As you know by now, Benedict XVI recently issued a call to blog.
“[Jesus] didn’t sit around and wait for people to come to him,” [the Rev. James] Martin observes. “He went out and met people by the Sea of Galilee who were fishing. He went to tax collectors’ booths. He went into synagogues. He went all over the place. And so we need to, figuratively speaking, go out to the ends of the Earth — which includes the blogosphere.”
NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty collected some blog tips for the pope:
One solution: “He should have some favorite YouTube videos that he can just slap up there when he’s feeling kind of tired. Like the parade scene from Ferris Bueller,” [the Anchoress] says, referring to the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Slap that up there and that’s a day’s blogging.”
Should he allow comments?
“Only if he has a thick skin,” Martin says, laughing. “I would say there are two kinds of angry people. There are angry people, and then there are religiously angry people.”
David Weinberger of Joho the Blog has a warning:
“Putting a message out over the Internet is exactly the same thing as losing total control of your message,” he says. “People take it up, they republish it, they make fun of it, they contextualize it. The simple message becomes incredibly complex because of all the ideas that are pulled out and linked to it. That means that the very thing that you wanted in your message was control and what you ended up with was the opposite of control.”