I Wish I Was Ern Malley

Today I was at the Web Directions South conference so I've gone geek. I loaded up Flock to write this post, claimed this blog on Technorati (currently ranked 1,157,502) and started to think about tagging everything I can find with Microformats . The conference has been great with some excellent speakers on web design, Ajax, and the future of the future of the World Wide Web (”Web 2.0 is so 2005!"). It's all very exciting and it's easy to start thinking that everyone in the world is blogging stuff, loading photos to flickr and working on a Web 3.0 application. But part of the way through one of the presentations I began to wonder whether the Web can really save the world. No doubt it has changed the world in a very big way, and it's made a lot of information available, connected a lot of people and keeps a lot of us in jobs. Still it's easy to start thinking that if everyone has access to the right information then together we'd be able to solve all the w...

At the risk of alienating a percentage of my readers, (OK, read er ) I’d like to say that I have always felt close to God. For the last week or so I’ve been reading Michael Raiter’s Stirrings of the Soul . Apart from an interesting survey of Western spiritual topography (which might possibly include a church out past Dubbo) the book talks about people, even evangelical or ‘Bible-believing’ Christians yearning feeling spiritually ‘dry’, distant from God and yearning for a deeper, more spiritual experience of God. It would come as no surprise to Evangelicalism’s critics that some Evangelicals have had enough Bible study and want to try something more touchy-feely. Evangelical Christians are sometimes characterised as unfeeling, dogmatic automatons who wouldn’t know a spiritual experience if it landed on their doorstep accompanied by a myriad singing angels. In fact, some people might say, if the angels did turn up they’d be lik...

I’ve never been a big fan of Steve Irwin’s, but his death today really shocked me. Maybe it’s because my kids thought he was pretty great, and now “The Crocodile Hunter” from Wiggly Safari is stuck in my head. Or maybe I’m sad because he obviously loved Bindi and Bob and now they’ve lost their Daddy, and Terri has lost her husband. So we prayed for them all tonight.