GlennFrazier.com

Wow, this took a long time to get to, didn't it? Sorry about the delay, folks, but June was an extremely busy month as it turned out. Anyway, this hopefully means that plenty of people have managed to pick up The Long Tail and start reading.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Go check out my earlier post/podcast on this subject for all the details. In essence, I'm podcasting and blogging through this fascinating book, looking for insights relevant to the life and future of the church, both generally the Christian church and also as it specifically applies to New Christianity (Swedenborgianism).

Anyway, welcome to the first real installment: "The Introduction".

First, for those who don't (yet) have this fantastic book, here's a quick synopsis of what you missed from the Introduction:

SYNOPSIS

Chris Anderson, editor in chief for Wired magazine and author of this book, opens up by noting how as a society we are obsessed with tracking "hits". Best-seller lists, music charts, movie box-office figures, television ratings, and all that. He then notes that hits are becoming harder to achieve, and that fewer people are watching the "best" shows and buying the "best" albums.

A major cause of this decline of the economic popularity of "hits" is the Internet. Anderson contrasts his own teen years with that of an adolescent of the early 21st century. Today's teen uses TiVo, iTunes, Web comics, Slashdot, Fark, BitTorrent and instant messaging to enjoy a huge host of niche versions of standard media in a way that caters to his very particular tastes, and all in a manner that is independent of schedule and location. This is a big jump from those of us that sat in front of the TV in the living room for Gilligan's Island and whose parents learned about the world from the city newspaper and the nightly network newscast.

Back in the day, most information, media and entertainment consumption was done by means of a small number of "big buckets". This was an economic necessity in the era of broadcast media that dominated the 20th century. Today, though, the idea of one-size-fits-all media marketplaces is ending. As Anderson puts it, what we once thought of as "the mainstream" is "shattering...into a zillion different cultural shards". Traditional media companies don't like this. New technologies that allow information consumers to pick from scads of "little buckets" are resulting in a decline in the economic power of "hits". Bottom line: more and more money is flowing to a larger number of "non-hits" and away from the small number of big bucket "hits".

The category of "non hits" has of course always been bigger than the category of hits. Only a select few movies can be blockbusters; only a handful of books make the best-seller lists. These non-hits may have audiences in the millions, but put into the larger context of the overall human population, they don't make even a blip on the radar. And yet, that is where people are increasingly turning. This doesn't mean the mass market is going away, to be replaced wholly with millions of niches; it's just that the balance is shifting.

This synopsis is running long, but it's important to get this idea clear in everyone's heads up front. Future synopses will be briefer.

Anyway, Anderson says "This book began with a quiz I got wrong." Want to take the quiz yourself? There is a company called Ecast that places digital jukeboxes in public places (bars, restaurants, etc.) which through a broadband connection to the Internet are able to offer a huge selection of music to paying customers. Here's the question: "What percentage of the 10,000 albums available on the jukboxes sold at least one track per quarter?"

Heard of the 80/20 rule? Well, Anderson used it as a starting point, and then guessed, somewhat outrageously, that 5,000 of the 10,000 available albums sold at least one track every three months. And he was wrong. The answer? 98 percent! It turns out that the combined market for niche music is, as Anderson puts it, "effectively unbounded." It turns out that this phenomenon appears in a number of places today. NetFlix and iTunes are two examples of services that capitalize on this effect, making a good deal of money renting out niche BBC documentaries and anime series, and almost-never-heard-on-the-radio indie rock bands and classical recordings. It turns out that the market for all the millions of niche titles, aggregated together, is the same size as the traditional market for hits and near-hits combined!

This may seem like strange economics. Economics are usually driven by scarcity, right? Well, the invnetion of digital media and the decreasing costs of digital storage and transmission are creating a situation in which there is effectively no inventory cost in certain industries. This means there can be unlimited supply. Unlimited. Factor in the fact that there are as many peculiar tastes in the market as there are individual people, and you get a really cool situation: effectively unlimited supply serving the needs of what turns out to be an effectively infinite variety of niche markets. Traditional supply/demand curves show the interplay of those two basic economic factors. But if supply no longer counts as a constraining force, you get something more like a "pure" demand curve—something that describes what people actually want or need, not merely what they can manage to get given artificially limited selection.

