All Souls’ Archive Crowd-sourcing Experiment: Can You Help Us Out?
What makes a good archive or library? Well, as I’ve written elsewhere, I think there are at least 3 key ingredients.
- Excellent, unique and desirable content
- Well ordered and easily retrievable resources
- Intuitive and straightforward search processes.
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 38 (November 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- Every human being is part of the global community; every Christian is part of the global church; and yet is amazing how little we know of life in other parts of the world. This website will help a little – compare life in different countries and follow up with suggested reading.
- Did you go to a Christian University/College in the USA or were you home-schooled? If so, this research makes for interesting reading.
- I love good infographics. So when used with the Bible, it’s a win-win. Read more
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 37 (October 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- Sinclair Ferguson has some great preaching tips in his Preacher’s Decalogue
- A friend of mine who works in Sarajevo, Bosnia has researched a distant English relative of his who had a profound impact on the city. He’s written a book, and now has an accompanying website, MissIrby.com – really interesting stuff.
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 36 (September 2011)
Sorry for the delay and somewhat truncated list this time – just back from holiday. But Q is due back on track v soon!
Sacred Treasure
- “Greed given a spiritual name”: a great, if brief, PBS interview with Eugene Peterson on many things (incl prosperity gospel).
- It is now only a matter of time before another of the 20th Century Church’s greats follows his friend John Stott to glory – here is Billy Graham on facing the end of life.
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 35 (August 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- Carl Trueman is his trenchant, swashbuckling self in his corrective about current obsessions with all things urban
- Jason Ramsami has remarkable graphic gifts. He’s now made his Jesus Comic (which is available as an iPhone app) freely available on his website in its entirety.
- Been doing the rounds, but Taylor Mali does a brilliant job of cultural deconstruction with his earnest appeal to speak with conviction. Check it out if you’ve not done so yet. Read more
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 34 (July 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- Pete Saunders very helpfully lists 20 things that the Pratchett BBC2 doc on assisted suicide doesn’t tell you
- Krish Kandiah does a great service by his thoughtful comments on Grudem’s recent Politics book.
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 33 (June 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- This is a truly remarkable testimony of forgiveness from the wife of one of the hijacked co-pilots on 9/11 (HT Nancy)
- Very interesting comment on Religion and the Royal Wedding after Bashir & Wark talked on Newsnight Read more
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 32 (May 2011)
Sacred Treasure
- Tyndale House has come up trumps with these really helpful little Easter videos
- ASBO Jesus has a nice Prodigal Son overview: Read more
15 questions to ask of popular history
Having come up with a couple of other similar lists for Lars Dahle’s online culture project (20 Questions for Novels & 12 Questions for Albums), here is the latest, on one of my personal passions: history writing. Popular history books are big business. Which means that lots of people must be reading them… Which means they are definitely worth approaching with considerably more care and attention than many give them…
Q’s 2010 in review (courtesy of WordPress)
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how Q did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health (the rest of this post is automatically generated):
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 6 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 192 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 687 posts. There were 155 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 74mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was October 13th with 1,538 views. The most popular post that day was This book made me feel…?? 20 Questions to ask of Novels.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, wordpress.com, twitter.com, thebluefish.org, and challies.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for chat rooms, all that you can’t leave behind, leaning tower of pizza, u2 all that you can’t leave behind, and mark meynell.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
This book made me feel…?? 20 Questions to ask of Novels October 2010
7 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com
U2 favourite songs – well why not April 2007
12 comments
Q Web-Wise October 2007
3 comments
Amillia the miracle baby – here is a LIFE! February 2007
6 comments
A few recent U2 poetic favourites May 2008
11 comments
Q marks the spot – Treasure Map 27 (December 2010)
Sacred Treasure
- The dilemma for Iraqi Christians
- Charts showing the difference between NIV2011 and previous versions, and here. (HT Antony Billington)
- Full schedule of Lausanne III at Cape Town to see videos of main talks etc
- Bring Advent to life by following Natwivity on Twitter
David Instone-Brewer at Tyndale House has very helpfully reviewed a variety of computer resources for the bible scholar – check them out at Tyndale Tech
Topical Treasure
- If you know anything about recent Balkan history, this news is an encouraging sign.
- Books vs eBooks – an interesting Newsweek chart
- Very interesting article about what Americans feel about their ex-Presidents.
