When Copies Are Free, What is Valuable?

Kevin Kelly, an influential thinker about all things digital, just posted an essay called Better than Free.

It’s quite good.

The gist is that technology is making copies easier and easier to create. In fact, copies of most things are so cheap that they’re essentially free.

In his words:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable

…

Well, what can’t be copied? 

There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world. 

Kelly identifies 8 similar difficult-to-copy qualities which add value to products and services:

  1. Immediacy: getting it now (as it is produced or created)
  2. Personalization: getting it made just for you
  3. Interpretation: having it explained in a way that makes sense to you
  4. Authenticity: knowing it’s the real deal or a copy of the real deal (as opposed to a song being done by a cover band or something)
  5. Accessibility: it’s convenient to experience
  6. Embodiment: it’s something you can experience on a uniquely intense level (you can shake the hand of the athlete who just scored the game-winning point, etc)
  7. Patronage: you believe that by consuming it you’re enabling more of it (whatever it is you value) to be produced
  8. Findability: it gets on your radar somehow

Kelly is mostly speaking about business in his essay, but it occurs to me that this is a pretty good checklist for ministry.

A sea of ministry copies is floating around your community. There’s Christian radio (carrying copies of some the best worship music and preaching to be found), there’s Christian television (carrying copies), there are Christian books and magazines (carrying copies of wise people’s opinions and Bible interpretations), and there are blogs that give everyone the opportunity to interact with any number of other esteemed Christian leaders. On top of that, there’s the multi-site church movement which at its heart is about copying ministry.

And this is to say nothing of the ministry clones that abound in every community. You know the ones I speak of. They are the Starbucks of churches, the McDonald’s of ministry. Each of them looks and feels the same no matter what community they nominally inhabit. They could care less whether they are in El Paso or Austin. They will treat Boston and Springfield, MO alike.

In this copy-laden context, what true value does your ministry offer? 

There are certainly other things we need to consider than Kelly’s list. Some of them are of exceeding importance, such as whether we’re proclaiming the gospel clearly and faithfully.

But his list still nags at me. It seems to me to be a helpful way to examine ourselves from a purely pragmatic perspective. 

I think ministries do well by these standards. For example, most ministries I know are strong at

  1. Immediacy: people are there while we preach it — live. Our worship team is performing — live. Our prayers are spontaneous. People are operating in the gifts of the Spirit — live and without rehearsal.
  2. Personalization: people are meeting with mentors who are showing them how to understand the Bible given their particular situation in life (although they’re not usually called mentors — they’re usually called youth sponsors, sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors, friends, co-workers, or something else that’s not very trendy to be callled)
  3. Interpretation: people are not only given a Bible, they’re given a whole learning environment with it — sermons, Bible studies, Sunday School, seminars, conferences, Christian media, websites
  4. Authenticity: it’s become cliche to knock around the established church for being inauthentic, but I just don’t see it. Most people love their pastor for a reason. Notable examples aside, most ministers aren’t hypocrites and are serving up the goods of a life lived in humilty before God.
  5. Patronage: giving in the offering pays the salary of the pastoral team and allows the ministries of the church to operate. Giving in offerings allows missionaries to take the gospel around the world.

I think a lot of ministries could use work on the other parts of the list, however.

  1. Accessibility: we too often make ministry inconvenient for the people we say we’re trying to reach. Our service times are funky. Our dress code is off-putting. Our lingo is difficult to decode.
  2. Embodiment: too many churches seem obsessed with making church as bland and palatable as possible. This is especially true of my Pentecostal comrades: we’ve become embarrassed about our spirituality. To them, I can only quote Curt Harlow: don’t tone it down, sincere it up. Make coming to church significantly more lively and rewarding than watching a church service broadcast on a big screen tv at home with surround-sound.
  3. Findability: not nearly as many people know about your ministry as you think. Existing is not enough to produce awareness.

So to my ministerial friends, I pose this simple question: in a world of copies, what makes your ministry valuable? Is it something that can’t be copied out from under you?

The things I find myself obsessing over are all too often the things that are the most copyable. Did my sermon sound like one of Rick Warren’s/John Ortberg’s/John Piper’s/etc? Does my worship team sound like they just rolled off the Passion Tour/IHOP Prayer Room/etc?

What I should be asking is: if Rick Warren set up on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives? If Dave Crowder decided to lead worship for another ministry on my campus, would I still be adding value to students’ lives?

What’s not copyable about what I’m doing?

Anyway, just some off-the-cuff thoughts inspired by his essay. Read the article ladykillers the download free .

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Using Yahoo! Go

A friend of mine is working at Yahoo and he mentioned that I should really give the special Yahoo program for cell phones a try (just browse to mobile.yahoo.com with your cell phone and you should be prompted to install it). So I downloaded it and he’s right — it’s awesome!

