GodBloggers’ publish or perish

With 10 minutes and counting before they start boarding my flight back cross-country, and enjoying the free WiFi here at Long Beach Airport, I had flirted with the idea of upgrading my WordPress to 1.5.2 (still running 1.5.1.3). But not a good idea to risk my website going down, amidst a short-lived web traffic spike from GodBlogCon attention. GodBlogCon is getting news media buzz, 163 sources at the moment, according to news.google.com, mostly from the AP Wire piece.

A few other thoughts perculating, now that a few more hours and a good night’s sleep has past after GodBlogCon. I’ll share one: it seems to me that most of the attendees I heard in conversations at GodBlogCon see blogging as a publishing tool. So with a purpose to publish in mind, the gravity of inquiry pointed to how to form the message, how to shape culture, how to influence, how to make money, how to defend apologetically, how to develop a niche, how to grow readership.

Many voices in the world, the society, the New England elite, and even among Christians and most of the GodBloggers at GodBlogCon, place a lot of value on leadership and accomplishments and success and purpose. The subtext seems to be this: a disdaining of the unambitious and unfocused. You have to publish, or perish. Fits with a traditional institutional or organizational approach to seeing life, and the role of individuals in that framework. It comes with teeth, as if driving an agenda. It can be easily perceived as a battle of right and wrong.

For others in the blogosphere, blogging can be purposeless, distinguished from meaningless. It’s a place for dialogue, exploration, expression, learning, and growing in understanding. Instead of having an answer to dispense and entice others to buy-in through persuasion, blogging is conducive for sharing thoughts and feelings and ideas, questions and doubts and notions that are not yet well-formed and well-defined. This tone fits some emerging church bloggers much better, at least for me. Takes a little more faith, that if we as followers of Christ, would just be, and share our humanity transparently and vulnerably, that normal people can see how Jesus makes a difference in the way we live and behave, without having to always dispense answers. 1 Peter 3:15 is so often misread – the sequence is supposed to be this: if & when they ask, then we can give answers.

I think here’s the opportunity post-GodBlogCon, in the blogosphere, to explore other ways of blogging, beyond the pressures of publish or perish.

And, great to hang out with Bumble of i12know last night, and enjoyed some Vietnamese pho and warm hospitality. (an idea bookmark here to say more about that; [update: Bumble described the encounter here]) Now boarding flight 307 at Gate 2A…