ttyl.ca

Listening to the preachers at the National Prayer Service this morning, I can’t help thinking that they would be better off listening to Obama than the other way around.  What a letdown.

I was mildly interested to see the first woman preach at the service, but unfortunately that historic moment was marred by, well, by preaching!  …and her cadence was about as good as Elizabeth Alexander’s (Obama’s inaugural poet).

Another preacher suggested that he couldn’t think of a better way to start Obama’s journey as president than by praying.  The audience’s response was priceless.  Laughter!

I’m sure many people were as ecstatic as I was to hear mention of nonbelievers in the inaugural address.  But then the question remains whether it is just lip service, or a sign of real change?  He is after all sitting in church on his first day.

Check out the first item on the Additional Issues page in the Agenda section of the new whitehouse.gov site (complete with RSS feeds for the first time!).  It mentions Obama’s “doubts” and “the need for a deeper, more substantive discussion about the role of faith in American life.”

I just don’t think you make this the first (additional) item — ahead of Child Advocacy, Science and Transportation — unless you’ve got some humanist-friendly goals in mind.

The reality is that you can’t yet win in American politics by eschewing belief in imaginary friends (or “childish things”), and Obama is exactly what we need to bridge the gap between that reality and some new one where it no longer matters.  I can’t wait!

We all know Kiva is goodness wrapped in chocolate.

Even better, the AASFSHNR group — Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists, and the Non Religious — is goodness wrapped in chocolate wrapped in bacon! (Sorry to the vegans on board, just substitute “tofu” for bacon or some similar thing…)

I think the discussion on this group has been superb. Of course, as a regular contributor, I may be biased. But it seems to me that caring a lot about other people, and doing so from a particular point of view which is relatively unpopular politically, and talking about it enthusiastically, is a pretty awesome use of the Internet.

I recently pointed out that FriendFeed is also a big bowl of awesome with many groovy applications.

Inspired by my friends at Kiva AASFSHNR, I just created a new group on FriendFeed with the same name (it’s pronounced ass / fuh / shu / ner by the way). I’m hoping it will become a place for rational discussion of issues to do with atheism/agnosticism/religion/politics from a skeptical and secular point of view.

So, here’s an invitation to all people who value critical thinking, who approach life from a skeptical and scientific point of view, and who care about the political health of secular humanism. Join AASFSHNR!

It’s a place to share content you come across in your online travels, and to encourage lively discussion.

By the way, in the group description, I point out how hard it can be to label this kind of a group. It has been noted previously that there are many names we might use, and has even resulted in a campaign to adopt a new name. I may be way off here, but I’m actually kind of hoping that AASFSHNR will take off as a new meme. I don’t get any credit for the neologism if it does. That goes to the founder of the Kiva Group: Peter Kroll.

The flood of new content on the Internet is definitely exciting. We are pulling our media in smaller bits (and on demand) rather than having it pushed out to us by scheduled broadcasts.

But have you noticed that the more you do online, the harder it is to talk about with your friends? Remember when we used to all watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights, and then go to work on Friday to talk about the new episode around the water cooler?

At the water cooler, someone would say, “hey, did you see…?” And we would talk about it. We would add interesting personal anecdotes, and segue freely to other things we were interested in. Every time we brought up a new item in the conversation, we were producing (or better said, re-producing) content. We were offering up something for our listeners to consume, and giving them the chance to participate (by adding their experience, disagreeing, or high fiving, whatever..). But we did so from our shared experience of scheduled broadcasts.

As the flood of new online/on-demand media continues, it can feel impossible to recapture the water cooler experience. Whether we find content on YouTube, our favourite blog, a forum discussion, a news item, a photo, or simply some web page, how do we do the water cooler thing? If we try to talk about it at work (like we did Seinfeld), we have to repeat or summarize the content for context. Over and over again! We can’t assume that our listeners (consumers) have seen what we want to talk about. What about family and friends we don’t work with? What if we telecommute? What about new online communities?

And, just in case it’s not clear, it was the water cooler that made Seinfeld successful at all. In the same way, all this groovy new exciting Internet content gets practically all its value from us: our mentioning it, and our discussing it meaningfully. So how do we do that now?

Sharing platforms to the rescue.

You’re probably very familiar with one platform already: Facebook. It’s pretty good. …and pretty bad. It actually can be more than just a rolodex + a silly waste of time. (Personally, I have tried to use it primarily as a platform to update friends about what I’m doing online.) But, it has a drawback. It is very much USER-focused, rather than CONTENT-focused. It’s all about my profile. Me. Pictures of me. My favourite TV shows. And my favourite quotes.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, is all about content, and discussion. (It is only about the user inasmuch as you trust someone enough to follow the content they produce.) It has been around for about a year, slowly building a committed user base. It is being built by the people who brought us GMail, Google Maps and other popular Google apps. It is both simple to use, and very powerful. Like most powerful apps, it can be a little overwhelming (so take your time not to throw the baby out with the bath water).

So, how do you use it? There are 2 ways:

1. You produce content:
   

   You create an account, and then “hook it up” to your other social accounts (such as Facebook, Twitter, your blog, your YouTube account, your Flickr, your last.fm, and many many many many more), and then you go about your social way — twittering, blogging, fav’ing on YouTube, etc.. Basically, you create content for people to consume at the water cooler.

2. You consume content:
   

   You follow people who are doing the same thing as producers. You comment on their shares. You can “like” stuff (ie, “vote up”). You can divide streams into various lists (to avoid overload perhaps), or aggregate it into rooms.

And, if you just want to just consume, that’s okay too. It’s kind of like showing up at the water cooler and never saying a thing. For some people, that’s their comfort zone. Whenever they want to participate (beyond listening), it’s easy to do.

The thing that I find the coolest about FriendFeed is that it doesn’t require me to give up any of my previous social networks. If you use Facebook, you continue to do so. Twitter, same thing. FriendFeed is complementary to all these services. In this way, it’s a very sustainable transition. Remember how long it took you to get good at Facebook? Well, you don’t have to risk any of that investment by slowly experimenting with FriendFeed. (I have never used Twitter before now, but am getting a taste for it, slowly, as I get good at FriendFeed.) It’s all very interoperable, and open, and squishy good!

The Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group (or AASFSHNR as we like to refer to it) accomplished a longtime goal on Kiva.org. It became the #1 group in all categories (number of members, total amount of money loaned, and total number of loans).. It was that last category that had eluded them until recently.

The loan-a-thon over New Year’s finally pushed them past Team Obama. (Earlier in the year, AASFSHNR held off a challenge by the Kiva Christians as well.)

The Obamanians have a loan-a-thon of their own planned for Inauguration Day to reply. It remains to be seen if they can take first place back.

Meanwhile, the historical moment has been immortalized by AASFSHNR member JOsara.

Way to represent people! Who says the godless don’t care about their human beings?