced by a new one. The whales may not be a part of it, we may not be a part of it. That does not matter. Change is normal. Extinction is part of that natural change. We are part of the natural order. That which we do is natural.
  The way the whales are dying is in fact natural. It is caused by the natural creature that is humanity.
  Species dying out is normal, natural, and okay. It is the way things have always been. It was this way before the human creature arrived, and will be this way long after we depart.
  The mistake in your thinking, is the idea that humanity is somehow not a natural creature. The idea that humanity is somehow outside of nature. That is simply untrue. WE are a natural product of the ecosystem. We are a natural result of what came before. What we do is part of nature.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 8:19 pm #
111. shmo! wrote:
  there is no dounght in my mind that we are natural, but they way that the whales are dying IS NOT NATURAL!without us, they would be fine! how do u not c this? yes things die and new things replace them, but in this case when a certain species hat is sellfish becuase they want to eat an endangered aimals, this is not natural. WHY ARE U THE ONLY ONE THAT DOES NOT SEE THIS?
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 9:07 pm #
112. shmo wrote:
  How old r u any way? cause u act like u r some old smart fart! but ur not!
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 9:08 pm #
113. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  Without us they would simply die off from some other reason or creature. Species eat and decimate other species. It is in fact natural for one species to obliterate other species. Why are there so few who realize this? The reason would be the mass media propagation of the idea that ecological stasis is the norm. In fact, ecological stasis is neither normal or natural.
  Ecological change, disaster, and rebirth are normal.
  Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 9:15 pm #
114. shmo wrote:
  so u get it? that without the humans they would not by extinct right now? o finally ur stupid liitle brain takes in some sense. that i what i have been trying to say, that yes the whales would have died without us, but the fact of the matter is that they are dying right now! yes all creatures eat eachother, but the human race is way to universal and we eat creatures that we dont need to eat, and that are supposed to live longer. GET IT YET??? if not i will be back later!!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 2:08 am #
115. Phillip J Rhoades wrote:
  The point being, it does not matter if humans are the cause or a meteor or some other creature. Extinction is normal and natural. Human beings are a natural creature leading to the natural extinction of other creatures. We are not outside of the ecosystem. We are part of the ecosystem. Nothing that we do is unnatural. Everything that we do is a natural extension of the ecological system. If we’re causing an extinction or many extinctions that is only a normal and natural progression of life and evolution. We are not above nature, and what we do is a part of the natural cycle.
  It is completely and totally okay in the grand and massive scheme of life on this planet for creatures to become extinct. yes, it’s even okay for a natural creature, like humans, to cause the extinction of other creatures. It is the norm. It is the way it has always been. It doesn’t matter if it’s us or something else. Everything meets extinction eventually.
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 4:14 am #
116. somebody wrote:
  This is awfull. of course we must save the whales!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:32 am #
117. no name wrote:
  SAVE THE WHALES!!! I am with shmo we HAVE 2 HELP THEM I MEAN WITHOUT THE HUMANS WHALES WOULD BE FINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:35 am #
118. Will Litchfield wrote:
  Don’t save the whales?
  What the hell is wrong with you, jesus christ. If whales are the devils servants then you are the devil!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm #
119. Chris wrote:
  Will Litchfield » What does that even mean? And, please don’t call me Jesus Christ.
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 7:44 pm #
120. Chris wrote:
  somebody » How are you saving the whales today?
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 7:44 pm #
121. shmo! wrote:
  thank you no name! as to you phillip… i dont inderstand why you need to wirte such long blogs, its really qite annoying! we need to save the whales becuase someone said before even if we loose plankton, you know those tiny miniscule things in our ocean, we willl be in big trouble. so imagine what would happen if we lost the whales or the manatees, or penguins, polor bears, etc. get my onsomble?
  Chris will litchfield is just a name it doesnt mean anything, dont be a wise ass. and i bet “somebody” is figuring out what to do, you cant expect everyone to just start something right away!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 9:43 pm #
122. 36987 wrote:
  wow! that was insightful!
  Monday, May 5, 2008 at 10:32 pm #
123. shmo wrote:
  ok i think that was a waste of time and space if i do say so myself
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 2:21 am #
124. Chris wrote:
  shmo! » That logic doesn’t work, Shmo. The lower the order the more important the species is: plankton and coral are essential ingredients of undersea life while whales and manatees; penguins and polar bears, higher up in the chain, are really less essential. Losing bees is a big deal, losing man isn’t. Losing algae is a big deal, losing the blue whale isn’t. That said, as we have been discussing via email, I am not a proponent of whale-killing and am in fact more of a green freak now that I have ever been. I moved to Europe, gave up a car, ride by bike, go to the green grocers and buy veggies without plastic bags and carry them home in a reusable cotton bag. When I need to go far, I choose the train, when I need to go close, I take the subway or mount my bike. My footprint is low and I am active in my community.
  What have you done for he whales or for the environment lately — besides attacking me?
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 6:46 am #
125. Chris wrote:
  shmo » Well, I am some old smart fart! I am 38! 38 is old!
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 6:48 am #
126. shmo wrote:
  geeezz!! what the heck! someones angry today?! thats good and i am gld that u are doing that. it doesnt madder where on the food chain the whales are. they obviously had a purpose on this earth, or they would not be here. why is that so hard for people to understand?? it doesnt madder where they are they are here and important, maybe not as important as other species, but they are still. After reading ur “posts” my friends were very alarmedd, and so we have been making flyers, that we are actually going to give out at school today! what do u think about that? huh? public awarness? we arent adults, so we cannot do as much, but we ARE DOING ALL THAT WE CAN WITH WHAT WE ARE GIVEN!!!!
  O and by the way, about my last six blogs were not directed to you, they were to Phillip! but thank you for telling me ur age, becuase i was wondering about that!
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 12:47 pm #
127. Chris wrote:
  shmo » I appreciate you for engaging with me and for opening yourself up to this conversation and for calling me out on being controversial — really, the title of my article has very little to do with the whales or the rain forests, it has to do with family, but I knew that “Don’t Save the Whales” and the graphic would get a lot of attention. How old are you?
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 1:53 pm #
128. shmo wrote:
  it doesnt madder what the objective is, you diplayed this on the iternet,and now you have to live with the consequences.
  I don not need to reveal my age, that is of no importance.
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 5:53 pm #
129. Chris wrote:
  shmo » Well, je ne regret rien.
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 10:33 pm #
130. shmo wrote:
  what the heck does that mean?
  Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 10:40 pm #
131. Chris wrote:
  shmo » “je ne regret rien” means, “I regret nothing.” In French.
  Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 2:31 pm #
132. shmo wrote:
  and how do u think that i would know that?
  well ok then, becuase u better be prepared for people to continue hating you for what you have said and posted, especially if the whale situation becomes worse.
  Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 10:04 pm #
133. Chris wrote:
  shmo » Well, I do expect illiterate and ignorant people to continue to write poorly-written sub-literate comments full of swearing and very little thought, that’s for sure. It has been happening for well over 3 years.
  Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 8:16 am #
134. shmo wrote:
  i think that the people that write on here are very literate, intellegent, and that swearing is common, becuase of the posts that u have posted. just shut up… u write on here too!
  Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 1:00 pm #
135. shmo wrote:
  and there is a lot of thought that goes into writing, i should think that u know that… but maybe not!
  Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 1:00 pm #
136. Chris wrote:
  shmo » There is no literacy or intelligence. The English and grammar is appalling — including your grammar and spelling. You should be ashamed. I hope you get into college.
  Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 3:06 pm #
137. shmo wrote:
  what the heck! this is only cause it doesnt madder! if i was turning in a paper for a grade then it would be good. when people are on here we dont care if the spelling is wrong!
  I’m not ashamed! idc.
  and i will get into college. there is still thought that goes into it, whether u believe it or not!
  Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 11:39 pm #
138. kevin wrote:
  BLOW ME!!!!!!………. A BUBLE!!! I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING THAT SHMO HAS SAID! THERE IS THOUGHT THAT GOES INTO THESE (WELL NOT REALY MINE) BUT WIT EVERYONE ELSES! AND YES I AM NOT USING GOOD LANGUAGE, BECUASE I DONT CARE WHAT U THINK! U NEED TO RECONSIDER UR IDEAS AND HOW U DISPLAY THEM!
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 3:21 am #
139. shmo wrote:
  well thank u for ur agreeing, but ur words did not really prove my point. but thats ok! thanks! i think so too!
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 3:22 am #
140. Chris wrote:
  shmo » You undermine all of your arguments because you communicate sub-literally… it really does madder (sic) — all the time. There is never a time when it doesn’t madder (sic). The entire world will dismiss comments like these — dismissing you as poorly-versed and poorly-informed. Ignorant, really, although I know you aren’t, Shmo.
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 7:04 am #
141. shmo wrote:
  shut up!! therea re times where u can use akranims and poor spelling ( like i just did) cause it
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 9:43 pm #
142. shmo wrote:
  noone cares!i am not poorly literate! infact i love to write and english is one of my best subjects. i will admit that i am a bad speller, but thats ok, cause WHEN I CARE ABOUT IT… i will fix it and re-read my work, but on here, iam not going to waste my time! get it?
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 9:46 pm #
143. shmo wrote:
  no one cares!i am not poorly literate! infact i love to write and english is one of my best subjects. i will admit that i am a bad speller, but thats ok, cause WHEN I CARE ABOUT IT… i will fix it and re-read my work, but on here, iam not going to waste my time! get it?
  Friday, May 9, 2008 at 9:46 pm #
144. lizzy wrote:
  well, i would first like to say that i have borwsed this web all over and have read every blog, so that chris could not call my uninfromed.
  Now, why would you evoke such an image on the web if ur point was totally different? i guess for attention- public awarness- but dont complain now.
  My family is complete. i have two wonderful children, i live in australia where i am a marine biologist, and my husband studies mamal existence. so why should we not save the world? even if my family was messed up, i would still save the world, becuase i care. all the “stupid wahle queadas” as u say are doing the same thing, but in smaller picture, as they cannot do as much as us adults. i do not agree that you descriminate against them, becuase they are trying to make our future bright and becuase they care. if we dont trust them… then who will? and who will fix our previous mistakes?
  as i have read these blogs, i can agree with both sides. not the family issues, but if we should get involved. as few have said, god has made us care takers of this world, but is it our job to fix it? i mean there are two sides, a) that god has everything planned out that we fix what has been odne, or b) that he has the future organized that we dont need to help. now to decide which one to go with, you need to follow what you believe, and stick with it, dont give up.
  as to the teenagers, keep up your commitment to our planet and follow you dreams, they will come true.
  Chris, i would appreciate if you would stop bashing my fututre and yours. they are literate and i see shmos point of how puncuation and speeling doesnt madder, i dont care right now either.
  Phillip~ i have to agree that you have some excelletn points! but then again i am back to my spiritual ways of believe what you believe.
  chris i must say that your arrogance is very… excentutating. it shows that you will commit to what you have started, and that is good even though you get so much grief. i do believe however that the grief you get is very apprehensive and undersatndable.
  thank you for reading my long speil, feel free to blog back to me for info and advice of how you can help.
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 4:02 am #
145. shmo wrote:
  wow! lizzy i am so glad that you have said that! you are seriously living my dream, i mean australia, thats my goal! well thank you, i am glad that adults see us as a bright beacon for them in the future! and that some think we contribute a lot! thank you
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 4:04 am #
146. Chris wrote:
  lizzy » How can you be an adult woman with children and a scientist husband and be able to write like this, “My family is complete. i have two wonderful children, i live in australia where i am a marine biologist, and my husband studies mamal (sic) existence. so why should we not save the world?” Mammal! Mammal! The job your husband does every day is studying Mammals, with two els. Besides, “excentutating” isn’t even a word, so I don’t even know what my arrogance is! Egad! The future is ruined if the entire island of Australia is subliterate, even the wives of marine biologists! Good lord! Please tell me that you’re a 14-year-old girl just pretending to be a mom and wife because otherwise you’ll make my cry.
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 7:28 am #
147. Chris wrote:
  shmo » What is an “akranims?”
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 7:29 am #
148. shmo wrote:
  see like i said, i am bad at spelling. like a.k.a. or t.t.y.l how they satnd for stuff. c’mon use some common sense and sound it out.
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 1:33 pm #
149. lizzy wrote:
  i hope you do cry, i am speaking like this to prove a point. i’m not going to say what it is, or you would never have to find out. we also have differnet ways of speaking, learn that you bone head!
  Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 1:36 pm #
150. cody wrote:
  yes, why try and save the world. After all it is the only planet in the solar system capable of supporting life!
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 12:51 am #
151. shmo wrote:
  thank you! exactly! well… actually so far! but thats still so true!
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 1:48 am #
152. Chris wrote:
  lizzy » There may be different ways of speaking but there is a dictionary for a reason and when speaking English, mammal is always spelled mammal and never mamal, especially when that personal supposedly has a husband who studies aquatic mammals. So, you’re just plain wrong, sub-literate, and — to be frank — either lazy or wrong.
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 12:59 pm #
153. Chris wrote:
  shmo » I will use common sense next time if you spend the little bit of time trying to sort out what I am trying to say, too. Meet me half-way.
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 12:59 pm #
154. shmo wrote:
  no! ok i am done trying to undertand what is wrong with you.
  to everyone that reads these, dont listen to chris abraham, do as much as you can to help our world and dont let anyone stear you away from what you believe.
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 7:14 pm #
155. Chris wrote:
  shmo » Oh, egad!
  Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 10:49 pm #
156. lizzy wrote:
  i am with shmo, there is no point in this website. afternoon chap! good bye!
  Monday, May 12, 2008 at 1:58 am #
157. Chris wrote:
  lizzy » I appreciate it. Thanks for coming.
  Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 2:35 pm #