One of its niftier features is that it’s super-easy to upload pictures directly to Flickr from my cell phone. So I’ve just uploaded some stuff I’ve been sitting on for ages.

Anyway, expect to see some more random pictures from my cell phone now and then in addition to the photos Paula uploads to our family gallery

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Typo at Stanford

I’ve been meaning to blog this forever, but I kept forgetting. On the first floor of the renovated Old Union is an acrylic sign telling the history of the building.

For the longest time (months) it had a glaring typo (I think it’s been fixed since I took this photo). It really amused me.
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If you have a hard time seeing it, look under the word Union or click on the picture to view it with the error highlighted.

It's Not About Me

Our College Winter Conference

is this weekend, and I’m in charge. So for the last few days I’ve been bombarded with phone calls or urgent emails relating to some minor crisis about the event. It reached a fever pitch yesterday when I received a message about every ten minutes (or so it seemed).

That’s not a big deal — it’s what you sign on for when you agree to direct a retreat or conference.

However, I also had to preach last night. 

Being interrupted every ten minutes does not lend itself to robust sermon preparation. I’m very particular about my sermon preparation routine. I like to research my topic thoroughly, write out what I intend to say word for word, and then rehearse it (at least once, preferably twice). When speaking in the evening, I usually manuscript in the morning and rehearse in the afternoon. That didn’t happen yesterday.

The bottom line is that I walked into last night’s meeting less prepared for a sermon than I have been in years. I felt certain that the message was going to be a flop.

While delivering it, I felt as though I was fumbling for words and rambling incoherently.

But at the end of the evening, one student prayed to receive Christ and another prayed to rededicate herself to Christ.

It was a humbling reminder that it’s not about me and my preparation; it’s about God using broken vessels to achieve His will.

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Science, Faith, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yesterday we were giving away free homemade chocolate-chip cookies on White Plaza, and we got all sorts of wonderful reactions. My favorite was from a master’s student in engineering who grabbed a cookie and then looked at the poster next to the cookie pile.

It was an advertisement for the upcoming Francis Collins talk watch corvette summer online the man who would be king online download

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download barbie of swan lake movie . If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Collins coordinated the Human Genome Project that decoded human DNA. He’s also a follower of Christ.

Anyway, this guy just stared at the poster for about a minute, befuddlement sprawled across his face. He looked at the picture of Collins on the cover of Nature magazine. He read his scientific credentials. And then he read the topic of the lecture again. Then he sort of murmured, “Wait. This can’t be right. This doesn’t make any sense.”

So we explained that yes, Francis Collins really is one of the world’s leading geneticists. And yes, he really does believe in Jesus. And he’s going to be talking about it Stanford.

The student said he’d be there, and I hope he does show up. He seemed quite earnest. There are a lot of students on campus who don’t allow themselves to consider God seriously because they assume that science and faith are by definition opposed to one another. We hope that by showing them a world-class scientist who loves God we can dispel some of that prejudice.

I love this job.

Congratulations, Aaron "Rhodes Scholar" Polhamus!

Chi Alpha @ Stanford officer Aaron Polhamus was just awarded a Rhodes Scholarship

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(see page 10 of the document). That means he gets 2 or 3 years to study at Oxford — fully subsidized. The Stanford Daily has a brief write-up

on it which quotes Aaron at some length.

Being a Rhodes Scholar is a big deal — some notable recipients of the award include Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark (the general turned politician), Robert Reich, Daniel Boorstin (the historian), physicist Brian Greene (yeah, the one who writes the cool books about science), George Stephanopoulos, current Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and scads of congressman and senators. Oh, plus Kris Kristofferson (really).

So congrats, Aaron!

Love and Tolerance

Last night at Chi Alpha’s weekly meeting we had a guest speaker — missionary Mark Orfila. He’s been serving for over a decade in eastern Europe and has been thinking very deeply about American cultural values and how they relate to the Kingdom of God.

He said a lot of very helpful things last night, but I think the most helpful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):

If I had to choose between tolerance and hatred, I’d choose tolerance hands-down. 

But we’re not facing a binary choice — we have a whole range of options available to us. And tolerance can’t be the ultimate good in a society for two reasons: one philosophical and one practical. There must be something higher of which tolerance is a special case, because if tolerance is the highest good then you have a real problem — how do you handle the intolerant members of your own society? If you tolerate them, then you allow intolerance to flourish. If you don’t tolerate them, then you promote intolerance yourself. Either way intolerance sneaks into your society. That’s the philosophical approach. But there’s an even bigger practical problem. Who wants to be tolerated? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tolerance is a negative virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to people. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stigmatize you. It’s a peculiar inverse of the golden rule — tolerance tells us not to do to others what we don’t want done to us. It creates a distance between us and never forces us to cross it.

