Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Blog Addiction

Addiction has become a central concept for the ills of society. Oddly, addiction has also become a keyword in modern LDS discourse, occupying a vaguely defined middle ground between sin (we don't approve of addictive behaviors) and illness (we want to cure them). So this morning I'm just a few pages into Hubert Drefus and Sean Dorrance Kelley's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Free Press, 2011) when up pops this entirely unexpected critique of blogging as an addiction.

FPR Mulls Mormon Acronyms

Faith-Promoting Rumor is generally a fairly quiet group blog populated by pseudonymous theology bloggers putting up sophisticated posts. Definitely on my A-list. Then, suddenly, this recent orgy of confessional self-categorization: one proclaims himself a TBML (True Believing Mormon Liberal); another coins for himself the moniker HASM (Hopeful Agnostic Sympathetic Mormon); and a third adopts an inverse definition by declaring that he is not one of those people who uses the seemingly derogatory term TBM (True Believing Mormon) or even associates with groups that use the term. Maybe the world really is ending on Saturday. The FPR-types would be the ones to know. The rest of the crew better self-identify before they miss their chance!

Big Orange is Back

For reasons known only to that composite persona known as "BT Editors," The Bloggernacle Times roared back to life last week. The move achieved complete tactical surprise — I used to edit the thing, and I didn't even know. This is an odd counterpoint to the recent renaissance of another classic, Mormon Stories: where MS will talk to anyone and everyone with something to say about Mormonism, the new BT hopes to set the standard for Bloggernacle navel-gazing. So I might as well dust off my dormant weekly Best of the Box series for the new BT. Coming soon to a big orange blog near you.

Here, Have a Niblet

Mormon Matters is hosting the 2009 Niblets event. Vote here. DMI was nominated in three categories (thank you, whoever you are): Best Solo Blog, Best Blog Layout/Graphics, and Best Overall Blogger. It's nice that the folks at Mormon Matters inserted links to all the candidate blogs, posts, and comments — I know that must have taken a nice chunk of someone's Sunday afternoon. So what's good or bad about the Niblets?

2009 Blog Year in Review ... and What's Ahead For 2010

I posted at Beliefnet and T&S for most of the year, so the 16 posts in my Greatest Hits 09 list (about seven clicks down the right sidebar) are from all over: ten from T&S, four from Beliefnet, and two originally posted here at DMI. [Note: I have archived most of my posts from other sites here at DMI, so all the sidebar links are to the DMI version of the post.]

Blogging the holiday

Apparently some people spent a lot of time over Thanksgiving blogging. Me, I focused on eating, shopping, and reading. Here are links and comments on a few of the posts that caught my eye as I slogged through my Google Reader queue this morning.

What's Hot

It's been a little slow here lately, but here are a few posts from around the 'nacle that are worth reading. These and others are listed on my Recommended Posts feed.

• How Maine Is Different From Prop 8 at LDS Law: "For Mormons, one of the biggest differences in the two campaigns is that the LDS Church has not taken an active role in the Maine initiative like it did in California."
• Commandments and Revelations at the RSC Blog, praising the latest JSP volume and noting several articles on the volume in the latest issue of BYU Studies.
• The Church of the Big Bang at Mormon Matters. Because astronomy is always cool.

To Link or Not to Link

I know blogrolls are kind of passé, but I still update them. I do have to cull the bloated lists from time to time, but I'm not really the cleansing type. Rather than encourage a discussion of the ethics of blogrolling, I'll just say that those who are sensitive about where they link should be cleansers, and those who think a link is just a link (often those who get cleansed) shouldn't worry about it.

Anonymity as Virtue or Vice

Online anonymity is a topic that comes up regularly. Does if facilitate public discussion of controversial issues or just allow anonymous commenters to spread rumor and innuendo with no accountability? Does real-name posting or commenting improve quality via reputation effects or lead to self-censoring? These are valid questions for all online forums, not just blogs or the Bloggernacle.

Does Blogging Make You a Better Person?

Does it further the philosophical (or ethical or religious) goal of promoting human flourishing? Have you learned anything? Or is it just a waste of time? These questions come up for discussion from time to time, most recently in light of remarks at LDS General Conference (reviewed in this Nine Moons post) suggesting blogging is a distraction from more important things (which would probably include just about anything except playing video games or watching television). Nine Moons disagrees, and suggests this defense (of blogging, not gaming): "I'm doing a great work and cannot come down."

A Few Good Posts

In case you've been distracted by election news (I think I have), here are a few good posts you might have missed.