Sex Position Secrets for Women from Dr. Sadie Allison

Chris Abraham — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:20:47 +0000

As you can see, I have been writing about Sadie Allison for years now — Dr. Sadie Tickles My Fancy with TickleKitty and See Sexy Dr. Sadie With Your Own Two Eyes On TV This Sunday — and just recently received 5 copies of Sadie’s new book, Ride ‘Em Cowgirl: Sex Position Secrets For Better Bucking. She’s a friend of mine — and she’s super cute and knows what she’s talking about! OK, I am sort of crushing.

Before that, Sadie penned three sex-help books, Tickle Your Fancy, Toygasms!, and Tickle His Pickle — but she has outdone herself with this book! Oh, and on page 97, the G-Spot is finally demystified! Come on fellas, you’re really missing out if you haven’t sorted out some of the magic little bits and pieces of lovemaking. Definitely a worthwhile endeavor for the both of you!

Here’s some of the stuff I have been able to steal from both Amazon and the Tickle Kitty website:

Enjoy an entire lifetime of sexual enrichment for the cost of a couple of cocktails!
Fully illustrated to guide you. Over 100 tasteful point-n-play illustrations help you visualize your exciting new moves together
Easy and fun to read. You’ll feel inspired by Dr. Sadie’s conversational style and hands-on encouragement
Filled with secret touches. You’ll explore all the strokes, squeezes and sensations your lover wants (but isn’t telling you)
She’ll start coming like crazy. Many of Dr. Sadie’s tips are designed to ignite the woman’s orgasms—including the wild and elusive “during intercourse” orgasm
You and your lover are invited. Come discover how to reposition your bodies together for the most satisfying, fulfilling, mind-blowing lovemaking ever!
Product Description
Why is this today s best sex position guide? Instead of twisting you into impossible pretzel poses, Dr. Sadie illustrates hundreds of ways to shape your favorite sex positions into a more passionate orgasmic fit for the two of you. Comfortably! Even better, Dr. Sadie s fun, empowering hands-on coaching inspires intimate new explorations and sensational erotic touches. You ll reveal your lover s deepest sexual desires (and yours, too!) while triggering powerful orgasms like never before especially hers! Whether you re newly intimate together or long-time lovers ready to take the monotony out of monogamy this is the one lovemaking guide ready to create a lifetime of excitement, passion, confidence, supergasms, and un-wipe-offable smiles every morning after. Try it! And read it together…in bed!
Check out what’s inside Ride ‘Em Cowgirl!:
1. Your Passion Cocktail—How to shake awake your lovelife
2. Supergasms—The secrets to supercharging your orgasms
3. The Art of Penetration—Sensual entry secrets just for him
4. The Art of Being Penetrated—Sensual entry secrets just for her
5. Missionary Possible—New pleasure angles when HE’S on top
6. Doggystyle—Enjoy new come-from-behind victories
7. Ride ‘em Cowgirl!—Exciting moves when SHE’S on top
8. Spooning—Rediscover the world’s most romantic position.
9. Clitilicious—How to arouse her orgasm trigger every time
10. The G-spot—Finding and stimulating her deep pleasure spot
11. Backdoor Boogaloo—Why couples now say yes to this old taboo
12. The HE-spot—Finding and stimulating HIS hidden pleasure spot
13. Voluptuous Loving—Positions designed for our larger lovers
14. Pregnant Poses—Exciting positions for the soon-to-be-mom
15. Outercourse—An exciting alternative of good messy fun
16. Location! Location! Location!—Reasons to skip the bedroom
17. Vive La Difference—Exciting new ways to fit your lover to you
18. Sexy Playthings—Choosing the right sextoys for you
Appendix: Safety First—How to practice safer sex every time
Position Index—So many positions, so much time!
Excerpts from Chapter 9: “Clitilicious”
As opposite as the sexes often seem, women and men share one important sexual similarity—the workings of their sexual pleasure centers. Here’s why:
The clitoris is micro-clustered with millions of the same type of erotic nerve endings found in the head of the penis.
Men become erect during arousal—and so do women! As the clitoris swells with blood, it swells in size. Next time, feel it grow from small and subtle to round and firm as foreplay
heats up.
There’s rarely an orgasm without direct stimulation to the head of the penis. Likewise, there’s rarely an orgasm if you ignore the clitoris.
The clitoris and the penis respond best when slippery-wet. Did you remember to pick up a good sex lube?
By understanding these similarities, it’s easy to see why it’s vital to stimulate the tiny but powerful clitoris directly, especially during intercourse. Guys…please read that last sentence again!
20 ways to supercharge intercourse
Between the two of you, you’ll find 20 warm, soft, active little clitoral stimulators that you’ll never misplace, need no batteries, and can lift the woman to the highest orgasmic peaks on earth.
They’re your fingertips—just add sex lube!
The fingertip secret is to touch the clitoris with slow, gentle caressing motions, matching the pressure and pace to the level of her arousal. Just be sure there’s lots of lubrication, start slow and soft, and you can’t go wrong.
Whoever is doing the arousing, vary your fingertip motions till you find a pattern that works: up ‘n’ down, side-to-side, round ‘n’ round, or even figure eights. For a real treat, try these motions with the tip of the penis.
About the Author
When you need answers about lovemaking, look to Dr. Sadie Allison, founder and CEO of Tickle Kitty, Inc., and ticklekitty.com. Dr. Sadie is a leading authority on human sexuality today, and author of the award-winning bestsellers Tickle His Pickle, TOYGASMS! and Tickle Your Fancy. She appears frequently on TV and radio, including E! Entertainment Television, Talk Sex with Sue Johanson, Dr. Drew s Loveline and the Bob & Tom Show. She is a sought-after speaker, and is often quoted in national magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Men s Health. She s a Licensed Doctor of Human Sexuality, having earned her degree from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She s also a member of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors & Therapists (AASECT). Her Tickle Kitty brand of sex-help books, sensual pleasure kits and sex lubricants enable her to assist more individuals and couples find greater joys in sexual pleasure.
Editorial Reviews
Review
YEE HA! for Ride Em Cowgirl!, Sue Johanson, host of TV s Talk Sex –Sue Johanson, host of TV s Talk Sex
Read this together and enjoy the pleasures to come., Ian Kerner, Ph.D., Author, She Comes First –Ian Kerner, Ph.D., Author, She Comes First
Dr. Sadie Allison combines sex education with erotic temptation so everyone can learn and enjoy. She s one of the great emerging sexologists of the 21st century., Dr. Ted McIlvenna, President, The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality –Dr. Ted McIlvenna, President, The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality

Review of My Beautiful Mommy by Abigail Jones

Chris Abraham — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:29:00 +0000

I adore Abigail Jones just because she’s Abigail Jones but also because of her mind, her politics, her ethics, her writing, and for her sense of humor. I have written about Abigail before in the form of Restless Virgins and Abigail Jones and Abigail Jones’ Newest Fan is Josielle for “Restless Virgins”. I don’t know if you have heard about the Children’s Book, “My Beautiful Mommy,” but it is pretty appalling.

