My Ten Favourite Blogs

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A friend recently asked me a question that I had never been asked and which I found more difficult to answer than I assumed I would. The question arose because I had been tidying up my RSS feeds - a task I tend to do two or three times a year as web sites change and content creators stop producing. My changing and developing interests also make this exercise necessary from time to time.

The question asked was, "If you had to recommend one blog what would it be?"

I currently subscribe to 162 web sites via RSS, most of which are either blogs or contain a blog as part of their wider content. I use Google Reader to sync these feeds through the brilliant Feedly application on Mozilla Firefox. Feedly turns RSS feeds into a magazine format, which enhances the reading experience ten times. 

So, of these 162 blogs that I read regularly, which would I recommend?

I realise that there is a difference between my favourites, and my recommendations. The former category says something about me; the latter focuses more on my understanding of the person to whom I am making a recommendation. 

Some general factors that I take into account when subscribing to a blog feed (via RSS or any other method) are:

• I have to find the content interesting, instructive, stimulating or entertaining
• I have to find the content well-written - not full of grammatical errors, slang or cliches
• I tend not to follow sites with a lot of video content - my default preference is for the written word rather than the visual image
• I want to be informed by someone who is knows their field well
• I want to be exposed to ideas that may challenge my existing assumptions and beliefs because I find this helps me to think through more carefully what I actually believe 
• I prefer a blog that allows comments and interaction

So, taking all the above into consideration, what are my top ten blog RSS feeds that I currently follow, which meet all or most of the above criteria?

In no particular order, here they are:

1. Ed Stetzer - The Lifeway Research Blog. I appreciate Ed's broad view of the (American) Christian scene and his attempt to fuse sociological research with applied evangelical theology at both a church and national level. 
2. Stephen M Walt is Professor of International Relations at Harvard University and blogs on the site Foreign Policy. His stance as "a realist in an ideological age" enables him to ask rational questions that rarely make it into the mainstream political discourse. An example would be his arguement that Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon would not necessarily be all bad.
3. Cole-Slaw is not a brilliantly-produced blog (with various fonts used throughout and little evidence of much attention to visual design.) All this should be overlooked, however, as the content is very much a "now word" on the nature of church leadership and church planting. I believe that Neil Cole's experience of a new paradigm of releasing church planting movements in western urban settings warrants serious consideration.
4. Christian Medical Comment by Dr Peter Saunders is my first port of call for content on medical ethics, as well as other topics from time to time. Always well-researched and well-presented, Dr Saunders takes into account the human as well as the abstract ethical considerations of the positions put forth. A good bedside manner. 
5. I don't read Elizabeth Esther's blog very often, but when I do I am struck by two realities.  Firstly, the courage and honesty of a woman trying to regain her life and her faith after growing up in an oppressive church setting. Secondly, a sober reminder of the fruit of a gospel that is not centred upon the grace of God in Christ. Not always a jolly read, the blog is gutsy, personal, well-written and not without hope. It should feature on all courses in pastoral theology, in my opinion.  
6. The New Economics Foundation offers "economics as if people and the planet mattered." In the early twentieth century, economics began to be separated in western universities from ethics, and seen as primarily a matter of numbers and graphs. NEF tries to put the two strands back together.
7. I often find myself disagreeing with things written by John H Armstrong. What attracts me to his blog, however, is his attempt to find a genuinely ecumenical approach to Christian mission. His paleo-Orthodox position forces me to look beyond post-Reformation constructs of evangelicalism and ask important questions about the nature of the church and what it means to be a Christian believer.
8. Orion Magazine is one of the most beautifully-written sites I know. Its longer-than-average articles have a strong emphasis on nature and environmental themes, but without merely repeating slogans from others working in these fields.
9. Earliest Christianity explores the latest research and thinking on the history of the Church in its first three centuries. Not always an easy read, the blog is academic in its tone, but provides a window into the important stage of transition between what are often referred to as the apostolic and sub-apostolic ages.
10. What You Think Matters is the applied theology blog of a number of mostly younger writers and church leaders from the New Frontiers family of churches.  The combination of Reformed theology and charismatic church life is a potent one, in my experience, and the blog has an increasing breadth of topics covered.

So, in answer to the question, "If you had to recommend one blog what would it be?" - my answer would be, "One of the above."

At least, that's the case at the end of 2012. Maybe I should make this a question I should answer annually 

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Seven Things I Like About Tumblr

1. It looks cool

Uploaded images are sharp. Videos are centred and of a good size and quality.