Blogging and the Decline of Authority

At LDS & Evangelical Conversations: "Blogging: The End of Religion," summarizing discussion at the recent God Blog Conference about decentralization and the decline of media authority. The post notes that the effect also extends to religious authority. So what exactly is the effect on religion and religious authority of easily available online information relating to everything you ever wanted to know about your denomination (or anyone else's), but were afraid to ask? That seems like a huge question that gets touched on here and there but is rarely faced squarely.

Daily B'nacle Digest

The Today in the Bloggernacle feature at the Mormon Times is now providing daily highlights from Mormon weblogs. I know you scan it just to see if you are mentioned, but you are allowed to pretend you are just keeping up on the latest posts.

Comments and Mormonism

Nothing like riding shotgun on comments at a Mormon blog to learn that people either love us or hate us, and they're not shy about broadcasting their opinions on the subject. Thus in the recent "Commenters, can't live with 'em ..." post at Get Religion, the best example the author could come up with of the ubiquitous difficulty of managing comments on a busy website was the GR posts on Mormon media stories. Well, at least someone out there understands the challenges of Mormon blogging. My admiration and gratitude to the GR bloggers for their excellent coverage and discussion of Mormon stories in the media.

Arrival of the Scripted Marriage Comment

As on display at T&S here. This virus seems to start at Focus on the Family here. Blog comments are for visiting humans to express their own thoughts, not for comment bots, ad spam, or viral marketing campaigns, whether commercial or political.

BCC Featured in BYU NewsNet Story

Maybe it was just a slow news day. The last three paragraphs of today's story "Church Members Blog to Defend Church" consisted of quotes and comments about BCC. Here's what the story said:

Mormons Encouraged to Use New Media

As noted by Geoff at New Cool Thang, the Newsroom at LDS.org highlighted a recent talk by Elder Ballard encouraging graduating LDS students at BYU-Hawaii to participate in online conversations about the LDS Church. Here's the actual passage from Elder Ballard's talk:

Now, to you who are graduating today, along with the other students at this wonderful university, may I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true.

Spotlight on the Bloggernacle

The Sunstone Symposium starts Wednesday. The most interesting talks might be by Helen Whitney, the producer of the PBS series "The Mormons," including one session recounting her experience over several years putting the documentary together, and another showing footage on a section entitled "Faith and Doubt" that did not make the final cut and was not aired. Other interesting program items:

• "Inoculating the Saints: The Pros and Cons of Proactively Teaching Church Members About Difficult Issues," featuring BCC blogger Kevin Barney and frequent commenter Blake Ostler on the panel.
• "Staying in the Church After Becoming Disaffected," with John Dehlin of Mormon Stories (and Sunstone's new Executive Director) arguing for a "middle way" in Mormonism, a judicious mixture of faith and doubt.
• "How Effectively Does the Bloggernacle Represent Mormonism?", featuring Sunstone Blog's Matt Thurston (as a stand-in for ABEV's John Fowles, who couldn't make it) as moderator and a panel of four bloggers (two from T&S and one each from BCC and FMH). [Note: the audio of this session was subsequently (and generously) provided for free at this link by Sunstone.]
• There's a paper on reparations presented by Kaimi of T&S, and I saw pretty much every blogger from the Sunstone Blog on the program somewhere.

Let's talk about that Bloggernacle topic a bit.

The Busy Bloggernacle

I was offline for five days last week -- no Internet, no email, no Yahoo. How did people live like this? Anyway, when I finally accessed my Google Reader there were 100+ posts in my "Bloggernacle" queue. Granted, 90% of it is trash, but, as writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, 90% of everything is trash. It's that other 10% that makes the world turn. So what'd I miss? What happened in the Bloggernacle this week?

Ten Years Gone By

The Wall Street Journal ran a short retrospective on blogging over the weekend, "Happy Blogiversary." It dates the roots of the word "weblog" to early postings in 1997 by this guy. One of the first real weblogs was Scripting News, authored by tech wizard Dave Winer. He also founded Userland Software in 1988, which went on to release one of the first blogging platforms, Radio Userland. I launched this weblog in 2003 as a Radio blog (which site, for no apparent reason, is still up and running).