A new children’s book, “My Beautiful Mommy,” helps parents tell their young kids why mommy, who just came home from the hospital in bandages, will now have a new nose and a thinner waist. Whether it’s your next-door-neighbor, her daughter, or Heidi Montag, plastic surgery has become business as usual.

Well, I am not the only person who is completely appalled — so is the lovely Abigail Jones, who wrote this scathing op-ed for the International Herald Tribune, my personal newspaper of choice in Berlin, Germany, titled The Mother of Perfection:

A new children’s book, “My Beautiful Mommy,” helps parents tell their young kids why mommy, who just came home from the hospital in bandages, will now have a new nose and a thinner waist. Whether it’s your next-door-neighbor, her daughter, or Heidi Montag, plastic surgery has become business as usual. But it wasn’t always this way.
Back in Victorian America, women embraced the ideal of natural beauty, associating makeup with the artificial faces of prostitutes and showgirls. In the 1910s, when the flapper was the measure of femininity, Vogue signaled a significant shift, urging readers to (discreetly) use lipstick and rouge to enhance their beauty. Decades later, Clairol’s legendary 1956 ad campaign – “Does she or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural, only her hairdresser knows for sure” – publicized another turn; women in the Eisenhower years were hiding the gray, enhancing the red, and becoming blonde, but they still wanted it to remain a private matter. Unnatural changes to one’s physical appearance were meant to be a secret – unless you were Marilyn Monroe.
Today, however, blonde highlights have become as typical as red nails. There’s the “mommy makeover.” From blogs to Facebook to reality TV, private life is more public than ever. Given the obsession with appearance and perfection, beauty has gone public, too, and plastic surgery is the latest frontier. Such physical changes are practically impossible to disguise, but the point is that many women don’t want to hide them at all.
Ashley Tisdale got a nose job. So did Ashlee Simpson. There’s Joan Rivers’s face, Tara Reid’s stomach, and Pamela Anderson’s chest, all of which we’ve seen plastered across the pages of gossip magazines, the photographs magnified and analyzed for inconsistencies or modifications.
Most celebrities don’t end up like modern-day Frankensteins Jocelyn Wildenstein and Michael Jackson, yet this pursuit for eternal youth is real. Plastic surgery, however, is hardly just a Hollywood pastime.
Women all over the United States are altering body parts in search of physical perfection. By now, everyone knows what a “mommy makeover” is (in case you missed it: liposuction, tummy tuck, and breast lift, with or without breast implants).
Yet aiming to regain one’s pre-pregnancy body is only part of the story. Women turn to a range of surgical and nonsurgical procedures to help turn back time, and, last year, they constituted 91 percent of all cosmetic surgery patients.
How many of these women have children? It’s a critical question, because aside from the emotional effects plastic surgery can have on patients, how does a mother’s plastic surgery affect her kids?
Teenagers are growing up in a society where you can buy what you weren’t born with. After a brief recovery, you, too, can have a button nose and slim waist or lips like Angelina Jolie. MTV’s “I Want A Famous Face” exposed teens’ obsessions with beauty in possibly the worst of the plastic-surgery-meets-reality-TV glut.
The show, which aired in 2004, featured young people getting surgery to make them look like their favorite Hollywood stars. Amidst pop culture’s quest for extreme beauty, who do girls look up to? Their moms, the very women who now pay thousands of dollars to look just like their daughters.
Though “mother” has always been heralded as the heart of the family, the attractive – and gracefully aging – matriarch, the rules are changing. Some women will do anything to stop the clock. Whatever happened to the idea that it’s the daughter’s turn? Today, the mentality has flipped: It’s mom’s turn, too. But women’s efforts at preserving their youthful appearances often put them in competition with their children (hello Dina Lohan and Kris Kardashian).
The publication of “My Beautiful Mommy” shows that plastic surgery belongs on that laundry list of issues (drugs, sex, alcohol) for parents to discuss at the dinner table. Many mothers will continue to get plastic surgery, so as long as they care for their relationships with their kids, maybe that’s enough. After all, is it worse when mothers strive to perfect themselves or when they strive to perfect their daughters?

Zardoz is the Most Interesting Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

Chris Abraham — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:06:03 +0000

Before I start, check out Sean Connery’s costume (left). Zardoz is the most important movie nobody (I know) has seen. Forget that there is a lot of nakedness and topless women; or, that you get to see a super-buff, 1974-era, Sean Connery running around for more than two hours in a pair of underwear; this is an important movie or utopia gone terribly distopian.

Zardoz is written and played out like a Broadway musical, with lithe dancer-actors, it is presented like a play. This is not a sophisticated movie but it will surely make you think. I would say that Zardoz is both brilliant and campy; insightful and kitchy, and brutal and actually very good at dealing with the concept of balance: in order to grow as men and as a society, one cannot — must not — merely separate physically from poverty, ignorance, sickness, and death; but, rather, integrate, integrate, integrate — or perish. Bravo! See it.

The quote that is most popular from the movie comes from the first scene. God Zardoz says,

“The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill!”

“In this cult favorite from John Boorman (Beyond Rangoon), 23rd century society is split into two castes — the overly civilized Eternals and the barely civilized Brutals — one of which is constantly controlling the other. The Brutals worship a huge stone figure known as Zardoz. When Zed (Sean Connery) begins to question the authenticity of this god, the film is able to offer some pointed commentary on class structure and religion.” Via Zardoz/60020833?trkid=14″>Netflix

“Zardoz BY ROGER EBERT / January 1, 1974

John Boorman’s ZARDOZ is a genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators. It’s set in an Ireland of 2293 that looks exactly like the Ireland of today, until you get inside the Vortex. And then suddenly everything is shimmering gowns and futuristic throne rooms and beautiful young people who glide around at an endless debutante ball.

These are the Immortals. They will never die. They cannot. Every time they try to, their bodies are relentlessly restored by the all-knowing mystical computer mind that runs the Vortex. There’s a catch, though: They can’t die but they can grow old, and for infractions, they’re sentenced to age a few years. If they don’t watch themselves, they might wind up as Immortal Seniles.

Outside the Vortex, a barbaric civilization survives. Slaves till the land and gather the crops, ruled over by sadistic masters who sometimes gallop around killing off the surplus population. One of the barbarians is Zed, played by Sean Connery as a cross between Tarzan and Prince Valiant. But one day, Zed (like Lord Greystoke, come to think of it) finds a child’s alphabet book. He teaches himself to read and then fanatically devours the contents of whole libraries (like Thomas Wolfe, come to think of it). Eventually he comes upon The Wizard of Oz and, in a moment of blinding insight, sees through the whole joke of his world’s social structure.
Zed has himself smuggled aboard the giant floating head of Zardoz, which rules hinterlands, and finds himself inside the Vortex. Here he is an object of great interest, because the Immortals, you see, having lost the ability to die have also lost the drive to procreate and are doomed to an eternity of detumescence. Zed labors with no such difficulty.

The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful DELIVERANCE. Boorman seems fascinated by stories which are disconnected from the ordinary realist assumptions of most movies; his LEO THE LAST (1970) gave us Marcello Mastroianni as the last of the big-time decadents, living in a mansion at the end of a deserted street in an eerie London.

Boorman puts a lot of heavy concepts into ZARDOZ, but seems uncertain whether he takes them seriously himself. There are sight gags (the attempt to turn on Connery with futuristic pornography provides the best) , there are group seances that seem lifted bodily from pajama parties, there is no end of special visual effects (every optical printer in England must have been busy for weeks), and at the end there’s a combination shoot-out and mercy-killing spree that is at once ridiculous, depraved and low camp.

Sean Connery wanders through all of this with a slightly bemused expression on his face. He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like “gathers all knowledge to himself”), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the center of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics (that’s another social class I forgot to mention), makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack) and finally turns into a fossil while the sound track milks Beethoven’s 7th for all it’s worth.

I remember standing in the rain once outside a theater that was playing LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Now there was a movie so complex and personal no one claimed to be able to understand itÑno, not even Time magazine. The people coming out from the previous show were shaking their heads and admitting that they, too, didn’t have a clue. And then it was our turn to go in and be mystified.

Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it. In the movie’s own terms, this much can be said for sure: It may not make you an Apathetic, but it will certainly age you by two hours.”

“Zardoz Review by Scott Weinberg

If your idea of perfect science fiction consists of space battles and droids, you’re probably best advised to steer clear of John Boorman’s ultra-trippy cult classic Zardoz. If, however, you can enjoy an ironic and entertaining fantasy mind-bender, then this one might be right up your alley. While overlooked by general audiences, Zardoz is one of the most feverishly adored cult movies ever. And while the movie certainly looks outdated and even silly at times, the deeply intelligent and thought-provoking issues under the surface challenge and entertain audiences.

The year is 2293 and most of humanity has devolved into mindless ‘Brutals.’ Their god Zardoz visits these savages periodically, instructing them to hunt down and kill any human ‘Breeders’ they come across. This is because “the penis is evil,” and humanity deserves to be wiped out. Zardoz appears to his violent followers as a giant flying stone head that spits out rifles and ammo, along with his murderous decrees. Zed (Sean Connery), one of the Brutals, stows away aboard the massive stone head, which takes him to ‘the Vortex.’ The denizens of the Vortex are a race of genetically superior, immortal beings that treat one another pretty rotten and long for death. When Zed climbs out of that giant head and starts poking around, things get really screwy.

Zardoz is packed to the gills with high-minded concepts. Take the ‘apathetics.’ These are immortals who have become so bored and disassociated during their eternal lives, that they are breathing, blank zombies. Another faction of the immortals is the ‘Renegades,’ who have become irretrievably insane. These elderly creatures are dumped off in an out-of-the-way building and forgotten. Zardoz is a movie with a lot to say about the ills of society.

