Getting Home And Clearing The RSS Cache

I normally check my blog subscriptions once or twice a day, usually cherry picking the blogs that take my fancy at the time. But, when the content backs up (especially over a holiday), I just control-click and open all the blog feeds in tabs and work my way (quickly) through all the posts. While clearing the reader today, the following

Youth Ministry is a machine that hinders young people from receiving Jesus’ embrace and blessing – I recall meeting Chap Clark back in 2000 (or so) and was struck by one simple thing – he was one of the few, on of the very, very few youth ministry specialists who was really thinking theologically and really taking seriously the cultural problems of programmatic youth ministry. So, I’m pleasantly surprised to see him reaching a wider audience.

Anatomy of a Hit Song – Great post on song-writing and song structure.

How McCain Picked Palin – Fascinating insights from the McCain campaign’s Vice-Presidential selection process.

Concrete and Cardobard themes for Keynote available – There is a fascinating market developing for Keynote themes and music composers should probably look at ways of packaging music for presentations as well.

Sound to Pixels and Back Again: Isolating Instruments with Photosounder – Amazing stuff with the usual of visual input for sound creation (not just visual representations of sound. There’s a glimpse here of a future where gestures and touch screen controls open up new possibilities for music creation. In the next decade or two we will see some amazing new digital “instruments.”

H&M Opens Flagship Store in Canton Road – H&M is not one of my favourite stores, but they are savvy marketers. That’s what makes their decision to open a flagship store in TST interesting. There’s a subtle clear move away from Hong Kong Island in terms of high end retail. If the government would commit to pedestrianising the Kowloon Peninsula, Hong Kong would be on the verge of developing of the the world’s great shopping precincts.

Cheb Khaled (???? ??? ???????), King of Raï (????): Algerian Freedom, Fusion, and Fête – I’m a big fan of Raï and Khaled was one of the first artists I became aware of in this genre. This post is an excellent intro to his music and to this infectious genre.

Visitors From Afar – Tracking visitors to your blog is always a fascinating experiment. Most of the visitors to this blog are from the US, Canada and the UK, but it is always a geography lesson to look up some of the countries that pop up in the statistics.

Thinking online community and offline networks – A thoughtful contribution to the discussion of what online community means. As someone who agrees that most claims for “real world” community are overblown and overly optimistic I’m intrigued by the idea of the “privatisation of sociability.” I also agree that today,

“…the congregation cannot singularly represent the religious identity and practice of its members, but can only be a node in the network of everyday living that informs those things.”

Things that go Thump – Ryan Gruss’ blog has fast become a favourite. This post is an excellent example of doing a lot with a little. One drum, one measure and a very useable and musical loop. Cool stuff.

Other Side Vocal – Nice humorous post on singing your heart out for a good take! Love it. (One of my big regrets from the recent holiday was not meeting up with Kris, sometime soon buddy).