Anderson starts looking at data from music download site Rhapsody. When you graph their "best sellers", you get this huge spike at the left of the chart, showing their top downloads. The curve falls off steeply, but it doesn't drop right to zero. Trailing off to the right is a flattening curve showing all the other downloads, ranked by popularity. Even the 100,000th most downloaded track has been downloaded thousands of times, and the curve keeps going like that past the 400,000th download. This is called a "long tail distribution" and is the source of the title of this book.

Anderson makes three important observations here:

(1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it's now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market

This effect shows up in non-entertainment industries as well. It's not just about the economics of digital media, but of abundance itself. Think of produce. You can go into a Whole Foods today and select from twenty different varieties of flour, some of them quite niche. We are all becoming "mini-connoisseurs", engaging in things labled as "massclusivity", "slivercasting", and "mass customization". The Long Tail is everywhere.

It's easiest to see, though, in the world of digital entertainment media. Prime examples are found in the economics of Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, eBay and in Google advertising. And exploring this phenomenon is what the book is all about.

COMMENTARY

I'm going to keep my commentary short after that long synopsis. This is the reverse of how future installments of the "Church and the Long Tail" podcast blog series are going to go. I just wanted to get everyone on board with the basic premise, and hopefully inspire some laggards and inquirers into actually borrowing or buying the book so they (you!) can follow along with future installments.

I don't know if you see what I see, here, so let me give you my own premise in a nutshell: the world of "church" is a long-tail world, with a handful of megachurches getting giant crowds along side zillions of very small "niche" churches scattered among the billions of communities of the world. Furthermore, the world of "religion" is a long-tail world, with a handful of religious denominations getting the limelight while an increasing number of niche religious movements and independent churches, are gaining interest among more and more people.

Add into this the fundamental nature of the "preaching industry", of you will. The lifeblood of religion is moral behavior. Church is only effective when lives are transformed so that people do more good and less evil in the world. To stretch the image of lifeblood a little, the oxygen that binds with the red blood cells of the church and makes religion possible is, essentially, information. It is truth wed to good that is the very breath and heartbeat of any effective church. The job of the preacher is to provide instruction in truth, and then to use that truth to guide people to live a life of goodness.

And this puts priests, pastors, ministers and preachers squarely inside the realm of the information economy. (For those of you that are squeamish about putting "priest" and "economy" in the same sentence, let not your heart be troubled; "economics" isn't the study of commercialism, but the study of human interactions with regard to resources. Yes, economics often is about currency and commerce, but more broadly it's really about human behavior. Why do you think Jesus sometimes taught by means of parables that use economic frameworks?)

Anyway, this means that the primary activities of a pastor—instruction and leadership—are clearly susceptible to long-tail market forces. In other words churches, through blogs, podcasts, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies, are in a position to have surprisingly important effects on the world, out of proportion with traditional expectations.

So, in short, I see my field of religions, congregations and priests to be one squarely placed for taking advantage of long-tail effects. I see this from the perspective of my niche denomination (General Church of the New Jerusalem), my niche congregation (Pittsburgh New Church) and my own personal niche ministry (TheoBlog.com). The question is—as it always is—what are we going to do about it?

I invite comments via email, phone call, and (of course) comments posted directly to this blog. Next installment, I will go over any interesting feedback I've received, synopsize (briefly!) the first full chapter of Anderson's book, and then provide some thoughts on what I think this all means.

Oh, and spread the word. More minds on this task will make it a better project by far. I look forward to hearing from you all!

(This special blog series is also available in audio. Click here to listen to the audio of this post, or click here to subscribe to the free podcast.)

I am not an environmentalist—too many kooks, "true believers", charlatans and fascists inhabit that space. However, I am a conservationist; conserving natural resources makes good economic sense, it's aesthetically pleasing, it's charitable to one's neighbors, and it is part of being a good steward of God's gifts to mankind. I know it sounds like I'm playing a semantics game, and I guess in part I am.

It's like feminism. I am a supporter of all things feminine. However, much of what cloaks itself in formal "feminism" looks to me more like female supremacy. Perhaps one might more properly call it "femaleism"? Anyway, I love women, have deep respect for all of the important, powerful, and underappreciated ways they contribute to civil and spiritual life. But I abhor group identity politics and all the ugly intellectual violence it does to individuality.