Links to New LDS Blogs

Still on blog vacation, but I have been updating the sidebars in my few spare moments and I thought I'd post links to a few new blogs I've run across (listed in the New LDS Blogs list in sidebar 1). [Oh, and I redesigned my template too.] Here are the new blogs:

• Mormon Chronicles gathers LDS news stories and posts them, sometimes verbatim and sometimes as a summary.
• Mormon Momma blogs on "the life and times of LDS women."
• Learn By Faith is one of those slick but unattributed sites that feel like they are written by a human but carry no trace of an identity anywhere on the site. (A link to a business site by the same blogger does show two real people, though). I wonder about these depersonalized personal blogs.
• Latter-day Saints Focusing on Jesus Christ is written by an LDS Director of Interfaith Relations for Orange County (where there is plenty of interfaith to relate to). It's a nice contrast to Learn By Faith. His post about an upcoming book by Robert Millet, apparently modeled on How Wide the Divide, is interesting.

Four Five New LDS Blogs

I try and keep track of new blogs that post on Mormon topics in my New LDS Blogs list (two clicks down on the right sidebar). Here are four recent additions, along with a link to one post from each new blog. Go check them out and leave a comment or two:

• Whitney's "The Mormons": Reactions by JKC at We Might Be Windmills (using Blogger). Really nice photo image with that post. I didn't know people blogged in Minnesota.
• He's No Apostle But He's Got Influence by Dando (the Evangelical half of the team) at Mormon and Evangelical Conversation (using WordPress), noting with approval the evident influence of Robert Millet reflected in the new LDS press release on LDS doctrine.
• Neutrality in an Era of Inequity by Natalie at Mormon Rhetoric (using Blogger), expressing the opinion that VP Cheney's visit to BYU undermines the LDS claim to political neutrality. As one would expect from the name of the blog, the point is well argued.
• Solemn Responsibilities (using Blogger) promises posts on raising your kids and getting along with your spouse. Something like that, anyway.
• Late entry: Adventures in Mormonism, by a veteran IT guy who gives new meaning to the term "go the extra mile."

Nice to see some new solo LDS blogs coming online again. Remember, Rodney Stark thinks there will be 265 million Mormon blogs by 2080. Something like that, anyway.

Sidebar Additions

Rather than search for bloggable nuggets of wisdom tonight, I made two sidebar changes. First, I'm moving my "Post of the Day" posts from the center column to the "Post of the Day" list at the top of the left sidebar (and yes, they will get radically shorter). It won't show up in the MA box anymore, so you'll have to come here to see it.

New Bloggers Sneak In by the Back Door

BCC announced M. Norbert as a new permablogger, a Californian transplanted to Finland. Top that, T&S! I have noticed that new bloggers increasingly just pop up at group blogs rather than serving an initial apprenticeship as a solo blogger. Others taking this fast lane to permablogger status recently include Tagore at Mormon Mentality, Mike Wilson at Purim Blog, and Anneke and Eric at AMV. Even M-Star signed up a newbie: Sarah, an aspiring LDS law student with Unitarian roots.

New Blog

Either/Or is a Typepad blog run by PK and AML (for Angry Mormon Liberal), a husband and wife team. They intend Either/Or to be "a place to talk about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its influence in our lives, [and our] political, philosophical, social, and spiritual beliefs." Sounds interesting.

New LDS Photoblog

Here's a new blog featuring photos of Utah and the BYU campus: Onelowerlight's Daily Photo Safari. I downloaded the accompanying shot of a BYU quad as an example (yes, there's still a little grass left on campus). And you might enjoy the photos of Kelly's mission call party. It's about time someone did something a little different with a blog.

New Upgrades, New Blogs

Time to upgrade. I revamped the entire right sidebar: dropped Google ads, moved my lists of prior DMI posts to the bottom of the sidebar, and added a "New LDS Blogs" list to my blogroll section. The first three entries: Spherical Chickens, by a BYU English and Chem major; Enduring to the End, by an aspiring LDS writer and poet; and the Zach Jones Blog, by a history grad student who will be presenting a paper on LDS missionary work in 19th-century Finland at the upcoming MHA conference. Go say hi and leave a comment at these interesting new sites.

Oh, and I added Snap previews (after wrestling with Typepad's widget maker for the code). I can't yet tell whether they are useful or just annoying. Any feedback?

Shadow of the Blogs

The Spring 2007 issue of Dialogue arrived yesterday. I notice an increasing number of references to familiar LDS weblogs and bloggers in the letters and articles in this issue. The shadow of the blogs is growing longer. Just one more reason for bloggers to subscribe.