Since it was made in 1973, it’s no surprise that Zardoz looks dated and even downright absurd. There are more than a few costumes and set designs that may have you rolling your eyes in disbelief, but it’s important to watch a movie like this with a sense of maturity. It may be difficult to take seriously dialogue like “The penis is evil,” but a willing (and preferably enthusiastic) suspension of disbelief is essential. Yes, that’s Connery as Zed, running around in what looks like a giant red diaper… and yes, there is a scene in which Zed is forced to achieve an erection while dozens of fascinated immortals stare on. But with the plethora of challenging and satisfying ideas being tossed around in Zardoz, it’s a tough movie to dislike.

It’s a testament to writer/director John Boorman that this movie ever saw the light of day. Zardoz was obviously a labour of love for him, and to this day Connery still lists this movie as one of his favourites. If you’re a fan of science fiction in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner, I would recommend Zardoz. While not as ‘polished’ as those other films, it deserves a place in anyone’s sci-fi collection.”

Plot Summary

* Genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
* Tagline: Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death
* Plot Outline In the far future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity’s achievements.
* Plot Synopsis: In the distant future Earth is divided into two camps, the barely civilized group and the overly civilized one with mental powers. A plague is attacking the second group after which it’s members cease to have any interest in life and become nearly catatonic. When Sean Connery one of the barbarians, crosses over, the tenuous balance in their world is threatened.
* Plot Keywords: Blindness, Bizarre, Book, Mutant Human, Crystal Ball, Head, Harvest, Mutation, Flying Head, Ring, Reverse Footage, Horseback Riding

- Actors: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, See more
- Directors: John Boorman
- Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Language: English, French
- Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rating R
- Studio: 20th Century Fox
- DVD Release Date: March 27, 2001
- Run Time: 106 minutes
- Average Customer Review: based on 113 reviews. (Write a review.)
- DVD Features:

* Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
* Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 3.0), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
* Commentary by director John Boorman
* Still photo gallery
* Concept Art and Pressbook Galleries

- From IMDb: Quotes & Trivia
- ASIN: B000059HAE
- Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,570 in DVD (See Top Sellers in DVD)

Nominations

* BAFTA Awards: BAFTA Film Award for Best Cinematography
* Hugo Awards: Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation

Trivia

* The scene where Zed (
* DIRCAMEO:(
* To help keep the movie cost down,
* Zed’s revolver is a Webley in 455 caliber.
* The exterior shots at the very opening of the movie were taken right next to director
* To make the shots of the stone head move into the mouth accurately, the camera was placed at the mouth and tracked backwards, and the film reversed in the lab.
*
* The government initially refused to allow the production team to import the guns for the movie into Ireland because of terrorist attacks occurring at the time.
* Radio spots (available on the DVD) were narrated by
* According to John Boorman, Sean Connery found it incredibly difficult to get work when he abandoned the James Bond role a second time after Diamonds are Forever. Thus, Boorman was able to hire Connery very cheaply for this project.

Goofs

* When mortality comes to the vortex, several “dead” characters can be seen moving.
* When the exterminators on horseback are killing the brutals, tire tracks can be seen on the wet beach sand.
* Early in the film, when the weapons are spewed out of the floating head’s mouth, a crewmember’s arm can be seen throwing them.
* About three minutes into the movie, when the floating head is in the clouds, part of a car can be seen in the top right corner of the screen.
* In the scene where Zed discovers the floating book, you can clearly see the strings suspending it in midair.

Movie Connections

* Remade as: Planet B: Mask Under Mask
* References: Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey
* Referenced in: Excalibur, Dark City, The Big Tease, Wonder Boys, Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy
* Featured in: To the Galaxy and Beyond with Mark Hamill, The Fly Papers: The Buzz on Hollywood’s Scariest Insect

Quotes

* Arthur: It was I! I bred you! I led you!
Zed: And I have looked into the face of the force which put the idea in your head. You are bred and led yourself.
* Friend: We’ve all been used…
Arthur Frayn: …and reused…
Friend: …and abused…
Arthur Frayn: …and amused!
* Zardoz: The gun is good.
Exterminators: The gun is good.
Zardoz: The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!
* Zed: Stay behind my aura!
* Consuella: The brutal is now in fourth hour of unconscious sleep. It’s astonishing that Homo Sapiens spends so much time in this vulnerable condition, at the mercy of its enemies.
* Zed: I want the truth.
May: You must give the truth, if you wish to receive it.
Zed: I’m ready.
May: It’ll burn you!
Zed: Then burn me.
* The Tabernacle: Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four. Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four.
* Zardoz: Zardoz is pleased.
* The Tabernacle: Vote, please. Vote, please.
* The Tabernacle: I cannot give information which may threaten my own security.
* [watching his memory-scan video of hunting down Brutals] Zed: I love to see them running. I love the moments of their deaths – when I am one with Zardoz.
* [first lines]
Arthur Frayn: I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived 300 years, and long to die. But death is no longer possible, I am immortal. I present now my story – full of mystery and intrigue. Rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep within a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may! Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in showbusiness too?
* [to Zed] Consuella: I have hunted you so long, I have become you.
* George Saden: I think what I think. I hate you all. I hate you all. I hate you all. Including me…
* [about to Liberate Consuela] Zed: All that I am is gone.
* [Zed breaks the heart of the crystal] The Tabernacle: You have destroyed us. You are alone.
* Consuella: Penile erection was one of the many unsolved evolutionary mysteries surrounding sexuality. Every society had an elaborate subculture devoted to erotic stimulation. But nobody could quite determine how this…
[Consuella points to a diagram of a male penis and scrotum]
Consuella: becomes this.
[Consuella points to a diagram of an erect penis and scrotum]
Consuella: Of course, we all know the physical process involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence, with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject. Sexuality declined probably because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve. And we are no longer victims of this violent, convulsive act which so debased women and betrayed men. This brutal
[Sean Connery]
Consuella: , like other primates living unselfconscious lives, is capable of spontaneous and reflexive erection. As part of May’s studies of this creature, we’re trying to find, once again, the link between erotic stimulation and erection. This experiment will measure autoerotic stimulation of the cortex, leading to erection.
* The Tabernacle: Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated. As Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete and Second Level meditation took its place.
* Zed: What is it you want?
Friend: Sweet death. Oblivion.
Zed: For yourself, or for the whole Vortex?
Friend: For Everybody. An end to the human race. It has plagued this pretty planet for far too long.
Zed: You stink of despair. Fight back! Fight for death, if that’s what you want.
Friend: I thought at first you were the one to help. But it’s hopeless. All my powers have gone.
* May: Friend, I cannot sanction this violence and destruction.
Friend: It’s too late, May. There’s no going back.
May: Don’t destroy the Vortex! Let us renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time…
Friend: Time? Wasn’t eternity enough?
Zed: This place is against life. It must die.
May: I have my followers. Inseminate us all, and we’ll teach you all we know. Give you all we have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle. Or be broken.
Friend: An end to eternity.
May: A higher form.
Zed: Revenge.
* [to Consuela] Zed: Can you unknow what you know of me?”

Zardoz from Wikipedia

Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery in one of his first post-James Bond roles. The film contains a mix of mythology, a bizarre, sprawling plot filled with twists and incongruities, and wide-ranging satirical and allegorical stabs. Filmed on a small budget of US$1 million, Zardoz‘s mixture of cerebral, philosophical sci-fi was in complete contrast to Boorman’s previous film, the brutal thriller Deliverance. The film was shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth. An attempt to market the film to the post-2001: A Space Odyssey audience was unsuccessful, although the film has since developed a cult following.

Plot

In a future post-apocalypse Earth (2293), the human population is divided into the immortal “Eternals” and mortal “Brutals”. The Brutals live in a dark-ages wasteland. The Eternals, who live apart in various “Vortices” (singular “Vortex”), hidden bastions of civilization, lead a luxurious but aimless existence. The contrast between the two groups is stark. In general, calamity after calamity has reduced life on much of the Earth to dire subsistence levels. The distant Eternals are unknown to most people. The only contact between the groups is through a religious warrior class called the “Exterminators”, who kill and terrorize other Brutals at the orders of a huge flying stone head called Zardoz. The stone head supplies them with weapons and ideology in exchange for the food they collect.

Zed (Connery), an Exterminator, hides aboard Zardoz during one trip, “killing” its Eternal operator-creator, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy). Arriving in the Vortex as a stowaway, Zed meets two Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman). They possess psychic powers, and make Zed a prisoner of the community of decadent effetes in order to study him. Zed is put to work as a physical laborer under the direction of subversive troublemaker called Friend (John Alderton).

Over time Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by an AI called the Tabernacle. Through their vastly extended lifespan the Eternals have grown bored, corrupt, and impotent. They spend days stewarding the vast knowledge of humanity while doing little themselves besides participating in bizarre rituals and mass meditations navel gazing. As they never die and the passage of time is largely meaningless as a result, violating the complex set of social rules, and thereby going “Renegade”, results in artificial aging. An Eternal thus aged will remain as the feeble elderly for the rest of time. More recently some have fallen into catatonia through an odd mental illness, forming a new social strata the Eternals call the “Apathetics”.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Zed is not quite the “brutal” the Eternals believe him to be. He very quickly divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, and starts to play an increasingly proactive role among the Eternals. The backstory develops to reveal that Zed was aware of the true nature of Zardoz, having been led to an old book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; the origin of the name Zardoz (Wizard of Oz). After revealing that Frayn had led him to the book and taught him to read, the story is completed; Zed is the ultimate creation of Frayn’s long-running experiment in creative eugenics, using the Exterminator class to control the Brutals with the aim of breeding a superman to save humanity from its dead-end status quo. He had led Zed to understand the nature of Zardoz, hoping he would use it to infiltrate the Vortex.

The Eternals discover the deceit and “age” Friend, while attempting to control Zed. But Zed is actually superior in intelligence to the eternals, and is eventually able to withstand their psychic powers. He destroys the Tabernacle, after which the Vortex is invaded by other Exterminators who bring death to the majority of Eternals, typically with their blessing, given the novelty of the events. A few Eternals escape to make a new life outside the Vortex among the Brutals, carrying the knowledge of civilization. The allegorical ending shows Zed and Consuella producing a child, growing old and dying naturally, whilst the sound of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony swells in the soundtrack.
Spoilers end here.

