It's a sad fact that progressives get together and mope, while the Religious Right gets together and gets their people in office. Time that changed.
The fact is that we tend to mope in little clumps. I've been whizzing around YahooGroups for the afternoon, and I've seen something like two dozen separate email lists of progressive Christians -- some of them 200 names long, some of them 20; all very active, commenting on the media. But think about all that wasted energy -- twenty something discreet groups, none of them speaking to each other? It's good to talk; it's good to vent; but it's much better to organize and do something.
The CrossLeft leadership team wants to do something about that. We're putting a big push forward the next few months to recruit attention to the website. We'll be sending out mailings (please forward them!), posting around other places on the web, and encouraging folks to carry our banner and newsstream as a way of helping to get progressives in touch with each other.
We welcome your ideas. Even more, we welcome your help. If this sounds like a good idea to you, don't just sit there, help us tell people about it.
And in the meantime, to give you a sense of our commitment to helping progressive Christians find each other and meet each other, check out the "LINKS" page: www.crossleft.org/ .
I've put up links to most of the several hundred other discussion boards, blog-sites, church sites, and columnists that feed into our StreamingChristianity newsstream -- including the half dozen YahooGroups that had public RSS-streams.
We want people to meet each other, and we're hoping that, if nothing else, vanity will lead them here as people follow the addresses that list their own sites.
It's about more than that, though. This isn't just another blogrolling site or webring. We're offering a major service with the newsstreams -- you can read the headlines that interest you the most, already put together. For instance, say you've got a lonely pastor friend, the only blue preacher he knows in a red state. Send him to our daily-updated selection of headlines from blogs by progressive clergy.
Once folks come here, we hope they'll say hello, start joining us in talking about a PATH TO ACTION for political and social change, post local progressive Christian events in their area, and help us show how large the movement could be if only we all showed up at once.
The fact is that we tend to mope in little clumps. I've been whizzing around YahooGroups for the afternoon, and I've seen something like two dozen separate email lists of progressive Christians -- some of them 200 names long, some of them 20; all very active, commenting on the media. But think about all that wasted energy -- twenty something discreet groups, none of them speaking to each other? It's good to talk; it's good to vent; but it's much better to organize and do something.
The CrossLeft leadership team wants to do something about that. We're putting a big push forward the next few months to recruit attention to the website. We'll be sending out mailings (please forward them!), posting around other places on the web, and encouraging folks to carry our banner and newsstream as a way of helping to get progressives in touch with each other.
We welcome your ideas. Even more, we welcome your help. If this sounds like a good idea to you, don't just sit there, help us tell people about it.
And in the meantime, to give you a sense of our commitment to helping progressive Christians find each other and meet each other, check out the "LINKS" page: www.crossleft.org/ .
I've put up links to most of the several hundred other discussion boards, blog-sites, church sites, and columnists that feed into our StreamingChristianity newsstream -- including the half dozen YahooGroups that had public RSS-streams.
We want people to meet each other, and we're hoping that, if nothing else, vanity will lead them here as people follow the addresses that list their own sites.
It's about more than that, though. This isn't just another blogrolling site or webring. We're offering a major service with the newsstreams -- you can read the headlines that interest you the most, already put together. For instance, say you've got a lonely pastor friend, the only blue preacher he knows in a red state. Send him to our daily-updated selection of headlines from blogs by progressive clergy.
Once folks come here, we hope they'll say hello, start joining us in talking about a PATH TO ACTION for political and social change, post local progressive Christian events in their area, and help us show how large the movement could be if only we all showed up at once.
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SF Bay Area
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Unsu...
Re: Getting down to business
Fri, October 28, 2005 - 7:42 AMYou could attempt to set up a reverse service, where if someone posts to CrossLeft, your software cross-posts it on all those other sites
Some sites won't like this, but some probably will, esp if you only do with high-quality, pre-screened posts
Also, in addition to the feed, which generates potentially tons of posts going by, you could have an editorial board or some way of harvesting user feedback and create a recommended area, or hall of fame, or best posts of the month (week, year) section
So, that by harvesting all these areas you could take the most interesting and create a sort of magazine
People who don't want to deal with the feed or understand things like that, could just go to the 'magazine', which could be a separate url (subdomain like mag.crossleft.com) and it would navigate like static monthly or weekly content, more stable for example if people want to tell their friends -- read the latest issue, it has articles on this, that and the other
Eventually you could solicit content for this section directly and potentially lead to a print version
If you get ad revenue, you could potentially offer to give a bit to 'winning' posts that are selected for that section of the site
Or solicit 'columns' from those writers (who may be pastors or whatever) for themed issues -
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Re: Getting down to business
Sat, October 29, 2005 - 6:51 AMposting crossleft to other sites: already happens. we have about 10 other sites doing it now.
edited feed: love it. helen thompson is working on setting up an edited "magazine" of the best posts and articles, to come out bimonthly!
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