- Scary infographic about internet porn. (HT Simple Pastor)
- The problem of contemporary parental discipline:
Quirky Treasure
- Ever been on an overnight flight? Well this sums up the experience perfectly.
- I love tilt-shift photos – clever focus manipulation that makes real life scenes look like models. Check these out.
- Some rather fun and quirky photographs from everyday London.
- I rather like these Ukrainian designs for playing cards
- 50 office jargon phrases we just totally hate
- Some fascinating cartographic futurology from the ever reliable Strange Maps
- People are awesome (not dumb… mostly) …!
- Rather fun reflection by Kevin Connolly on James Bond, America and post-war austerity
Our Digital Life: towards an ethos for a church’s online presence
Over the last few months, we’ve been involved in an intensive process of review and development for the All Souls church website. This has come about for a number of coincidental reasons – the primary one being that the person who has slaved away for years to both write and maintain the site is moving on. So we have the challenge and the opportunity to do something new. The plan is over the autumn for a new, revamped site to be rolled out.
As part of the process, I did some extensive research on what is out there, what is possible and, more significantly, what is appropriate. The team has felt that this was worth sharing more widely in case it is of use for those facing similar questions (on the understanding that some of the discussion within it are of course specific to our context). So here it is…
Q joins the British Library web archive
The British Library has been archiving all kinds of UK websites for 6 years now. It’s an extraordinary project.
Bizarrely enough, they decided to include Q (I filled out a form once when I was there, not imagining for a second that it would lead anywhere). So if Q gives up or something happens to WordPress, then they’ll always be a copy of Q in the BL – unless the British Library goes belly up of course – but that would definitely be the end of civilisation as we know it.
They’re including literally 1000s of blogs so I’m not so deluded as to think this will bring ‘fame, fortune and everything that goes with it’.
But it’s nice to be noticed!
Thinking politics: some UK General Election suggestions
At last night’s ASLP prayer gathering, I did a little slot on the General Election. It seems to me that there are number of areas that should concern a responsible vote (by no means an exhaustive list and in no particular order):
- Justice and fairness
- Responsible borrowing and responsible prosperity
- Punishment of evil and wrong-doing
- Protecting the vulnerable
- Combating hatred and extremism
- Good stewardship of all God’s provisions
- Trustworthiness and integrity of candidates
A verse that should certainly underpin Christian civic duty which should inform how we vote (even if the verse’s original readers never had the privilege), beautifully summing up what it means (in Peter’s words) to be servants of God:
Show proper respect to everyone:
- LOVE the brotherhood of believers
- FEAR God
- HONOUR the king.
Various people have coming up with election guides and the like (one or two I’ve nicked from The Simple Pastor) - but for what it’s worth, here is a little summary to help guide how to follow these principles in your vote.
Why Vote?
- Some questions with which to evaluate policies: don’t ask ‘what’s in it for me’, ask ‘what’s in it for others?’ - from the Jubilee Centre.
- Why bother? – a Catholic resource for this election
- Make the Cross Count – I’ve mentioned this before, but Care has produced an excellent and helpful resource
- The Simple Pastor has produced a good summary handout here based on Krish Kandiah’s book Just Politics
Voter Resources
- BBC has loads of great stuff
- Poll trackers
- if you fancy yourself as a Peter Snow/Jeremy Vine figure, you too can play with swingometers and poll seat predictors
- set up a link to your own constituency (by postcode) – in the same place you can find all the marginal and battleground constituencies. We’re in Cities of London and Westminster (an established and very safe Tory seat) as it happens.
- The Power of your Vote – work out how powerful your vote is in your constituency (based on marginality, size and boundary changes). A few friends have played around with this – it’s quite fun though actually I’m not 100% convinced. If you check out the power of those in the most marginal of seats (acc to the BBC site above), it comes up with some pretty odd answers. Still, it might help you if you want to vote tactically. Mine is worth only 0.092 compared to the no 1 slot held by Arfon at 1.308!!
- Christians and Candidates 2010 – news of various hustings that churches and Christian groups are holding in the next few weeks. It also includes a brief summary of individual MPs’ voting records on a number of a red flag issues (though some will question why some issues and not others are included).
- The Public Whip – if you want a more thorough listing of voting records and other parliamentary stats, this is a really useful site.
- Vote for policies not for personalities – find out who you really should be voting for.
Comment
- Soul Politics – some very sensible and insightful stuff here…
