Martin Kelley

“I’m partial to short stories that gallop through time. They’re like novels for very busy people.”

–Malle Maloy, in a New Yorker Q&A accompanying her short story, “The Marriage Proxy.”

Great quote, but I’m just as impressed about the ways in which the New Yorker is creating supplementary online material to go with their print articles. More magazines should do that.

Maile Meloy Interview
Your story in this week’s issue, “The Proxy Marriage,” hinges on a legal technicality. Where did you find out about double-proxy weddings? And did you immediately know this would be a good hook for a…

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This is just so depressing: the Facebook gorilla has bought its second mobile photo sharing app in recent weeks. Lightbox was a great app. It auto-posted to everything I cared about (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare, Flickr) but also had its own beautiful website that kept it above the fray. Lightbox (my account is/was at http://martinkelley.lightbox.com/) was what Flickr should have and could have become and it let me enjoy the fantasy while also dual-posting to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley), which has stored my photos since Mark Zuckerberg was in training diapers. For more on the Flickr that never was, see today’s piece in Gizmodo, “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.”

Lightbox is joining Facebook!
We started Lightbox because we were excited about creating new services built primarily for mobile, especially for the Android and HTML5 platforms, and we’re honored that millions of you have…

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Some good tips about polling your website’s audience to learn what they’re looking for. The author +Daniel Treadwell the developer of the Google+Blog plug-in for WordPress that lets you sync between the two.

Know your Audience
Last year with the release of Google+ it was made very obvious that a large amount of people have been looking for a new community that allows them to share their time, their art and their opinions with others in a way that was not previously available.

Once you have gained a significant amount of followers (and this amount is subjective and personal, what is a large number to one may not be to another) most people will start to wonder exactly what it is that their audience is most interested in

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President Obama’s been attributing some of his so-called “evolution” on same-sex marriage to his daughters. As he told ABC’s Robin Roberts:

You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table, and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and, frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

So where do Obama’s daughter’s independent friends come from? Like most tweens the likeliest answer is school–in their case, Sidwell Friends. It’s not unlikely that the “evolution” owed something to the Quaker environment there.

Most elite Quaker schools have only a token base of Quaker students and teachers, so we can’t assume that Malia and Sasha’s friends are Friends. Like many outward-facing Quaker institutions, modern Friends schools’ strongest claim to Quakerism is the values and discernment techniques they share with the wider world. They consciously transmit a style and pedagogy and create an environment of openness and diversity. Of course the Obama kids are going to rub up against non-traditional marriages at a East Coast Quaker school. And no one should be surprised if they bring a little of that back home when the school bus drops them off at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

NYTimes: Obama Girls Influence the President — Again
President Obama often uses his daughters, Malia and Sasha, as object lessons in explaining his reasoning behind important policy positions.

Some t-ball pictures from Francis’s t-ball league, the awesome South Jersey Field of Dreams. Album (12 photos)

A must-read piece from Cory Doctorow for those interested in the changes in publishing, Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers.  He’s predicting the end of DRM (digital rights management) and looking forward to a day when formats and readers are interchangable:

The cheap-and-cheerful manufacturers at the low end don’t have a secondary market they’re trying to protect, no app store or crucial vendor relationship with a big distributor or publisher. They just want a product that ticks the box for every possible customer. Since multiformat support is just a matter of getting the software right, what tends to happen is that a standard, commodity firmware emerges for these devices that just works for just about everything, and the formats vanish into the background.

Many readers and publishers have been upset at the recent Department of Justice accusations of price-fixing by major publishers. The real bad guy, we’re reminded over and over, is Amazon. The publishers are so scared of Amazon that they developed a pricing scheme (the “agency model”) that often nets them less money than they get from Amazon. But for all it’s market share, most of Amazon’s advantages come from smart salesmanship and a big-picture view that helps it develop an ecosystem that “locks in” customers (e.g., I use Amazon video on demand to watch TV, which means I get free shipping when I purchase from them, I get to “borrow” an electronic book a month, etc., which means when I wanted to buy an e-reader, it was really only a matter of which model of Kindle I would choose). As Doctorow points out, the most ubiqutious e-reader is the cellphone and most of us get a new one every two years–Amazon’s dominance could end relatively quickly with the right competition. Getting rid of DRM content levels the playing field.