But I'm way off track, here. My point? No one would ever accuse me of being an environmentalist, probably just on the strength of my political conservatism. However, the idea of "going off the grid" with regard to power consumption—the notion of being a net producer, not user, of energy—and clean energy at that—has always been a little fantasy of mine. My conservative appreciation for what is sometimes called "rugged individualism" has yearned for years for the opportunity to become more and more self-sustaining and less and less dependant upon burning other people's resources in some faraway coal plant.

And so, I find this article, “'Zero-Energy' home plans, in the city or in the sticks" (Matt Edens, Knoxville Metro Pulse: Commentary, 2007) to be really exciting. Here's the lead paragraph:

Living “off the grid” in a home that uses superior efficiency and renewable sources to produce all its electrical needs without plugging into the power grid has long been a goal of environmentalists and conservationists everywhere. Today, that goal is essentially achievable, and you don't have to be a tree-hugger living deep in the forest to do it.

Read on to discover how people are building homes for under $100k that give back to the power grid almost as much energy as they draw from it, all without looking like dorky George Jetson style twinkidomes.

(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.)

Tomorrow morning I am "officially" starting my new health regimen. Now, technically speaking, I've been "sneaking up on it" for some time, adopting piecemeal various components. But tomorrow is my scheduled "kickoff"—no cheating, no backsliding, no exceptions, whole-hog looking only forward from here on out. I'm trying to lose (a lot of) weight, improve my stamina and energy levels, improve my appearance, and learn some fun skills. My body is the instrument God gave me for carrying out my calling; I have not taken good care of it for years, so I have been working up this past year toward turning things around. Anyway, here's what it looks like:

Diet
Low in fat and calories, high in fiber, protein and water. Breakfast is 400 calories and under 14g of fat; lunch is under 550 calories and under 18g fat; dinner is 650 calories and 22g fat. There are also one or two snacks during the day/evening, totalling no more than 200 calories and 6g fat. That's a total of 1800 calories and 60g of fat per day. Breakfast is mostly meal-replacement products (e.g. SlimFast), since early morning is my most productive work time and I hate wasting it on food—especially since I don't really enjoy traditional breakfast fare. Lunch during weekdays is often a mix between more high-protein meal replacement stuff and low-fat sandwiches ala SubWay. Weekend lunches and dinner all week long draws alternatingly from home-cooked meals and "healthy" prepackaged convenience foods, depending on my and my family's schedule. Snacks are mostly popcorn and low-fat frozen desserts. Finally, I am taking a multivitamin at bedtime (for good reason), and one alli (over-the-counter orlistat) with almost every meal.

Exercise
I do three sets of pushups the moment I get out of bed, to boost metabalism and build arm, chest and back muscles. At the end of the afternoon, between work and family time I walk 30 or more minutes—in Frick Park or in my neighborhood (Edgewood, PA) when the weather is nice for it, and on a treadmill at a small local fitness club on other days. By the way, I have mastered the art of reading while walking, so this is also a time for me to do either devotional reading of the Word or (occasionally) professional development reading. Bedtime I do between 15 and 45 minutes of Taiji Quan (a.k.a. Tai Chi Chuan). All this is seven days per week. Also, I am now taking Taiji classes on Monday and Thursday nights, after the kids are in bed. I plan on going down to just one class per week in August, when I will be adding in one or two classes per week of Kendo. (Eventually, I hope to spnd time in the next five years studying Taiji, Kendo and Tae Kwon Do; in particular I am fascinated with the different approaches each martial art takes with regard to the sword.)

Sleep
Tuesday through Sunday my alarm goes off at 6 a.m. Monday night through Saturday night, another alarm (on my phone/pda) reminds me to go to bed at 10 p.m., although I often ignore it. Sunday night / Monday morning is stay up late / sleep in late time. I try to read for half an hour every night, rotating through serially the Word, reading various non-fiction books for professional development, and reading an occasional novel just for fun.

