I met Andre Yee about two years ago when I was just getting into blogging. He still blogs over at Every Square Inch about “Conversations on the Glory of Christ in Business and Culture,” and he’s really good.
The Social Media Prophet
Andre was one of the first bloggers we hired to write for TheHighCalling.org. (You can read his two articles here.) But lately I think he’s been too busy with his nonprofit start up to write for us!
Andre Yee is like some kind of Social Media Prophet. I’m not joking here. He’s a wiki Moses. The church has has been captive for too long, and he’s leading us into the wilderness of the net. I’m not talking about a series of brochure ware nonsense. Or clumsy facebook groups. Or even webzines.
Andre knows where the wind is blowing–and he’s raised the sail.
Marshall McLuhen warned that the medium is the message. A lot of folks have used McLuhen’s cliche to warn us about how easily computers dehumanize us. Take that thinking to its logical end and we all become obese spacemen in floating chairs waiting for Wall-E to wake us up.
But Andre understands the gospel message is more powerful than any medium.
Andre says that nearly 60% of all evangelicals worldwide are in the areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. “But they suffer from a lack of biblically sound teaching material.” He goes on to explain that the current model of translation is expensive and limited in its reach. “Few books ever reach worldwide audiences, and some language groups never qualify for any translations at all.”
But you don’t need to read what Andre says. You can see it yourself. He’s been on me for months now to catch this vision with him. Sorry, Andre, I just didn’t get it. My faith is weak, I guess.
But this video helped me see what he’s talking about. It literally opened my eyes. Now I get it.
If you’re like me, you need to watch the video. Watch it. Then think about how you can help.
If you’re like me, you can’t be one of the translators. But you can help promote Andre’s vision. The Wiki Moses needs us! We can help “proclaim the gospel to all peoples in all languages to the glory of God.”
How You Can Help
I’m not talking about a big investment here. I’m talking about simple word of mouth.
Share the video on Facebook. Just click here. (I did!)
Tell others. Do it. I’ll make a social media press release here in a minute that has all of the tools in one spot to make this easy. (Update: here’s a link to the social media press release.)
And if you still haven’t watched that video, here it is:
The Brooklyn Bridge in New York was 125 years old this past weekend. The New York Times has some good celebration pictures of the celebration.
Since I couldn’t go hang out in New York, I’m celebrating with this super exciting educational reading of Walt Whitman’s masterpiece, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I know, I know. I’m a real wild man.
Whitman is writing during the period of Romanticism. Technically, I suppose you’d say he’s a light romantic. He fits in with other transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau. (But not Poe. His gothic stuff made him a dark romantic.)
Whether you like the light or dark, Romanticism emphasizes feelings and impressions over fact and science and form. Whitman is especially interesting to me because he’s a good bridge between romanticism and realism. He maintains the ruthless optimism of the light romantics Emerson and Thoreau, but his experiences as a nurse during the civil war give his writing a hard, visceral edge. He celebrates himself and the crowds of Manhattan and he acknowledges how beautiful people are even with all of their faults.
In one sense, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is about just that—riding across the river to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Ferry before the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. But it’s also about shared experiences and the personality of humanity, about what those shared experiences mean for the people who remember us, and ultimately about crossing the gap between the writer and the reader.
Something about this poem makes me think of blogging. Someday all of this turn-of-the-21st-century online flurry will be staring into the faces of people in the future—speaking to them. This blog maybe. Many podcasts. The bests one anyway—the ones with the most truth and beauty will endure. And who knows but that we writers will be looking back at our future readers?
According to this report, people trust financial analysts more than bloggers. Only 12% of of respondents said they would trust bloggers as a credible source for information about a company.
I have to wonder what this means for our blog networks. Every month, we tell readers take a look at what Zondervan is doing. Or Harvest House. Or NavPress. Or IVP. (Although after IVP’s April Fool’s joke, I’m not sure I trust them anymore!)
And by friend, I don’t mean someone on Facebook who contacted me out of the blue to give them permission to market to me. I mean people I’ve had coffee with. (So if you’re on that list but we haven’t had coffee yet, time’s a-wasting!)
I love Randy Ingermanson. Let me just start there. I’m very excited to be presenting at Mt. Hermon with L. L. Barkat in part because it means I also get to participate in Randy’s fiction workshop. In fact, I finally went and got Oxygen, a book I’ve been meaning to read for sometime.
That said, I found myself resisting Randy’s latest post at Advanced Fiction Writing…
My good friend, L.L., is coining a new term and using Blogger in an interesting way to build community for her upcoming book: Stone Crossings. I haven’t read the book yet (because it doesn’t come out until April 2008), but I’m excited about the premise.
L.L. first posted about her wog concept at Seedlings In Stone a few weeks ago.
Pretty quickly, several friends pointed out a problem with the word she coined.
Yesterday at the Religion Newswriter’s Association New Media preconference, Brian Peat created an RNAconference blog. He even gave us a homework assignment to login and write a post. (Sorry, Brian, my dog ate my password, but I left several comments and even a trackback.)
At some point, Brian started playing around to show everyone the neat tricks you can make a blog do.
Sit. Beg. Roll over. Aggregate this RSS feed from my Flickr account…
I love Randy Ingermanson. Let me just start there. I’m very excited to be presenting at 
My good friend, L.L., is coining a new term and using Blogger in an interesting way to build community for her upcoming book: 
Yesterday at the Religion Newswriter’s Association New Media preconference, 