Wikipedia and Me

How quickly a handy online app becomes a fixture in our increasingly web-oriented popular culture. One of the most popular: Wikipedia. But how reliable is the information one finds in Wikipedia? This is suddenly a hot topic, as discussed in the post Citing Wikipedia, discussing a New York Times story about the rising number of judicial opinions that include a citation to a Wikipedia entry. This makes some people nervous, but actual sampling of the info at Wikipedia suggests it is as reliable as what can be had from more traditional reference materials. And everyone loves Wikipedia because it is a linkable and immediately available resource giving pretty good information on almost any conceivable topic. If you want a full discussion, there's a second post at the same site giving links to posts at other sites that pick up the discussion. But I have a more personal way to assess Wikipedia's accuracy.

Marking Online Scriptures

LDS Webguy shared some terribly useful information in a post with the geeky title Scripture URL Strategy on Scriptures.LDS.org. It explains how to highlight in yellow particular verses and to center them in the screen by starting the display a few verses back. Take the "natural man" scripture in Mosiah. Here's how I used to link it. Here's how LDS Webguy taught me to link it. Very nice.

Blogger Exed

Yes, an LDS blogger was exed this week. While using labels is sometimes controversial, this was clearly a DAMU blog, not a Bloggernacle blog. It started with a short post last month here, an update followed here, then it ended with a touching narration of the final events here. Having read the recent posts of said blog, I think it's a good illustration of just how obnoxious a person has to become before formal discipline enters the picture.

Internet Mormonism: Threat or Opportunity?

The recent BCC post has shamed me into posting on a few of the articles from the new Winter 2006 issue of Dialogue. One of the reasons I subscribed, after all, was to get an additional source of good blogging material. Time to get my money's worth. The following article is posted online at the Dialogue site, so it's a good one to start with: Perserverence Amid Paradox: The Struggle of the LDS Church in Japan Today. The author, who is LDS and Japanese, is a university English prof in Japan. The article is a pointed reminder of what it is like to be a Mormon outside North America, in a country where Mormons are still considered an oddity rather than a fixture. But the issue from the article that I want to address is the troubling challenge that Internet information about Mormon history presents to LDS members in Japan and, by reasonable extension, in many other countries.

Bloggernacle as Middle Ground

J. posted about the angst of Mormon dissenters over at BCC and a mild kerfuffle ensued when DAMU visitors took exception. JDC may have revved it up a bit with "My enemies list" (an odd title for a post that supposedly tried to explain why there was really nothing to argue about). Since DMI came up in the first post, I thought I would reply and announce a couple of related blogroll changes here.

First, I eliminated the controversial "Borderlands" typelist from my sidebar. Several entries were defunct anyway. Of the three survivors, Sunstone Blog is now a full-fledged link in Group Blogs, and the other two are now in my newly rechristened "Solo Blogs" (see well down the right sidebar). Solo Blogs has B'nacle blogs, non-B' nacle LDS blogs, DAMU blogs, secular blogs, Christian blogs, even an anti-Christian blog. Like ebony and ivory, living together in perfect harmony, right there on my sidebar. It's not intended to be a comprehensive list of solo blogs, of course. Try MA for the B'nacle and Equality Time for DAMU if you want longer lists.

Mormon Blogs Get Recognized

In a recent SL Trib article about Dialogue's 40-year anniversary dinner, the current editor of Dialogue was quoted as follows about the "graying" of the Dialogue audience:

"Mormon blogs are where young people have gone," Peterson said from his home in Washington. "It's where they get their intellectual stimulation."

Well, on a good day there's some intellectual stimulation. Still, I feel bad that so many of us are wasting our time blogging around but not pitching in to keep Dialogue afloat. I felt bad enough last year to kick in for a 3-year subscription. If you feel bad too, click here to ease your pain. You can't put the Bloggernacle on your coffee table to impress the home teachers.

Cure for Dull Writing?

Is blogging a cure for dull writing? Some people seem to think so, according to The UCL Practitioner, a law blog. It links to and quotes from a journal article (written by a law professor) entitled "Blogs are liberating the profession from dull writing." Its claims seem easily generalized from writing about legal things (the sort of stuff one finds in law review articles and legal documents) to writing about church things (the sort of stuff one finds in manuals and other correlated discourse):

The growing respect for blogging among legal professionals stems in part from the medium's tendency to resist the worst excesses of the traditional forms of legal writing and publication. ... For legal writers and legal readers, it is liberating and refreshing to have thought-provoking ideas about the law expressed in only a few paragraphs or even a few sentences.

I have seen many comments from both regulars and visitors that express the same sort of "librating and refreshing" reaction to the informative posts and friendly discussion that describes the Bloggernacle at its best. What think ye?