History

Zardoz is is notable for being the first time a search engine (or a precursor) is shown in a film, retrieving visual images from a database, years before the personal computer was invented. Arthur Frayne is shown instructing the computer to search for specific images of Cars in the way that we associate with search engines, except with voice recognition software .

Production

In the DVD commentary Boorman repeatedly complains about the low budget of the film. Nevertheless he attempted to fill it with a sort of concept art. The Exterminators hunt down the Brutals while wearing large red paper mache facemasks, loincloths and matching bandoliers. The Brutals are instead dressed almost universally in sport coats and jeans, except for young women, who are dressed in “caveman” garb. If this were not enough, in one scene Zed escapes from the Eternals by dressing in a wedding gown. The head of Zardoz, arguably the most important set in terms of plot development, is clearly made of painted paper mache. Most of the sets in the Vortex are equally low quality, variously consisting of large inflated plastic sheets, “olde English” villages, or pastel decorated sets – the Tabernacle is simply a room filled with mirrors.

Reception

In 2004 the magazine Total Film described Connery’s costume (consisting of a ponytail wig, leather knee boots, and a loincloth which bears a strong resemblance to a giant orange nappy or diaper) as the number 1 “dumbest decision in movie history”.

References in popular culture

This article contains a trivia section.
Content in this section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article or removed, and the trivia section removed.

* The DC Comics character Vartox is a near-carbon copy of Zed. He has an exact replica of Zed’s clothing, brown hair, and receding hairline. The character’s name is even close to sounding like the “Vortex” of the film.
* The video game Time Bandit, which has several science fiction references, mentions the “spirits of Zardoz“.[citation needed]
* The video for “Dreams” by the rock band TV on the Radio features a huge stone head like the one in “Zardoz” that disintegrates at the video’s end.
* The webcomic Questionable Content referred to Zardoz multiple times in comic number 830].
* Saul was dressed as Zed in an episode of Saul of the Mole Men, “Fun King Johnny”, when he was on trial by combat.

Quotes

If the content can be changed to be more encyclopedic rather than just a list of quotes, please do so and remove this message. Otherwise, you can help by formatting it per the Wikiquote guidelines in preparation for the duplication.

* Zardoz: The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill! [Zardoz proceeds to vomit a torrent of rifles and ammunition for his followers to use.]

My Former Smart Mobs Blog Mob Bio

Chris Abraham — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:37:54 +0000

Smart Mobs Blog Mob: The resource-finders extraordinaire who keep the Smart Mobs Blog up to date (circa 2005):

“Chris Abraham is a strategist and technologist at New Media Strategies. He has been a technologist for over a decade, focusing on online education, virtual community building, web publishing, and blogging. Chris is especially interested in memetics and emergence and how they direct culture. Chris was found in the company of a brood of Unicorns and is believed to have been bred for his skills in magic.” It is my favorite bio ever.

Martin Marty is a Gift to America and My Favorite Theologian

Chris Abraham — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:40:28 +0000

I got to spend some time hanging out with Martin Marty at Renaissance Weekend a couple years ago. All I knew about him was gleaned from lunches, dinners, and panels together. During last night’s run, my friend Marty Marty started speaking into my iPod earbuds in the form of an interview on Speaking of Faith, America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty Download MP3, Listen, Podcast, and uncut interview with Martin Marty (1:38). God bless Martin Marty and thank you, Krista Tippett.