I’m not sure I’m as optimistic as Doctorow that DRM is about to simply disappear. But I agree it’s what needs to happen. It would make Amazon just another seller. Publishers could stop focusing on it and start taking taking more responsbility for shaping the future of publishing. (Where might that be going? Five Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. is a highly entertaining read and more correct than incorrect.) But gloom is not the forecast. A recent article in The Atlantic (chart right) persuasively argues that we are in a Golden Age of readership:

Our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it’s actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters. So, then why is there this widespread perception that we are a fallen literary people? I think, as Marshall Kirkpatrick says, that social media acts as a kind of truth serum. Before, only the literary people had platforms. Now, all the people have platforms.

The other thread that’s been running through my head these past few weeks is a G+ post from Tim O’Reilly that pulls a quote from terrific quote from Hemingway (“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”):

I love lines from literature that crystallize a notion, and then become tools in your mental toolbox. This is one of those. Keep it handy, because you’re going to see “gradually, then suddenly” processes happen increasingly in the next few decades, not just in technology and in industries transformed by technology, but in global issues like climate change, and in politics.

I’m part of a discussion at the Pendle Hill conference center outside Philadelphia next month. Everyone’s invited. It’s a rare chance to really bring a lot of different readers and media producers (official and DIY) together into the same room to map out where Quaker media is headed. If you’re a passionate reader or think that Quaker publications are vital to our spiritual movement, then do try to make it out.

Youtube, Twitter, podcasts, blogs, books. Where’s it all going and who’s doing it? How does it tie back to Quakerism? What does it mean for Friends and our institutions? Join panelists Charles Martin, Gabriel Ehri and Martin Kelley, along with Quaker publishers and writers from around the world, and readers and media enthusiasts, for a wide-ranging discussion about the future of Quaker media.

We will begin with some worship at 7.00pm If you’d like a delicious Pendle Hill dinner beforehand please reply to the Facebook event wall (see http://on.fb.me/quakermedia). Dinner is at 6.00pm and will cost $12.50

This is part of this year’s Quakers Uniting in Publications conference. QUIP has been having to re-imagine its role over the last ten years as so many of its anchor publishers and bookstores have closed. I have a big concern that a lot of online Quaker material is being produced by non-Quakers and/or in ways that aren’t really rooted in typical Quaker processes. Maybe we can talk about that some at Pendle Hill.

On a late lunch, just finished “Conflicting Views on Foreign Missions: The Mission Board of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Freinds in the 1920s” by Tesuko Toda from the Fall 2011 issue of Quaker History.

Sounds like a page turner, right? But it’s interesting history that’s still resonating. Toda’s piece sheds light on a generational sea change that happened among the evangelical-leaning subset of Philadelphia Friends (a minority of the Orthodox yearly meeting):

When the story begins, Friends interested in mission work have to organize independent of the yearly meeting. Over time they come into the fold but it’s right when younger Friends are giving up the idea of bringing Christianity to the heathens for the idea of international fellowship (a similar attitude change was happening throughout Protestant denominations).  Toda writes:

Young Philadelphian Friends did support foreign missions, but did not support conventional ones. Actually, none of them approved of foreign missions aimed at conversion. Although some pointed out the advantages of Friends missions, no one insisted on denominational missions. What kind of foreign missions did young Philadelphia Friends think was suitable for the new era (the 1920s), then? The first point to be noted is that young Philadelphia Friends unanimously had a negative view of traditional missionaries.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the group but it finally funnelled its energies into the still-new American Friends Service Committee. The AFSC had been set up to support conscientious objectors in World War I and there was no expection that it might continue after the war. That it did was because it better represented the internation fellowship model.

I’m not going to write a full review but those of you interested in the sociological history of that kind of bold, “let’s change the world” energy in Friends should look it up, as should those curious about how generational shifts sometimes play out in yearly meeting politics.