Why bother blogging?

A Family article with View Comments posted 1 December 2008.
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Sometimes I really wonder why I bother. I’m not getting all depressive and “woe is me” about it, but I find that I often hang too many hopes on how successful my website is. I have a few dozen regular readers, about a thousand visitors a month (who are mostly interested in technical information I publish), and that’s the extent of it. Then I happened across a old-ish article by Seth Finkelstein arguing that blogs don’t really get around old media, they just reinforce a different hierarchy of contributors.

I also found an article written in 2006 on Rough Type which argues quite pointedly that the “blogosphere,” as such, is really just a new feudal structure for information distribution. If you’re looking to get around “old media,” a blog isn’t what you’re looking for.

And yet. And yet I never started writing on this site because I wanted to get around “old media” – though to be honest, I wouldn’t mind if my political ideas got some more traction. I really started writing here to distributed ideas. A lot of those technical posts have been quite successful. Yet at the same time, a post I wrote about prosthetic dog testicles continues to be one of my most popular writings. Not the series I’ve been working on about the ethics of Freedom Software in the church, not my pictures of family and friends, plastic dog balls. Fulfilling, indeed.

I’m not planning on stopping writing – in fact, I often find myself planning to write here more. My Blogfodder file is longer than ever. But, for my own sake, I need to say – indeed, I need it to be true – that I’m writing to share ideas with the world, find solutions to computer-y problems, to present my hobbies and what’s going on in my life to family and friends. Few people are interested in regularly subscribing to a blog that is about such a personal and eclectic mix of stuff. Few still are interested in my peculiar mixture of hobbies, politics, and religion. I’m not interested in splitting the site, starting new ones, or anything else like that right now. And… (deep breath)… I’m okay with that!

Now I just need to find a 12-step program for addiction to Google Analytics…

The Coming Death or Rebirth of Church Publishing

A Church article with View Comments posted 27 August 2008.
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This article is #2 in the 8 part series Freedom Software and the Church

Every church I’ve ever attended has had to spend time, energy, and money contending with copyright infringement. Every duplicated hymn in the bulletin, every extra copy of music for the musicians, etc. is potentially a source of copyright violations. Many churches work hard to prevent this kind of problem with organizations like CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) and with licensing agreements through church publishing houses, but I’ve yet to find a church which fully complies with copyright law.

On one hand, paying for worship resources guarantees that the church can continue to develop high quality products in the future. On the other hand, licensing can be expensive, especially for small churches. Also, copyright enforcement actions effectively pit Christian against Christian and bring new meaning to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Sliding-scale payment schemes go a long way towards making resources accessible to small churches, but they are imperfect at best. What can be done?

Don Parris at Blue-Gnu recently began developing a hymnal for his small church which will feature music which is free as in free speech or the “freedom” in “freedom software.” Most of the hymns will be derived from The Cyber Hymnal, which is a huge collection of public domain hymns.

In some senses this begins to help solve the problem of free access to worship resources for smaller congregations, though by not including musical scores and liturgy resources this kind of hymnal would not offer enough for a typical Lutheran church. With the growing popularity of electronic distribution and video projection in church sanctuaries, physical copies of worship resources are becoming less important. Few would dispute, I think, that church publishing houses (and big name publishers in general) are becoming less significant as the Internet grows. If electronic distribution of worship resources becomes the norm, the Freedom mindset of the Internet will have done to church publishers what it has already done to newspapers: crippled their power and forced them to adapt to a situation where widespread usage without compensation is the norm.

Electronic distribution, technology in worship, and other forces are already redefining church publishers’ landscape in the same way that blogging did for newspapers. Just as newspapers ignored, then ridiculed, and then desperately embraced blogging as the Internet culture redefined news distribution, publishers are also beginning to face the same kind of changes with projects like Parris’ freedom hymnal. I hope they will learn from the mistakes and delays of the newspapers and embrace free (and freedom) distribution before they are smashed by new technology.