There are a range of attractive designs for personalising your blog.

2. It works well for macro and micro-blogging

It can be used like Twitter as a status updater but the range of things you can do on the site encourages a much more varied set of posts.

Which leads seamlessly to point three.

3. There is a lot you can do with it

• Text posts, like this one
• Uploading photos
• Embedding videos from just about any site you’ll ever use
• Simple links
• Uploading audio files
• Chat facility

The result is a varied and visually pleasing blog with good content, easily generated.

4. It’s not full of rubbish

No sheep or growing flowers. The absence of tacky applications is a plus.

5. You can upload in any way you like

• On the site itself
• By email
• Through Shareaholic or any other online sharing tool
• By a “bookmark this” link in your browser
• By phone - including to a dedicated direct land line

6. It links easily into other media

It’s easy to import and export into Facebook and Twitter (by default or selectively) as well as importing up to five RSS feeds.

The limit on these feeds stops the site becoming another Friend Feed. The feel of Tumblr (to me at least) is that it sits part way between a traditional blog and a social bookmarking site. How much of an individual’s content will be original work and how much will be imported from elsewhere is a matter of personal choice.

7. It has the option to queue posts

Sometimes you get a burst of creativity and want to produce a lot of content. Tumblr lets you queue your posts to upload at a specified date or at regular intervals set by you. This is very convenient and can keep your blog fresh (even if you’re not).

By the way, you can see what I mean by all of the above by visiting my Tumblr blog here.

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Thinking About Land Tax

Don't worry. I find tax boring and inscrutable as well. The arrival of any correspondence from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue inevitably causes me to want to throw myself under a train at the prospect of (a) having to fill in yet another tax form or (b) having to phone up my local office (located in Scotland for some reason) and explain for the 400th time why I do not in fact owe them any money, despite regular letters to the contrary.

Tax doesn't have to be taxing? Phaw!

Against that backdrop, I have found myself rather surprisingly drawn in recent weeks to the issue of Land Value Taxation, an idea espoused by (among others) the imaginatively named Land Value Taxation Campaign. The basic idea is that taxation should be levied annually on the rental value of land, replacing existing taxes on income and business.

I first stumbled upon the idea when a friend sent a link to a podcast by the "Renegade Economist" Fred Harrison, who in 1983 predicted the 1992 slump and who in 1997 predicted that the property price high point would be 2007 and would collapse in 2008 followed by recession in 2009/10.

My interest then took me to related sites, notably The Distributist Review and the Mutualist, the latter describing itself as espousing "free market anti-capitalism".

After that, I came across a piece by a former Sussex University friend Edward Rhodes on the pamphleteer Thomas Spence (1750-1814) who, along with his calls for universal adult suffrage (including voting rights for women) was an advocate of a system of taxation based on the value of land linked to the corresponding abolition of taxation on income and trade.

Time and inclination permitting, I may explore the theme in future posts. For now, I commend the links if interested in exploring the idea further.

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An Eye for an Eye?

News that an Islamic cleric in Saudi Arabia has called for the introduction of one-eyed veils for Muslim women has produced an unflattering response in parts of the Arab world.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan has proposed the radical measure as a way of reducing the incentive for women to wear eye make up and thus appear seductive to men.

The Sheikh's thought process reminds me of the logic of the Pharisees - an ultra-strict Jewish sect who were at their peak around the time of Christ and who proved among his most formidable opponents. The Pharisees believed that God's moral law should be protected by a "fence" of additional restrictions that would reduce the possibility of humans transgressing by never even getting close to a forbidden act. In taking this stance, they became guilty of externalism - a preoccupation with form and ritual at the expense of inner morality.

Jesus' diagnosis of the problem of male lust is as challenging to a western secular audience as it is to Sheikh al-Habadan's version of Wahabbi Islam. Placing the responsibility on the man not the woman, he calls for radical action in pursuit of sexual purity:

But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. Matthew 5:28-30

Bahraini female blogger Esra'a Al Shafei seems to have reached a similar conclusion, though I don't know whether she's read the Bible:

"Such disturbing calls only further objectifies women, inviting “religious” clerics to harass and disrespect them in ways that are no longer acceptable.

I have a more fitting proposal for clerics in favor of this bogus call; gouge your eyes out with a tack hammer if you wish to refrain from being seduced. Women should no longer pay the price of your disturbing and sickening mentalities."