Not As Easy As It Looks

The SL Trib set up a bunch of journo-blogs last year and they're still running, including their "editorial blog," Plato's Cave. Until recently they allowed anonymous comments but ran them through a moderation queue for review before posting. But it got confusing because there were too many "anonymous" posts. So they just announced a new policy: all commenters must register at Blogger, but there will be no more moderation queue. It's not that I'm enjoying their difficulties, it's just reassuring to see that journo-bloggers — professional wordsmiths, after all — struggle with the same comment challenges that regular bloggers do. I wonder how the new policy has impacted their comment volume. Who knows, maybe chucking the hated comment queue actually increased their comment traffic.

Brother, Can You Spare a Link?

He may be on vacation, but John at Mormon Stories ("MS") can still manage to kick up some dust, now complaining that he has been "de-listed" from the Mormon Archipelago's handy blog aggregator, which bills itself as the "Gateway to the Bloggernacle." [Disclosure: I am part of the committee that runs MA sites, including the aggregator, but was not involved in the discussion about the MS post in question, nor in the decision to temporarily "de-list" the Mormon Stories site.] Since John specifically discussed DMI in his post and invited MA-listed blogs to respond, I will do so here. I'm speaking for myself, not for anyone else. Many of the points relate to issues raised by commenters rather than by John in his original post.

This is a No BS Blog

As reported at This Mormon Life ("TML"), there was a short presentation at the recent Sunstone Symposium summarizing Harry Frankfurt's book On Bullshit (Princeton Univ. Press, 2005) and, of course, applying its thesis to discourse in the LDS Church. I was interested enough to go find a copy of the book (well, booklet) and read it. In this post I will comment briefly on the book, then consider (in order) LDS BS, Sunstone BS, and DMI BS. No kidding.

Defining the Bloggernacle

The Bloggernacle is bigger than it used to be. Once upon a time there were just a handful of Mormon blogs posting and commenting on topics related to Mormonism; now there are hundreds. Once upon a time you could list every Bloggernacle site on your sidebar; now there are just too many to keep track of. LDS lists or portals like Mormon Archipelago and LDSelect work in a general sense and there's even an index of the Bloggernacle out there, but it's not like there's a recognized application process that confers official membership in the Bloggernacle.

So here's the problem: How does one talk about "the Bloggernacle" with someone who is unfamiliar with it? How would you explain to someone who is not a blogger that Times & Seasons (a website where lots of people trade online comments about Mormon topics) is in the Bloggernacle but Exmormon.org and the FAIR message boards (websites where lots of people trade online comments about Mormon topics) are not? I'll try to answer these questions below. I hope this will be a post that can be used as a link by anyone needing to explain to other Mormons what "the Bloggernacle" is.

What I Have Learned as a Mormon Blogger

Consider this post a comment to the nice T&S post On the Possibility of Inter-Ideological Group Blogging. I think there is an optimal degree of diversity of opinion in the conversational community of a group blog: too little diversity and it's all just back-slapping and nods of approval; too much diversity and dialogue slips into accusation and acrimony. Personally, I don't see T&S as being all that diverse — if you combined T&S and BCC I think you'd have it just about right. Maybe they ought to engineer a four-blogger trade for a year.

Anyway, as I reflected on Kaimi's post, I realized how much I have picked up during my three years as a Mormon blogger about the art of conducting friendly dialogue with people holding a wide range of religious and ideological views. From the theoretical to the practical, here are a few lessons I have learned from blogging.

New Arrivals

The Salt Lake Tribune now runs several chatty blogs. The most interesting is The Polygamy Files, subtitled a "blog on the plural life." Here's the whole menu, complete with icons or photos, of the dozen or so blogs offered, all run by SL Trib journalists of one stripe or another. They seem to have a blog for every topic but religion. Just one more step along the road to the professionalization of blogging.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Intrepid Bloggernauts are on the road to Casper for the MHA meetings. Or maybe it's actually a clever new reality show — Survivor: Wyoming. I sense a real opportunity for MHA to boost their attendance next year. Oh, and they gave some awards when the contestants finally arrived.

It Comes, It Goes

The desire and ability to blog: it comes, it goes. Sometimes you're busy and there's no time; other times you're tired or there's just nothing ... to ... say. So I finally log on tonight and what do I see? Not popcorn popping, but five ugly spammish comments posted to the strangely irresistable post Stupid Things. I don't know what it is about that title, but it still brings in a dozen hits a week, generally under searches like "Mormon stupid." Maybe I need to do a post titled "Brilliant Things" and see what happens.