Work
There's a lot of variation right now. Once school begins in September, my teaching schedule will force some changes as well as more overall rigidity, but for now here's what I (mostly) am doing. Tuesdays I work in the office in the church; it's our senior pastor's day off, and a time for me to catch up on email, touch base with folks on the phone, check in on my denomination's listserv for priests, tackle long-term writing projects, etc. Wednesday through Friday I work in my home office up on the third floor of our house; these days are dedicated to sermon development, spiritual growth campaign work, outreach projects, and other long-term tasks. Also, Wednesday nights are frequently church meeting nights, and I have various pastoral duties that have me out and about town in unpredictable ways Tuesday through Thursday. (Fridays are protected time for in-office work, unless there's an emergency in someone's life.) Saturday is family time, although Saturday night I will often retire to my home office for a bit of sermon prep—what some call "internalizing", and others might call "practicing", although it's not necessarily either. Sundays I preach; on those days I don't preach (not many this summer) I make room for a little extra prayer and devotional reading. When I finish preaching and socializing, I rejoin my family at home for lunch, then go up to my office to upload sermons to websites and then to do some reading towards a future sermon. I also use this time to decompress, play guitar, daydream, and so on. (By the way, I am also spending about 15 minutes per day in structured guitar practice.) Monday is a total blow-off day. It's the "second" day of my weekend, since Sunday doesn't count as a day off. I sleep in, play trains with my two-year old, go to the pool, emotionally unwind and mentally return to neutral stillness in preparation for the week that is about to start (on Tuesday).

I'm thinking of adding even more structure to the work week. It'd be nice to say "Thursdays are for pastoral visits", for instance, but from my experience the life of an outreach coordinator / assistant to the pastor has too many tiny moving parts (controlled by other people) to make that work.

So why am I sharing this? In part to get it down in writing for my own benefit. In part because I know I was often curious as a theological school student to know how ordained men spent their time. Hope I didn't bore you too much.

New sermon up at TheoBlog.com: "Make Spiritual Victory a Habit".

It is the first sermon I've done that fully follows the Communicating for a Change model of "ME-WE-GOD-YOU-WE", in that for the first time, after study and prayer, I decided to go all out and actually use the dreaded first-person pronouns in the introduction portion of the message.

I'm posting my outline, for those interested in the method. It wasn't written to be read by others, so you might want to listen to the audio at TheoBlog.com while you read through it, so it'll make more sense.

* * *

TITLE: Make Spiritual Victory a Habit

LESSONS: Matthew 11:28-30; Psalm 51; Heaven and Hell 528

TEXT: Matthew 11:30; Heaven and Hell 533

POINT: Make a mental habit of shunning evil, and the Lord will transform you into a better, happier person.

ME
• Leading a good life sometimes seems hard, but if we just make a habit of repenting then the Lord will do all the heavy lifting.
• “My yoke is easy, and my burden light”
• Love your enemies?

WE
• Sincerely, justly, faithfully?
• Talents? Light?
• By this will they know you… Do they?
• Committed adultery with someone in your heart?
• Ask yourself, “If this big stone building fell and killed me here and now, would I wake in Heaven Tuesday?”

GOD
• Good news: the Lord is Merciful!
• While on earth, he faced every one of these temptations, and more.
• Psalm 51:
• “Have mercy upon me, O God, According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. / Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin. // For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me….”
• So what are we to do?
• HH 528:
• IT IS NOT SO HARD TO LEAD A HEAVEN-BOUND LIFE AS PEOPLE THINK IT IS
• Some people believe it is hard to lead the heaven-bound life that is called “spiritual” because they have heard that we need to renounce the world and give up the desires attributed to the body and the flesh and “live spiritually”.
• All they understand by this is spurning worldly interests, especially concerns for money and prestige, going around in constant devout meditation about God, salvation, and eternal life, devoting their lives to prayer, and reading the Word and religious literature. They think this is renouncing the world and living for the spirit and not for the flesh.
• …In fact, people who renounce the world and live for the spirit in this fashion take on a mournful life for themselves, a life that is not open to heavenly joy, since our life does remain with us after death.
• No, if we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is…no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses....
• But how is that an “easy yoke”? A “light burden”??
• The key is HABITS:
• HH 533:
• We can now see that it is not so hard to lead the life of heaven as people think, because it is simply a matter of recognizing, when something attractive comes up that we know is dishonest or unfair, that this is not to be done because it is against the divine commandments. If we get used to thinking like this, and from this familiarity form a habit, then we are gradually united to heaven.
• To the extent that we are united to heaven, the higher levels of our minds are opened, and to the extent that they are opened, we see what is dishonest and unfair; and to the extent that we see this, these qualities can be dispelled. For no evil can be banished until it has been seen. This is a state we can enter because of our freedom, since everyone is free to think in this way.
• However, once the process has started, the Lord works wonders within us, and causes us not only to see evils but to refuse them and eventually to turn away from them. This is the meaning of the Lord's words, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” (Mat. 11:30)
• WOW.
• Power of habits.
• Developing tastes for foods.
• Eating right.
• Brushing teeth.
• Regular exercise.
• Quitting smoking.
• Speaking of smoking, there’s a dangerous side to habits. HH 533 continues:
• It is important to realize, though, that the difficulty of thinking like this and also of resisting evils increases to the extent that we deliberately do evil things—in fact, to the extent we become used to doing them until ultimately we no longer see them. Then we come to love them and to excuse them to gratify our love and to rationalize them with all kinds of self-deceptions and call them permissible and good. This happens, though, to people who in early adulthood plunge into all kinds of evil without restraint and at the same time at heart reject everything divine.