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Brazil Becomes Middle Class

The Economist reports today that Brazil, with a population of 170,000,000 (an under counting of 3.3% according to the US Census Bureau's projections) has officially become a middle class country.

A person is, apparently, officially defined as middle class if they have:

1. a job in the formal economy
2. access to credit
3. ownership of a car or motorbike
   

According to Brazilian non-profit group FGV, more than half of the Brazilian population now meet these criteria.

Notable features of this move to middle-classdom include:

• 52% of the population now earn between £350 and £1,337 per month; in 2002 the figure was 44%
• Poverty (defined as living on the minimum wage) has declined from covering 52% of the population 15 years ago to 38% today
• Extreme poverty (defined as surviving on less than 50 pence per day) has also declined over the same period from 8.8 % to 4.2 % of the population
  
• The reduction in extreme poverty in Brazil has met one of the Millennium Development goals set out by the UN in 2000

Increases in rates of education (Brazilians now spend three years more in school than they did in the early 1990's) and in jobs in the formal employment sector are cited as the main factors contributing to the country's economic progress in recent years, a trend which has been evident over several decades.

It was as recently as 1985 that Brazil, Latin America's most populous country, finally left behind its reliance on military-backed governments and began its current uninterrupted journey towards democratic government.

In some ways, the transformation of Brazil is embodied in the life of its current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Born into an illiterate peasant family in the poor north-east of Brazil, he moved with his family to Sao Paolo when he was seven, working as a shoe shine boy and learning to read at the age of 10. Becoming a metal worker, he lost a finger in an industrial accident and emerged as a leading trades unionist in the 1970s. His early radical politics have developed into a social democratic platform of reform which in recent years has seen an increase in the minimum wage, the courting of local and international business leaders and significant reductions in inflation and levels of foreign debt.


Selected Brazil Links:

• Jose Sarmago is the only Portugeuse language writer to win the Nobel prize for literature. At age 85, he's also started blogging. It's in Portuguese and Spanish, but I'm sure Babel Fish will help you if you ask nicely.

• Daniel Duende Carvalho shares some thoughts on the state of the blogosphere in Brazil at Global Voices Online.

• The CIA factbook entry on Brazil contains all the basic stats and figures.
  

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Broadband, Bandwidth and Video

Some thoughts going round my head this week were sparked by the interesting Radio Four In Business show on Sunday night on the BBC.

Peter Day asks whether the growth of video online is outstripping the capacity of the infrastructure of the web to cope. His conclusion - we'll probably muddle through thanks to fibre optics.

Introduced through the show to Next New Networks a New York-based micro-television company narrowcasting over the Internet for targeted communities. User contributed, ultra niche, NNN's co-founder Herb Scannell describes the fact that half a dozen of his staff don't own TV's and represent the "Internet First" generation of video viewers.

A few loosely related sites I like that may point the way to how the bandwidth will be used up in the coming years:

• Daily Motion I like the fact you can embed videos directly from here to your blog and that you don't get a YouTube logo in the corner.
• UStream TV Live, interactive narrowcasting (without the same quality control as Next New networks!). Hamster Live is a personal favourite.
  
• Open Source Movies Mostly oldies but lots of goodies. Vintage Woodie Woodpecker included below.

If you like to create as well as watch, the following may be of interest:

• Eyejot Free Video Mail with nothing to install.
• Cover it Live Live blogging software with loads of extras, including video. Not open source, unfortunately.
  

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Libya Reinvents Itself

Libya - a byword in the 1970s and 80 for the state sponsorship of terrorism - is back in the international fold as the country's President has reinvented himself as Friend of the West.

Libya's reintegration into the diplomatic community of nations has been carefully negotiated and choreographed over the last five years. From abandoning its plans to become a nuclear power to its decision to pay compensation to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing (for which a Libyan agent is in prison and about to launch his second appeal against his conviction), Libya's transformation has been dramatic.

One factor behind this diplomatic goodwill is the opportunity for trade and business. UN sanctions, imposed on the back of the Lockerbie disaster, have been lifted and the flow of inward investment into the oil rich nation has been steadily increasing. Oil reserves under Libya's Saharan sands are put at 45 billion barrels, ranking the country's reserves tenth in the world.

The regime's commitment to develop its energy and other industries is shown in the increasing flow of the country's brightest and best to study overseas at British and American universities. One source has stated that current spending on overseas education of Libyan students totals over $60 million.

Holidays are more accessible than ever. And, inevitably, opportunities are emerging for real estate investment in Libya.

