(Ir)religiosity

Page2RSS is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread.  Every once in a while when I am surfing the depths of the interwebs I come across a cool site/blog that I’d like to add to my feed reader only to discover that the site has no feed!  Seriously, who doesn’t support RSS these days?!  Normally, I’d shed a tear, stick the url in my bookmarks and hope that RSS would be added later.

Now that I’ve discovered Page2RSS I can generate a feed specifically for the site or page of interest.  Then I can add that feed to my reader and I’m good to go.

For example, one of my favorite webcomic sites is SinFest.net.  The don’t have a feed so I pasted the url into Page2RSS and…bingo, there’s the feed.  I did the same thing for Chris Hedge’s columns over at TruthDig (you should check out his latest, pretty good stuff).  They don’t support feeds for different columnists’ posts so I made one especially for the pieces I want to be sure and catch.  It makes thing so much easier.

Check it out!

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I’m loving Google more and more everday.  I use Gmail, GoogleReader, GoogleDocs…I could go on.  This past week they added a new blog feature called FriendConnect, a web2.0-type outlet that can network all your blog readers/followers together to create a sort of meta-community.  Pretty cool.  Other bloggers have been adding this feature, and I’ve been working on mine over the last day or so.  I’m now ready to launch.

You will notice over in the second sidebar I’ve added a couple of FriendConnect gadgets where you can join the BlakeHuggins.com community and participate in the conversation.  Also, now when you click a post permalink to comment you will have the opportunity to rate the post and, if you want, post a FriendConnect comment.

So, come one, come all and join the FriendConnect community!  It’s super easy.  You can sign in with your Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account(s).

And, if you’re interested, you can follow me in other places.  Just take a look at the LifeStreaming widget in the sidebar!

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This is interesting to me.

I was messing around with Google Trends ( I love these sorts of things.  Check out Facebook Lexicon and Twist sometime.) the other day and discovered some interesting trends/correlations when I aggregated a graph of the terms “religion” and “economy” within the United States.

Here is a record of the last 12 months.

And here is a record of the last 30 days.

Even more interesting, here is a record since January of 2004.

Finally, here is a global record since January of 2004.

Clearly, there is a trend here and perhaps even a correlation. Now, I know this isn’t the best of surveying people and gaining information.  I know it is skewed and probably inaccurate to an extent.  But it is interesting nonetheless.  I don’t know what to make of it.  What do you think?

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It’s true, now you can add foonotes in Google Docs. I’ve toyed around with various online word processors (like Zoho and Google Docs) but hadn’t found one that offered footnote integration.  Not good if you’re doing a lot of acadmic writing.  Google pulls through once again!

In celebration of it’s 10th birthday Google is allowing people to search their 2001 database.  It’s pretty cool.  I did a search for Barack Obama and John McCain.  Here are some screenshots of the first couple of results.

You can see the results here and here and the archived sites here and here.

Interesting stuff.

EDIT 4:51 PM EST: Here’s an even more interesting link to a visualization of the keywords dropped by both parties throughout the duration of the conventions. [Ht. Joe Kennedy]

I twittered this last night, but I think it’s worth posting.  Below are tag clouds of the words used most often my Barack Obama and John McCain in their acceptance speeches.  Very interesting.

Obama:

McCain:

Blogging pioneer and missional leader Andrew Jones (The Tall Skinny Kiwi) is interviewed by five other bloggers from the GodBlogCon conference on the “emergent” (for lack of a better, less elusive term) blogosphere, live streaming, and other forms of new media.  It’s available for download and streaming here. [Ht. Steve Knight]

This piece from Lorelle on WordPress just made my blogging experience much easier.  If you use Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension it’s simple: just install the user script, restart FireFox and you’re good to go.  Now you can use the “preview” link at the bottom of each feed to comment on blogs, articles, etc without opening up another tab.  Wonderful!

This is cool.  With a little bit of work you can search your “read” items in Google Reader. It involves subscribing to your read items’ feed.  Not too difficult at all.  If you’re subscribed to 300 or so feeds like I am this is very helpful.  Sometimes important things slip through. [Ht. Lifehacker]

~bh ><>