YOU
• So what are you going to do about this?
• Repent: Examine, Acknowledge, Pray, Live.
• Make repentance a habit.
• Pick something and make shunning it a habit.

WE
• Imagine if every person in the world was making a habit of true repentance, of shunning something.
• Just imagine what your own life will be like.
• We make a habit of thinking, “The Lord said no,” and the Lord moves in us to fight evil and do good.
• He will give us the habit of spiritual victory, and with it, the joy of heaven.
• Truly, his yoke is easy, and his burden light.

Friends and longtime readers know that I co-founded a strategic web design and development company, Refinery (ne Image Refinery Productions) a dozen years ago, that I was an executive there until my career change a few years ago, and that I remained a significant shareholder and occasional board member.

Well, after months and months of behind the scenes efforts, I and my partners have sold the company. As the flurry of press releases and news articles linked to below correctly indicate, Refinery has been purchased by G2 Worldwide, a part of Grey Global Group, and a subsidiary of WPP, and will become a part of G2 Interactive. (Yeah, that's a little complicated, isn't it?)

Of the eleven shareholders, most of us have moved on to other occupations already. I can't and won't discuss the particular terms of the deal, so don't ask. Just know that I am very, very happy with the little company we started a year too early, and that I wish its new owners all joy and blessings as they take it into the future.

For more info, here's AdWeek's news article on the sale:

"Grey's G2 Adds Digital Shop Refinery"

And here is the press release from Refinery's new owner, G2, on the matter:

"G2 Worldwide Acquires Digital Agency Refinery in North America"

And here is the press release from WPP (ticker WPPGY), G2's owner:

"G2 acquires digital agency Refinery, Inc. in US"

Associated Press incorrectly calls Refinery an ad agency:

"WPP's G2 Buys Ad Agency Refinery"

I cannot begin to express what a relief it is to have the majority of all the sale-related business finally done with and no longer taking up time and emotional energy, and my involvement in the process was nothing compared to those of my fellow shareholders who were on the board for all this.

Don't get me wrong: all the distractions and lost sleep and awkward secret keeping nighttime conference calls were TOTALLY worth it in the end. This is a very exciting week for me.

Now I can just focus exclusively on all the cool stuff happening in my ministry going forward...

Life is good.

Sorry about the delay, folks. I've been running around like a madman these past two weeks, and Friday and today were especially crazy. It looks, now, like the first formal installment of the Church and the Long Tail podcast / blog discussion will go out some time in the next three days, while I'm in Ivyland and Bryn Athyn, PA.

In the meantime, other related topics/books worth glancing at are The Tipping Point, Blink, and The Black Swan.

Gotta run. I just finished packing and will be driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia within the hour.

I'm on the road, again. Two weekends ago was a little break from travel. Last Friday I spent the night (with wife and kids) in nowhere, West Virginia. Then Saturday and Sunday we stayed in Charlotte, NC, where we had a blast celebrating New Church Day. Folks came from all over and we had around 50 in total attendance. Then Monday we drove down here to Atlanta to visit my wife's family. We've been bumming around and now are looking forward to a 10++ hour trip back to Pittsburgh tomorrow afternoon/evening/night. Hoody hoo!

(One of my best friends once wrote a poem titled "My Life as a Car" and mailed it to us from somewhere between Pennsylvania and California. I wish I could remember how it goes.)

Anyway, I'm hoping to get back to the Long Tail blogcast project on Friday, before I head out (this Saturday) for a multi-day visit to Bryn Athyn and Ivyland, PA.

Happily, I have no more long drives after that until the end of July. Yay.