Before becoming too ecstatic, however, it is worth remembering that at present there is no free press in Libya, that human rights activists are routinely arrested and tortured and that no independent organisations are permitted to operate inside the country.

The English-speaking Tripoli Post provides a window into the world of the official Libyan media. Independent bloggers such as Weda from Banghazzi are rare. Several others, including Libyans resident overseas, are listed here.

Unemployment is running at 30% and the country is also a key transit route for the trafficking of drugs from Egypt, Morocco and Turkey into Europe. Libya is also the main springboard for African migrants attempting to sail to Italy. An estimated 100 000 illegal migrants attempt to cross to Italy each year from Libya.

At present, the country is celebrating the 39th anniversary of the revolution that brought Colonel Gadaffi to power. The leader of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (to give the country its official name) took the opportunity last week at a speech in Benghazi to extol the virtues of privatisation, promising sweeping economic reforms and the distribution of oil wealth to its citizens and predicted that Libyan society would "reformulate itself in a new, free, and democratic way". The CIA factbook entry on Libya puts things somewhat more cautiously:

Libya faces a long road ahead in liberalizing the socialist-oriented economy, but initial steps - including applying for WTO membership, reducing some subsidies, and announcing plans for privatization - are laying the groundwork for a transition to a more market-based economy.

Recent visitors to Libya have included Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, sealing a multi-billion dollar economic package, including the building of a highway across Libya's Mediterranean coast. American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to visit Libya this Friday - the first such visit for over 50 years.

Other international visitors to Libya in recent weeks have included hundreds of tribal chiefs and kings from across Africa who gathered to hear Colonel Gadaffi's vision of pan-African unity and to declare the Libyan ruler to be "king of kings". Clearly, the Colonel's long-standing vision of pan-Arab and pan-African unity remains alive. The formation of the African Union in 1999 is one of the fruits of this vision, though the Libyan leader's idea of a single African currency seems far off at present.

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China Clamps Down on Journalists Ahead of the Olympics

Reporters Without Borders reports a number of arrests of Chinese journalists in recent weeks:

• Cyber Journalist Huang Qi and several associates have been held for more than a month in Chengdu, without access to lawyers or outside contact. The arrests follow criticism on his website 64Tianwang of corruption in the allocation of money following the May 12th earthquake.

• Chen Xi, Liao Shuangyuan and Wu Yuqin were arrested on 8 July for investigating the death of a teenage girl in suspicious circumstances in the district of Wengan (in Guizhou province). The articles are part of a larger public campaign - most dramatically in a public demonstration by thousands of local people outside the local Public Security Bureau on June 28. The three activists have since been placed under house arrest.

• Human rights activist Yuan Xianchen has been detained since 28 May for his part in collecting signatures for the “We want human rights not Olympic Games” petition

• Police confiscated a camera and memory card from reporter Chen Yang of Hong Kong on 11 July in Beijing. At the time, she was taking photos of small investors protesting against the alleged embezzlement of 170 million Chinese yuan by China Commodity Spot Exchange President Guo Yuanfeng.

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Bristol Terror Alert

Posts on this blog have been somewhat interrupted this weekend due to a terror alert taking place in my neighbourhood here in Bristol.

I've blogged about it over on my local site and was quite pleased to be the first on the net (I believe) to break the story of the suspect's educational background.

Well done me.

Normal service is now resumed at Philosopher's Tree.

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The Guardian Writers Read This Blog

It's always gratifying to know when the independent media sector is having an influence on the big boys.

A case in point is the post written on this blog on 1st February this year titled Biofeuls - Part of the Answer or Part of the Problem?

On March 25th (this last week), Terry Macalister of the Guardian wrote a piece called Biofuels: a solution that became part of the problem.

Please compare the two articles and tell me whether you think Mr Macalister may read Philosopher's Tree during his working week.

Or maybe it's all coincidence.

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Generation P - Which Blog Service Should I Use?

Generation P - the publishing generation - may prove to be the term that sticks as a description of those seeking to maximize the opportunities available on the Internet for producing and promoting original creative content.

I'm planning on posting a number of items about self-publishing, starting with an introduction to the different blog platforms available.

The University of Southern California journalism school has published this useful table comparing the leading blog platforms side by side, enabling you to compare features and costs (if any).

A great place to start the journey in self-publishing.

Also, if you like a particular platform but want a different look to the blog, try blogger templates which provides a range of free templates for your blog.

They're very easy to use:

• preview
• select
• download
• upload to your blog hosting site.

Even I could do it.

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