Transcript of America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty
Billboard:
Krista Tippett, host: I’m Krista Tippett, today a conversation about religion in America, with one of the great public theologians of our time, Martin Marty. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are now the stuff of daily headlines: the rise of religious fundamentalism across the world, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the vigor of evangelical Christianity in American life. Marty offers historical and personal perspective.
Mr. Martin Marty: I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts, and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both.
Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty on America’s changing religious landscape. This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett. For decades, Martin Marty has been watching developments that are the stuff of daily headlines and partisan rhetoric: the vigor of evangelical Christianity in politics, the decline of the Protestant majority in American culture, and the rise of religious fundamentalism around the world. Today we’ll probe the historical perspective of this leading scholar of religion. We’ll discuss what’s really new in religion as a force in American culture, politics, and daily life.
From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”
Martin Marty has been called the foremost interpreter of religion in America today. The National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are just a few of the honors he has amassed. He’s served on U.S. presidential commissions and directed a visionary research project on religious fundamentalism. The University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years, has created the Martin Marty Center to continue his work on public religion.
But for all his celebrity and scholarship, Martin Marty draws crucial insight from his own personal grounding in the mainstream religious life of American culture. He began his working life not as a scholar but as a pastor. He was born into a Lutheran family in 1928, in the Nebraska of Dust Bowl and Depression, where his father was a teacher and a church organist.
Mr. Marty: We were a churched family, of course, it was my father’s profession, and I’ve reminisced with some folks about how I got babysat next to the organ bench and had to sit through long funerals as a child, and somehow it didn’t turn me off from it all. I have a brother and a sister, and the three of us were well-schooled in literature and music and art, and also a very close basic sense of the faith of ordinary people, and I’ve tried to keep some sense of that in my lifework.
Ms. Tippett: Much of Martin Marty’s investigation into American religious life has centered on the dominant majority religion at the heart of our culture, the many denominations of mainline Protestant Christianity. But in our time, surveys show that majority is disappearing even as many Americans perceive the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity to be growing. In his 2004 book, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, Marty describes the centuries from 1607 to 1955 as an era in American history in which “Protestants ran the show.” That began to change and take on new dimensions in the 1960s, an era vivid in the American popular imagination for political movements and the Vietnam War. For Martin Marty, it was also a decade of astonishing religious turning points whose significance went unnoticed. I asked him to walk me through the religious watersheds of the 1960s that began to erode the dominance of mainline Protestantism.
Mr. Marty: The biggest single event that hit this country happened in Rome, and that’s the Second Vatican Council. That is, Protestantism always knew what it was because it knew what Catholicism was, and it was over against that. Suddenly, Catholicism is friendly. It moves out into the public sector. The GI Bill puts Catholic young people into universities. They soon became the most educated group in the country, and Protestants were thrown off balance by that.
Secondly, it’s the beginning of the surge of evangelicalism within Protestantism, which — in those days, I imagine a lot of the Protestant leaders kind of sneered at Billy Graham and looked down their nose at tent revivals and so on and didn’t pay much attention to see how it was coming. And suddenly in the ’60s, I visited Berkeley, you had the Jesus People, little girls getting baptized in their bikinis, and change of worship from a certain kind of formality. The rock bands were coming in. And another huge infusion was an awareness of the religions of the East. You might keep going to your Presbyterian church, but you start doing yoga and you start doing Buddhist disciplines, etc. And you didn’t stop being Presbyterian, but you were of a different sort. You didn’t take it all for granted.
Ms. Tippett: I also think that something we’ve lost a memory of is how much tension there was between Catholics and Protestants, right, in this country, between different kinds of Christians, in a way that is absolutely unimaginable now. And I mean, personally for you, was that shift surprising?
Mr. Marty: I, in 1956, was invited to join the staff of The Christian Century, which was the towering Protestant voice. Today it still is, if not towering, a strong voice, but it’s ecumenical. It has a lot of Catholic writers; it has a lot of evangelical writers. But at that time, it was Protestant, and it was anti-Catholic. In 1950, on the cover of The Christian Century, there was an article, “Pluralism, A National Menace.” Pluralism was they’re worried about Catholicism. When I joined the staff five years later, pluralism was the best game in town. My first visits to campus, you always had one priest, one minister, one rabbi; that was called pluralism back then. But through that all, the Protestant still was in a privileged position. It simply was a kind of a reflex: ‘We’re the largest. We’re the ones who left our stamp on America’s literature, its poetry, its statecraft, etc.’
I’m going to say something in case I’m sounding critical.
Ms. Tippett: You can sound critical if you’d like to.
Mr. Marty: I’d be happy to be critical, but I don’t want to be distorting what I want to be. And that is to say, for all of that reflexive sense of establishment, I think I’m being a neutral, value-free historian when I say I don’t know any time in human history that somebody that powerful yielded that gracefully. In the previous century, Protestantism was often used — white Protestantism — to enslave, and it was used to justify the reservating of the Indians. But in the 20th century, Protestants have sort of said, ‘All right, you’re making your case. We’ll make room for you.’ They weren’t doing that much before the mid-’50s, but from then on in, they have done it even at the expense to their own identity.
Ms. Tippett: And I’m sure you’ve read these statistics that are now coming out, that perhaps today or tomorrow or six months from now, there will no longer be a Protestant majority in this country. And it depends on how people measure these things but, still, it seems significant when what is replacing the number of people who say that they’re Protestant are more people who say that they have no religion at all. In fact, it’s very high among people who were born in 1980 or later. And then there’s a category that’s doubled, of people who call themselves just Christian, right, who don’t identify with a specific tradition. How do you explain these statistics?
Mr. Marty: First of all, I think that Protestantism and Catholicism have very common fates here. They both have had trouble holding their younger generation. In some respects, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the northern part of the United States share a lot with Canada, which is far less involved with church, or Western Europe, which is far, far less involved. Incidentally, that little section, I call it the spiritual ice belt: Western Europe, the British Isles, Canada and the northern U.S. We are really exceptions in the world, and we are really having a hard time catching up with understanding the rest of the world.
Protestantism is not in trouble around the world. I am a Lutheran, and we’ve had 300 years to get about eight million people. In 15 years from now, the African Lutheran churches will have added as many people as it took us 300 years to get. And that’s true of many other Protestantisms and Pentecostalisms. Every day there are 23,000 new Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, and half of them would be called Protestant, if often in the Pentecostal version. So around the world, it’s not a losing force. No longer, however, does it make the reference it once did to Western Europe and its daughter, the United States.
What will that mean for the United States? I don’t think we’re going to wake up some day and see total change. There’s a strange thing that hundreds of years after the vital life of a religion is past, there’s still a strong influence. We’re still living off some of the Greek religious influences. We’re living off a lot of medieval Catholicism. Our very universities are inventions of that. Our hospitals are inventions of that. So in a sense, meanings, ideas — in this case, ideas of liberty, freedom — that came very often from Protestants will live on even if not everybody goes to church. Still, the churches have been the places where these stories get renewed regularly.
Ms. Tippett: OK. I mean, I just wonder, personally, is this something that troubles you?
Mr. Marty: I don’t think I wake up in the morning having great worries about that. You can tell from what I’ve said I have a global view of humanity and of religion, and it moves around a lot. In the 1930s a great Catholic, Hilaire Belloc, said, “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” Well, that was true then. Now the cathedrals are empty, but their granddaughters are full in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I certainly think that some things borne by the Protestant message would be a great loss. One of its gifts to America was its sense that we’re scripted. It’s a scriptural faith, it’s a Christ-centered faith, but it doesn’t mean that all virtue and all morality goes with you. And I think that’s been a nice irritating voice in classic Protestantism, which is, no matter how far along you’d come, God was holding you to a higher standard.
Ms. Tippett: Religious historian and author Martin Marty. One of the most popular of his over 50 books is Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in American. He is considered by some to be a bridge between the devotional and scholarly worlds of liberal mainline Protestantism and evangelical Christianity.
Ms. Tippett: Let’s talk about evangelical Christianity, which at the same time that there are some statistics of people becoming less religious, there’s certainly a sense that religion in some ways is more of a force now. I mean, I think there would be people who would take your phrase, “When Protestants ran the show,” and say that a certain kind of Christianity is becoming almost a controlling force or, you know, we have an evangelical Christian in the White House. I mean, how are you observing what’s happening now, with your broad view of things and of history?
Mr. Marty: I think those of us who write this kind of history are a little puzzled by the naiveté of the — well, people in journalism, in the media, in the general public, who think all this just got invented in the last four years and couple months. It has very deep roots. I trace it not to the ’20s. Nobody cared about the religion of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. And Roosevelt was a mainline Protestant, Episcopalian, and he could draw upon these themes very much. Harry Truman was a salty Baptist. Truman and Carter and Clinton, the three Baptist presidents of the century, know the Bible best. They can just recite reams of it at any moment. Eisenhower started having Billy Graham come by. When we say “evangelical” today, it’s almost a long shadow originally of Graham. Today, evangelicalism is multi-headed. It’s all over the place. You can’t really generalize about it much anymore, but in its purer form, it came up in that way.
And, yes, in ’64, they really galvanized around Barry Goldwater and the kind of conservatism. And they didn’t get very far because he didn’t get very far, but they got angry about being dismissed and so on. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter ran, he’s the first one who would say, ‘I’m born again,’ first one to say, ‘I had a personal experience with Jesus,’ but they soon dropped him because they didn’t like him politically. Ronald Reagan was not born again, but he was friendly to them. But you could see this long trend coming.
Robert Handy, one of our major historians, once wrote a little book on The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935, because the mainline churches were already beginning to lose some of their membership, their status. They were depressed. But Joel Carpenter, another historian, has since pointed out, through it all the fundamentalists who’d been disgraced in the 1920s started organizing. They bought radio stations. They started Bible colleges. They had magazines. And they were building a world inside the world. And suddenly along come people like Billy Graham and presidents who favor it, and you have a very different kind of pattern, so that by the time — I would say by the time of Ronald Reagan, it became so vivid that the normal clergy in the White House would be evangelists, usually, until recently, of a rather moderate sort.
Ms. Tippett: It also seems to me, though, that a mistake is made in media in lumping together — as you said, evangelicalism is a — there’s a multiplicity of evangelicalism, and evangelicalism has a very different history and theology in some cases from Pentecostals and certainly from fundamentalists, although there is some overlap. How would you explain the distinctions?
Mr. Marty: All right. To the sociologists, the slightly more than one-fourth of America that would be called evangelical includes fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and conservative Protestant denominations. And they really have tremendous differences except when they converge on highly focal and, let’s say, useful political points: gay marriage or something of that sort. But for the most part, they’re much more diverse.
Until around the turn of the last century, all Protestants were called evangelicals; all evangelicals were called Protestant. During the century, though, you started having the liberal churches accenting more the Biblical story applied to social life, economic life, cultural life, whereas those who were evangelical started dealing with private life, personal life. That still goes down in our own time.
Ms. Tippett: Why did that happen? How did that happen?
Mr. Marty: Well, I think the Protestants who ran the show had the sense that you can pass a law and get rid of slavery, you can join secular people to get antitrust laws, you could have child labor laws. All the while then, the revivalists, Billy Graham’s ancestors — the greatest being Dwight Moody, a Chicago evangelist — looked out at the world and saw it in trouble, and he said, ‘The world is a flood, and God gave me a lifeboat and said, “Moody, rescue all you can.”‘ And I think they concentrated on heaven, on saving souls. And then on moral issues, they chose those over which an individual could have control: You shouldn’t gamble. You shouldn’t swear. You shouldn’t drink.
Now what’s so interesting today is, what have come to be called social issues in recent campaigns are not social, they’re personal enlarged. In other words, the evangelicals and the fundamentalists and the Catholic conservatives concentrate on what goes on in the bedroom, and they don’t talk much the way classic Protestants did about should the government be involved with poverty, with waging peace, all of those kinds of things. It’s been their genius to organize that in our own time so they have great political power. The Republican Party in particular has seen that that can be amassed and help get votes for things outside of the bedroom.
Ms. Tippett: Although there certainly are Catholics and evangelicals who are mobilized around poverty and those more classic kinds of social justice issues.
Mr. Marty: Oh, my, yes. Catholics are very much upfront. And some of the strongest social involvements of today are among evangelical Protestants. But that kind of Catholic and that kind of evangelical and that kind of Protestant are themselves in a kind of a loose coalition today. Not as powerful as the personal morality people, but there’s a lot of power there. A lot of witness goes on.
Ms. Tippett: Religious scholar and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today we’re exploring Martin Marty’s historical and personal perspective on the changing religious dynamics in American culture. For a half-century, he has studied the effect of increasing pluralism on American Christianity. He’s also been a visionary scholar of religious fundamentalist movements around the world.
Ms. Tippett: I want to talk about the Fundamentalism Project that you did but, I mean, before we actually talk about fundamentalism, I’d like to note something that I thought was very interesting. I was reading your address that you gave at the conclusion of that project to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You titled it, “Too Bad We’re So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project Projected.”
I’ll just read this quote: “The Fundamentalism Project scholars have found that fundamentalists tend to turn intimate and private issues into public affairs. Concern for the zones of life closest to the self — world view, identity, sexuality, gender differentiation, family, education, communication — tend to take priority over macroeconomic concerns.”
So my question to you is, is there something at the origins of fundamentalism that is also moving our culture as a whole right now?
Mr. Marty: OK. One quick word about fundamentalism. The fundamentalism we studied, to which you’re referring, is not your friendly neighborhood fundamentalist down the block. Our assignment was to study the militancies. When we started this, a historian friend said, ‘When you’re studying American fundamentalism, Marty, remember there are no machine guns in the basement of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.’ We were really studying a different kind of thing there, and yet there are certain things everybody had in common.
In the roots of fundamentalism in our culture, it started, of course, anti-evolution, anti-biblical criticism, and then it started taking a moral cast. But its moral cast, again, was the things that you should take control of. Virtue, advice were their big terms, not social justice and social change. Take what is a virtuous person; pass laws to promote that virtue. And I certainly am leaving a wrong impression if I’m suggesting that bedroom and clinical issues don’t have social consequences. They have huge social consequences. If divorce becomes more easy and grows and families disintegrate and children don’t have models in the parental world and they’re not educable, it’s a huge difference in the culture. So they don’t have a monopoly on it either in its invention or its present carrying out, but I think more of them restrict their energies to that and, again, it’s a very politically popular thing to do.
Ms. Tippett: But here’s my question: This description that you gave of fundamentalism, that people turn to intimate and private issues and that these take priority over macroeconomic concerns, could actually, I think, describe maybe a majority of Americans this year. So what I’m wondering is if there’s something that you see that gives rise to that tendency within fundamentalism that is actually alive in our culture as a whole right now.
Mr. Marty: I think two things are going on. On one level, around the world people are having trouble with their identity, their belief — whom do I trust, who trusts me? And so a phrase we used in The Fundamentalism Project, around the world, there is a massive, convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and over-againstnesses, to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing the same thing. Now, look at American life. We don’t do it the way they do it in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. We don’t veil women or anything like that, but we’re clustering more tightly. ‘We’re the virtuous, and they’re the vicious. We’re the good, they’re the evil.’
Ms. Tippett: I guess I’m still wondering how you understand the human and spiritual–maybe not theological, but the spiritual roots of this focus that seems to have become so definitive in our public life, on private issues of morality as the issues of morality.
Mr. Marty: I think that all through Christian history, anything related to sexuality was troubling and exciting. Clerical celibacy for 1700 years in Catholicism shows this, how much of an upheaval was caused when Martin Luther got married and when the Protestant clergy married. Every change in sexual mores is troubling because that’s so close to the roots of creation and transmission of life. Now what’s happened in our own time, I argue, every church body from the Mennonites to the evangelicals to the Roman Catholic Church are torn up over two words: sex and authority. By sex, I mean everything in the biological cycle, from in vitro fertilization or stem cell research, abortion, birth control, cohabitation outside of marriage. All these things are troubling all the churches, some of them sweeping…
Ms. Tippett: And dividing people in them.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes. Some people sweep these things under the rug or close their eyes to it or whatever. But I think it’s very hard to get to the root of your part of the question as to why this longtime concern for personal morality, sexual morality, suddenly became so politically powerful. On one level, let’s be honest, it’s very exploitable. Everything else I’ve talked about — caring for peace, caring for justice, caring for feeding — these are all relative things. How much foreign aid budget you’re going to put into it, how much energy you’re going to put into it. With abortion, you either have an abortion or you don’t. You either perform gay right marriage or not. So it can be a big matter of identity and boundary, and I think that’s very popular in a time when people lose their identity and their boundary. I always say that the laws on gay rights and the practices toward them will be changed when every tenth evangelical minister’s daughter comes out. That is, when it gets close to you, you see these differently.
Ms. Tippett: So liberal — let’s say, Democrats and even liberal religious people who also have been struggling to find a voice in this last period will often hearken back to the days when it was the social justice issues that mobilized people and that had political force. Did those issues somehow achieve that force in the ’60s because they became more personal for people and, I mean, could you imagine that happening again?