The problem with tolerance for a Christian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one another; in fact, we are even called to love our enemies. And rather than merely respecting the distance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tolerance is a poor substitute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most situations we should demand more (especially of ourselves). 

Thanks for the clear thinking on a crucial subject, Mark.

Scanning a Directory For PHP Errors

My fellow web geeks might find this script, php-check download home on the range movie , useful. It recursively scans a directory checking PHP files for syntax errors.

Just copy it somewhere in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and chmod it to 755. 

I wrote the script because I edit PHP using Notepad++, so it’s easy for small typos to enter my scripts. I needed a quick way to scan a directory after uploading revised files.
I wrote it in PHP so that those who need it will also know how to customize it.

[php]
#!/usr/bin/php
?php // php-check version 1.0 // recursively scans a directory for .php files and runs php ‑l on // them (php ‑l checks for PHP syntax errors) // revisions at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/2007/10/31/scanning-a-directory-for-php-errors/ if (php_sapi_name()!=‘cli’) { die(“This utility can only be run from the command line.\n”); } $counter=0; $errors=false; function scan_dir($dir) { $counter=0; $dh=opendir($dir); while ($file=readdir($dh)) { if ($file==’.’ || $file==’..’) continue; if (is_dir($dir.’/’.$file)) { $counter+=scan_dir($dir.’/’.$file); } else { if (substr($file, strlen($file) — 4) == ‘.php’) { $counter++; $output=shell_exec(“/usr/bin/php ‑l $dir/$file 2>&1”);
if (substr($output,0,2)!=‘No’) { // skips the “No syntax errors in …” message
$errors=true;
echo $output;
}
}

}
}
return $counter;
}
if ($argc!=2) {
die(“Usage: php-check dirname (usually php-check .)\n”);
}

if (!is_dir($argv[1])) {
die(“Argument must be a directory. The most common usage is php-check .\n”);
}

$counter=scan_dir($argv[1]);

echo “$counter files checked\n”;
exit($errors);
?>
[/php]

This is a quick and dirty script — there are probably some bugs in it. User beware. 

If you find it helpful, you might also want to check out scripts like PHP CodeSniffer

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Me And The Mythbusters

I recently submitted a question to the Freakonomics guys for an interview with the MythBusters.

They picked my question as the first one! 

Here’s my question and their answer:

Me: Could you describe the brainstorming process that goes into an episode? How far in advance do you begin planning? Who sits in during those meetings?

ADAM: The usual crowd at a brainstorming session is me, Jamie, Alice Dallow (our producer), and whichever researcher is doing the segment we’re working on — either Dennis Kwon or Eric Haven. We also have an on-the-ground executive producer during an official “story meeting.” We usually have one or maybe two of them before shooting a myth, but discussions about stories can happen all over the place, and at any time.

Often, we’ll ask for certain parameters as far as locations or materials, and as we discover what’s possible or not possible, we’ll hone it down to what we’re actually going to do. The show’s researchers are fantastic about finding the weirdest of things and experts, and Alice is brilliant at keeping us on track. The discussions can be like herding cats — there’s a ribald, funny atmosphere, and we’ll range very far from the topic at hand.

Planning can take anywhere from a month to a day or two, depending on the schedule. We’ve had critical locations fall through at the last minute, and needed to turn 180 degrees on a few hours’ notice. We’ll also flag difficult stories as far in advance as we think necessary. Some things, like getting permission to film at Giants Stadium for the Jimmy Hoffa story, have taken the better part of a year to work out.

Then there’s the discussions that Jamie and I have. We’ll often take a difficult problem home, think about it overnight, and maybe discuss the problems we see in it while driving to a location. We also play devil’s advocate with each other — if one of us has a good idea, the other will poke as many holes in it as possible, and in this way we try our best to shake out any problems before we hit them.

JAMIE: This is, believe it or not, the most fun we have on the show. There is no underestimating the thrill of a big catastrophe or explosion; but if you really want to know what gets us going, it’s the brainstorming. Once a topic has passed muster, some basic research has been done by our research team, and we are down to nutting it out, Adam and I swing into action — sort of. Usually we go home first and think about it overnight, and then come in bursting with ideas. We set up in front of a dry erase board, and lay out any solutions we came up with by ourselves.

Amazingly, as much as we are of different temperaments, we quickly spot the best solutions and chip in to flesh the approach out. It becomes like playing Ping-Pong with ideas. Sometimes it gets so intense that there is no time to complete sentences; it becomes a bunch of gesticulations, some pieces of words or phrases, and then, when we come out on the other end, the approach is fleshed out. We call it the “MythBusters Mindmeld.” To anyone listening, it is gibberish, but it allows us to plow through a huge amount of designing in no time (which is what we have a lot of on the show). 

Read the rest of the interview.