Authors and Readers

On the way back from the library a couple of days ago, I was explaining to my daughter that there's something special about reading a book. It forms a link or bond between the reader and the author. She was just getting started with The Little Prince, and I explained that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author, actually was a pilot and really did crash a plane in the Sahara desert (as recounted in the opening pages of The Little Prince). His earlier book Wind, Sand, and Stars is one of my favorites.

Anyway, while blabbing about what it means to authors to have people actually read their books, my mind turned to blogging, which I didn't have in mind at first (honest). I haven't written any books (yet), but my site meter has counted 129,000 visits, with roughly half of those unique, based on what I've heard from other people who run blogs and on the fact that about half my visitors come in through Google searches. So I'm guessing I've got roughly 65,000 readers, people who have read part or all of at least one post. Wow. That got my attention, and eventually led me (out of a mixture of gratitude and curiosity) to put up my 1000 Comments post.

A Thousand Comment Thread

All visitors are hereby invited to make one short entry in the comments to this post. I get over 6000 visits per month at this site, of which about 3000 are unique visitors as opposed to repeats. I want to know: Who are all of you? Here's your chance to say, "I was here." In a short comment to this post, please share the following: (1) What brought you here to this site; (2) what post(s) you read; (3) your religious affiliation [practicing Mormon, cultural Mormon, former Mormon, anti-Mormon, Protestant, Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, UU, Buddhist, Hindu, Islam, French, Scientologist, Wiccan, agnostic, or atheist]; and (4) any comments you'd like to add about yourself, this blog, or the post you read here.

I will leave the comments open until exactly 1000 comments are logged, then close it. Limit one comment per visitor.

Links to this post from other sites:

• Only 945 Comments Shy of Success! (April 18, 2006, comparing Dave to an infamous overachiever)
• Dave Slays A Thousand Commenters With The Jawbone of an Ass (April 18, 2006, a highly edited link in Notes From All Over)

Blogs as an Open Forum

At "Bloggernacle Night" last week, Nate proposed the idea that LDS blogs represent a "public space" where LDS issues can be presented and discussed, giving due credit for the general concept of a public space (where free discourse can flourish) to Habermas. I'll give a few links where one can read about that general concept, then note how I think LDS blogs fit the schema in some ways but not others. I'll sometimes use the term "open forum," which does a little better job of capturing whatever it is that LDS blogs as a group represent vis-à-vis the larger LDS community.

Comment Angst

By amazing coincidence, three B'nacle group blogs all posted on "the comment problem" on the same day (Dec. 2) last week. FMH, in characteristically blunt style in a post titled Mormon Troll Morality, lamented "a particularly enthusiastic influx of troll vomit" over the past few weeks. Yum. T&S offered erudite reflections on post-Bannergate meanness that seems to be on the rise in B'nacle comments. Just remember that "David" is DKL and "Dave" is me. Finally, some guy at BT posted a short piece apparently trying to pump up the BT Comment Policy from its present three words to an extravagent nine words. So now let's talk about it.

Topix Hits

All of a sudden my site log is picking up hits from the Topix.net LDS channel, about ten or fifteen per day. They have apparently added blog posts to their input sources. In addition to a couple of DMI posts, I have seen posts on their feed from BCC, from Mormon Wasp, and from the Religion News Blog. Great — it's like free advertising! You might have noticed the news posts displayed on the BCC sidebar; that's the Topix.net LDS channel, configured to display on a blog. Anyone else getting hits from Topix or other news sites? Anyone have a clue what kind of algorithm they run to select which posts from a blog make their feed?

Blog Train Wreck

It was quite a spectacle yesterday. While the rest of the blogosphere was opining on the withdrawal of Harriet Miers, the Bloggernacle was transfixed with a blog train wreck: Bannergate. It was painful, but you just had to watch. It was grotesque entertainment, strangely out of place on the computer screen. The accusations happened here, here, and (most effectively) here; the groveling confessions (and one pathetic non-confession) appear in glorious and ongoing detail here. What to make of this bizarre episode? Here are a few abbreviated observations.

BT Renaissance

I'm pleased to announce that The Bloggernacle Times is back online: the www.bloggernacle.org URL now points to a spiffy new WordPress site designed by J. Stapley and his MA crew (who also join as new contributors). The format is a little more open, but expect some of the regular features you came to know and love at the old site to reappear at the new one.