Mr. Marty: Oh, I think so. The personalization of civil rights, you suddenly had a face: Martin Luther King. You suddenly had causes: the four little Birmingham girls who were bombed. These are very, very vivid things so that the president of the United States had to get on television one night, and after you’d seen the pictures of the dogs attacking children and police attempts to put down blacks in the South, suddenly it did become personal.
I should also say in fairness — I’m really trying to be as accurate as I can — these involvements of white Protestants in peace movements and civil rights movements that was never massive. That was often leadership. Some people would call them generals without armies. And there’s where I think we historians have kept saying a lot of evangelicals were up close, they were getting their hands dirty. The Salvation Army, for example, is an evangelical movement, one of the oldest. So we don’t have any absolute lines here at all. I just think that the sudden choice to organize on the virtue-vice line, the ‘we’re entirely right and they’re entirely wrong’ line, was very exploitable in politics, and in many, many states that has come to prevail as the main political agency. Nobody would have dreamed of that 20 years ago.
Ms. Tippett: Historian and author Martin Marty. This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, more of his reflections on the nature of fundamentalism, separation of church and state, and the future of religion in America.
Mr. Marty: I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody.
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I’m Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.
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Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I’m Krista Tippett, today exploring America’s contemporary religious landscape with Martin Marty.
Martin Marty is a celebrated historian and interpreter of American religious life. This hour he’s been reflecting on the religious dynamics of contemporary America from his perspective of half a century of scholarship. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the present, he’s been involved in many large-scale analyses of American Protestantism in particular, including its cultural influence and its pluralistic impulses.
And from 1987 to 1993, well before religious fundamentalism had become a feature of daily news headlines, Marty directed a global fundamentalism project that was commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That project studied militant religious fundamentalist cultures around the world, and resulted in a five-volume publication. I asked Martin Marty what he learned that surprised him and what shapes his reaction to fundamentalism now.
Mr. Marty: The first thing we learned was that it is religious. That is, we didn’t let the psychologists in the first couple of years. This was a six-year study. We wanted to make sure that we caught the religious dimension and were convinced of that. And therefore fundamentalists, by and large, saw us as being fair. Our main instrument was the tape recorder. We sent out a couple hundred scholars around the world and they would ask, ‘Why are you this?’ and ‘Why do you raise your family that way?’ We studied it in 23 religions, by the way, Jains and Sikhs and everybody; it wasn’t just Christians and Muslims and Jews.
What else did we learn? Number one, fundamentalism is not the old-time religion. Fundamentalism is a very modern packaging. That is, it’s born when there’s an assault on values that you have and are uncertain about. There has to be a threat to you as a group identity or to you as an individual. So the most important word in fundamentalism is you react. Very few fundamentalists are concerned about things that traditionalists and regular conservatives and orthodox are. You can’t get a phone booth full of an argument on the most important Christian doctrines like the divine trinity and the two natures of Christ and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. They care about evolution. They care about being left behind as the world ends. But there’s a very selective agenda. The whole left-behind theology is not the old-time religion. It was invented in the 1840s, which is really the modern world.
Ms. Tippett: For someone like you.
Mr. Marty: That’s right. I move glacially, not with a hurricane. And many other features were modern. Everywhere we studied them, they were better at the use of mass media than modernists were.
Ms. Tippett: Now, that’s interesting.
Mr. Marty: Yes. I once spoke in a church in — I think it was Dallas, and the pulpit looked like a 747 panel. A red light would go on, a baby’s crying in nursery 23C, and another blue light and that means a Jaguar’s lights were left on in parking lot D, and I could raise the temperature and the volume and everything else. And the minister in his sermon later on blasted technology, which he was using. In other words, he blasted the energy put into it, I suppose you’d say.
Well, I can go to a liberal Methodist church and I’m pretty sure the microphone won’t work. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution was done through tape recordings from France. Al-Qaeda is very much at home with the Internet.
Ms. Tippett: Very savvy, yeah.
Mr. Marty: Mass media helped produce fundamentalism because — first stage was born in the early radio; the second stage, Billy Graham, early television; the third stage now, Internet. What do you do? It comes at you with full force. You might try laws against obscenity and pornography. You might try to boycott Disney World. That doesn’t do much. You’re better off starting your own television networks. ‘Mass media are what messed up the intimacy of my family life; I’ll turn it right back upon itself.’
Ms. Tippett: So as late as on September 11th, 2001, the word “fundamentalism” became a part of our public vocabulary. And I’m curious, as you watched that happen and have watched all the discussion since then, having spent this good block of time studying fundamentalism a decade earlier, what have you found to be missing in our analysis of fundamentalism recently?
Mr. Marty: I think, unfortunately, the word is used to clump everybody together. The overuse of the word “fundamentalism” — I should be claiming a patent on it because we did those five big fat books on it. But one of the themes of those five books was there are an awful lot of things out there and there’s a lot of internal diversity. We would remind people — for example, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had 450,000 members in Indiana, in the North, and every meeting had a Protestant minister, it had a cross, it had the open Bible, it had prayer, and the rest of Protestantism and the rest of Christianity would say, ‘That’s not a bit representative of the one billion of us out there.’ So I think when al-Qaeda came on the scene that was our first message: Show the diversities. Make it easier for moderates to be moderate. Don’t demonize the enemy. Do all that you can to show their varieties and to make it easy for them to be diverse.
Ms. Tippett: Esteemed religious historian and author Martin Marty. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: A Conversation with Martin Marty.”
Ms. Tippett: You’ve lived a good long time as a public theologian and a religious thinker, and you quote a lot of great thinkers in all your works. I wonder, if I asked you who you think of as the most formative and influential religious figures in American life in the 20th century, who would you want to describe?
Mr. Marty: Among the well-known people, I would have to say the two Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, who towered at Union Seminary and Yale when Protestantism was strong. They both were strong for the prophetic principle. They weren’t good at leading you into worship, though they did write prayers. But they were up close. They were in the thick of things.
Reinhold was a “cold warrior.” He was a consultant in the Truman era to the Dean Achesons and then the John Foster Dulleses. He’s there. But his interpretation of human nature — on one level, there was a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, but he once said, ‘You’ll never understand me if you don’t know that I believe in Christ crucified.’ He always went back to his roots in the gospel, but they also appreciated his analysis of human nature was so realistic, and his interpretation of history and the place nations played.
Ms. Tippett: Here’s a favorite quotation of the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with which Martin Marty ended an address at the White House in 1998.
Reader: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
Ms. Tippett: From Reinhold Niebuhr.
My guest, Martin Marty, is describing some of the most interesting and influential religious forces in his lifetime.
Mr. Marty: I certainly would have to put Billy Graham in the front rank. And I may not have always been in the same camp, we’ve exchanged a few nice letters and have never had a sour word in 30, 40 years, but there’s no doubt about it that I’ve often thought — I’ve often said, ‘If Billy Graham had been born mean, we’d be in terrible trouble,’ because he had so much power, so many gifts and so on. One of my distinctions in religion is not liberal and conservative, but mean and non-mean. You have mean liberals and mean conservatives, and you have non-mean of both. But he’s not a mean. And I think you’d have to say that’s just been an enormous influence on many people.
Paul Tillich, of German import, was highly influential theologically. But I really think that people whose names you’ll never know were influential.
Ms. Tippett: Right. And who are some of those that are important to you?
Mr. Marty: Well, a custodian at a high school I went to. You’d come there in the morning and, as busy as he might be pushing a broom, he read your face better than the counselors did as to what your trouble was.
I personally have a lot of interest in the arts and I have hung out with people who are in music. Recently I was at the dedication of a new organ in honor of Paul Manz, a great, great organist who brought back something as corny-sounding as hymn singing into the great cathedrals. He and I have been on a couple of CDs together. I assure anybody listening that I don’t sing, I narrate. But certainly Paul Manz would be in my front rank of people who shaped me.
A theologian named Joe Sittler, not among the best-known theologians in America, blind in the last years of his life, nearly deaf, had a way with words and a way of discernment and a good-humored understanding of ethics that made the world richer for me.
Reader: A reading from Joseph Sittler in the 1986 book Gravity and Grace:
“St. Augustine, at the beginning of his Confessions, makes a great and beautiful statement: ‘Thou has made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’ Back of that statement lies a proposition which says that the human is created for transcendence … that we are by nature created to envision more than we can accomplish, to long for that which is beyond our possibilities.
“We are formed for God. …Faith is a longing. Humankind is created to grasp more than we can grab, to probe for more than we can ever handle or manage.
“…This restlessness may make us want to throw in the towel — or to pull up our socks. You can either be creatively restless, as before the unknowable, or you can simply collapse into futility. One of the goals of the Christian message is to join together the people of the way, the way of an eternally given restlessness, and to win from that restlessness the participation in God, which is all that our mortality can deliver.”
Theologian Joseph Sittler, from the book Gravity and Grace.
Ms. Tippett: You often mention a Dutch philosopher.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: How do you say his name?
Mr. Marty: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who was a Swiss-German Jew and Christian. He’s one of those geniuses that you can quote 20 pages of and then the 21st page is so nutty you’re not sure you can use it. But I’ll give a quick illustration of what I get from him. For example, he says — and this is extremely important in my life. He says you can write the history of learning in the western world in three Latin phrases.
The first is, in Latin, Credo ut intelligum — “I believe in order that I may understand.” It’s the birth of the universities in Europe, Bologna, Paris, Oxford. You believe to apprehend the universe; truth is divinely revealed and can be appropriated. And that’s the charter that believers should never be afraid of learning.
Secondly, modern learning, without which we couldn’t do, is Descartes. René Descartes. Cogito ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.” Modern university is born on skepticism and doubt and inquiry and criticism, and you want that. I don’t want a med school in which they’re just taking things on faith. I want them to be extremely critical. But he said, ‘That, too, gets sterile.’ And so he says, in the 20th century, that we also have to learn that truth has a social character. I’m learning from this conversation with you. We learn from conversing with someone else, we learn from the meaning of “I” and “thou.”
And his third motto was Respondeo etsi mutabor — “I respond although I will be changed.” I’m not changed when I argue with somebody because I know an answer and I got to defeat them. I’m always changed in a conversation because they’re going to surprise me. It’s kind of a game, it’s kind of play. And I think that that’s the kind of learning we need more in the churches, in theology, in politics, and in personal life.
Ms. Tippett: You’ve done a lot of projecting in your life. I mean, I found one book written in 1971 where you were projecting the church in that century, and there was projecting in The Fundamentalism Project. I wonder what you have been wrong about, as you look back, and also I wonder, as you look forward, where you are finding your hope and nurture.
Mr. Marty: Well, looking ahead, it’s a very foolish thing for a historian to do because we have nothing to say until something’s happened. I mean, our specialty is the past. But when you’re involved in the worlds in which I’m involved, you do hang out with the people who do projecting and you go along with them. My biggest misses were I didn’t foresee three huge things: One, the explosion of evangelicalisms; number two, the highly individualized spirituality of which you spoke earlier, the people who are on a spiritual search but they’re doing it at the coffee shop, at the mega bookstore, or they’re doing it in a little chanting group, and they’re not doing it in the churches. That’s certainly a force I hadn’t foreseen. And then I think the vitality that has come with the new pluralism, and that’s because I did a lot of writing before 1965 when the immigration laws changed.
Ms. Tippett: That’s another one of those points in the ’60s that you say how important that was for our religious life, that we never talk about as a turning point in the ’60s.
Mr. Marty: Well, it’s huge. It was the year of the Selma March. It was the year of the engagement in Vietnam. It was the year of all the LBJ Great Society legislation, and Congress made a little change in the immigration laws, after 41 years. And it was just in time for all the boat people. It’s just in time for people from Africa to come direct, and so on. And it was just a huge change…
Ms. Tippett: Because it gave rise to a pluralism and a multiculturalism in a new way.
Mr. Marty: Yes. It makes new demands on hospitality, etc. Lewiston, Maine, suddenly has people from Somalia. I once spoke in eastern Iowa and they said, ‘Well, you live in pluralism.’ I said, ‘Where’s the oldest mosque in American? It’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.’ And they have Postville Lubavitcher Jews north of them, and they have transcendental meditation south of them, and they have gypsies east of them, and Amish west of them. That’s the America we have. And when you go to a hospital today, your doctor’s probably Pakistani and your nurse is Filipino, and your clinician is Jewish, etc. That’s our future. It doesn’t mean it’s all easy, doesn’t mean everybody likes everybody, but it does mean that your interpreting is being done on a larger scale.
And, again, the two biggest of those — and I guess you could say I probably didn’t foresee that either, since we’re talking about what I didn’t foresee — is that half of everything we’re talking about today is done by women. And that was not true in the ’50s. When I was writing the third volume of my three-volume work on American religion, I said to my class, half of whom were women, ‘Help me out. I need women who are big in religion in the ’50s. I can’t have an index of all men.’ And they couldn’t find hardly anybody. And then one of them said, ‘I’ll bet they were seething.’ And I said, ‘OK, Julie, you’re going to right a history of seething women of the ’50s,’ and she found interesting stuff. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Catherine Marshall, all these people whose husbands are up front, and they’re seething. They’re all ready to change along the way. So I didn’t foresee how sudden and total that is.
It’s hard to think your way back to when very few women added work outside the home if they had children at home. And I think the…
Ms. Tippett: That’s a piece of pluralism we don’t really think about, in terms of how people are active in our public life. Women are more of a force in that way.
Mr. Marty: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: Religious historian Martin Marty. We’re exploring how his historical and personal insights shed light on the religious dynamics of contemporary America.
Ms. Tippett: I think that there is a real sense among many people in our time that the whole relationship between church and state–as we define that, it’s not really just church and state anymore, right, it’s mosque, synagogue, church, and state, and many other variations of religious expression, but that that is shifting profoundly. But I wonder, with your perspective as a historian, you know, how new, how profound is this shift and how do you view this?
Mr. Marty: On one level, the image of the wall of separation never worked. We did never have a wall. For example, tax exemption of churches probably pays more to the churches in America than being established governmental churches in Europe ever did. I like James Madison’s word, there’s a “line of distinction,” a line of separation between religion and civil authorities.
I think of it more, too, as zones. Most people know when you’ve really overstepped. Most people don’t want religion utterly in a box. When the astronauts looked at the Earth on Christmas Eve, they read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” I think Madalyn Murray O’Hair and one or two other people protested, but most people thought, ‘That’s great.’ And when you have the space shuttle disasters, the president gets up and is at his most eloquent invoking religious language. Well, if you read real separation of religion and the state, you wouldn’t do that.
It gets more complex in some other areas. There is much more eroding of that line than there had been. I think, though, again, many of us who are nervous about crossing the line are also interested in religion in public life. I’m all for the teaching about religion in public schools. I think you should know that Martin Luther King was a black Baptist and what that did for him. You should know why the Puritans came. You should know why your Hindu neighbor does something different. But a lot of people want to convert that and say, ‘But we should teach the majority religion as the truth about life, and we should worship in that tradition.’ And that’s where we get nervous, and yet there’s a strong popular appeal. ‘If only we had prayer amendments. If only we had stipulated prayer.’ And here’s where a Protestant of the old school or a real Protestant would say, ‘Watch out. Give religion privilege and it gets corrupt. And look at Europe if you want a sample of that.’ So in my view, religion has its place all over the public sphere as long as it is persuasive and voluntary. And the minute it gets to be coerced and privileged and assumed, somebody’s going to run it at the expense of others or it’ll get fat and corrupt.
Ms. Tippett: Where do you look for nourishment and hope? Where do you look around and say, ‘This is exciting. I’m happy for my grandchildren to be living in this time’?
Mr. Marty: The most important thing in my world, when I mention public life I don’t mean only politics. A lot of people equate the two. Politics is one branch of it. Public life is town meeting, it’s the mall, it’s the supermarket, it’s the college, it’s all those things. And I’m greatly cheered by artists, by musicians, by people who live out their vocation. It’s almost a hobby for me to pursue people who just never get their name in print and do heroic things.
I’m cheered by — I never know how to speak without proper nouns. I like a group called Opportunity International, which is one of a number of microeconomic ventures around the world that lends money, put 140,000 people around the world to permanent work last year. Now, they’re religiously motivated people and they give me tremendous hope, as do the people on the other end, 92 percent of whom pay their loans back in two years, which inspires me. That kind of thing.
In the city where I live, Chicago, there are all kinds of groups that provide leadership in the inner city without condescension, without imposing on them. There are others that train people. In one of these groups, the Christian Industrial League, trains people, mainly Mexican men, to start their landscaping companies and women to start their homemaking companies — not just to do the work, but to start companies. And they plant the flowers that we see in the city of Chicago. Come see them.
And family is very important. I draw nurture from the family. We love friends. I can’t say enough — I once wrote a book about friendship. In a cold, brutal world, you can’t do much better for somebody else than to stimulate friendship. And the model there again is God. As distant as God’s supposed to be, God also condescends and is our 3:00-in-the-morning friend. So I’m nurtured by all those kinds of things.
Ms. Tippett: Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Martin Marty Center has been founded there to promote public religion endeavors. He’s the author of more than 50 books, including, recently, The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism, When Faiths Collide, and the Penguin Lives volume on Martin Luther.
Contact us at speakingoffaith.org and read listeners’ reflections on this conversation. Also, sign up for the free Speaking of Faith podcast. You’ll never have to miss another program again. Listen on demand, when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org.
The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Jody Abramson and editor Ken Hom. Our Web producer is Trent Gilliss, with assistance from Jennifer Krause. Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith, the executive editor is Bill Buzenberg, and I’m Krista Tippett.

A Social Network Site is Not Just a Fancy Personal Home Page

Chris Abraham — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:50:19 +0000

Creating a space for your members to “show off” or “express themselves” is less important than giving members to interact. They crave connection and will pursue any perceived connection such as shared interests, hometowns, movies, orientation, or schools.

They’re not at all about sharing, they’re about connecting. The best of breed SNS’s are primarily concerned with three things: finding your current friends, reconnecting with old friends, and making new friends. In that order. Current friend connections are the most essential, offering the most energy.

The best SNS’s are like an office ski trip. Out of the 30 people who choose to chip in on the trip, maybe four or five of them are pretty good friends. The remaining 25 have only a few things in common with you, including being in the same industry, being at the same company, liking skiing, and being probably within ten years of each other in age and a shared experience of going to college.

When you get to the ski slope, there are plenty of diversions planned to help you relax and feel comfortable among your colleagues. You may rent a very large home together near the slopes, you might stay at a big hotel together. You might all travel up there together in a chartered bus. And when you arrive, there is a cocktail party, and a social, and in the morning there is breakfast, etc. The people who come up who don’t want to ski have board games and the spa.

So, an SNS is about creating artificial and intentional ways of starting a conversation. Office pools and work happy hours. They’re all affectations. There are so many web sites and blogs and so forth out there that successful SNS’s can’t follow that model.

So, when it comes to building a valuable personal profile for an SNS, it is important that the profile isn’t just pretty and isn’t just the equivalent of a questions-based, template-based personal website. For example, modern SNS’s tend to request an exhaustive list of favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, etc. These are props that allow registered members to find each other based on a love of LOST, 24, or the Matrix.

People love to connect based on shared interest and shared memories. People also love to compete. A friendly competition is always a very powerful way to allow people to both connect and create shared memories.

One of the most successful methods of connecting people in a very strong way is through bringing them together through “pools.??? Fantasy football is popular; Oscar pools, college basketball pools, etc, are very powerful ways of bringing people together and allowing them to “ski??? together, allowing them to interact in a very powerful, visceral, way.

I have friends who have powerful, shared memories, of Oscar and football and basketball pools; even stronger are the shared memories of seasons of fantasy sports, fantasy football in particular. Unlike catching a real game together, fantasy football can happen 100% online.

Virtual online communities are neither virtual nor are they exclusively online. They are real, powerful, communities of real people building real connections that can, and often do, result in marriages, children, businesses, jobs, and emotional support when times are rough.

Contact:	C.C. Chapman
Phone:	508-241-1062
Email:	cc@theadvanceguard.com
Website:	http://www.theadvanceguard.com