G. Frink's

Import Peace is non-profit organization that sells high-quality, fair-trade, USDA organic olive oil produced in Palestine.

It was founded by a group of 100 Presbyterians in response to the frustration, pain and poverty of the people of the Palestinian Occupied Territories during a 2006 trip with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program.

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Citizen involvement a top Obama-Biden strategy as we can see at change.gov.

Drop by to tell your election story, share your ideas about how the Obama-Biden team can solve this country's overarching problems, apply for a job or browse through the trove of information there about the incoming Democratic administration.

At first glance, this site appears to me to promise and deliver the kind of fully interactive citizen involvement one would expect of an online intensive administration that intends to keep both its stated promises and those implied by an online-intensive campaign.

More later, after I get my head around this.

Pat Riviere-Seel, whose volume of poetry entitled "The Serial Killer's Daughter" was reviewed here recently, is one of four poets featured on the cover of the current issue of Verve, a western North Carolina magazine for women.

Ms. Riviere-Seel is also the author of No Turning Back Now, part of the New Women's Voices Series from Finishing Line Press.

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Rapidly shrinking enterprises, like the Southern Baptist Convention, are not required to die.

They prefer death to adaptation.

Like the SBC, they often rush to embrace death by refusing to effectively apply easy-to-use, cost-effective technologies and services which speak directly to the markets which are their life's blood.

Technologies like wireless communication and services like Twitter, which was at last poorly employed at the SBC convention in Indianapolis.

Why Twitter? asked pastor Joe Thorn, a Saint Charles, IL-based Baptist blogger whom I see as an SBC technology leader.

His answer offered practical applications of Twitter, without noting that Twitter and other wireless-dominated services can speak directly to cellphone-communication-fixated youth the SBC must reach and convert in order to forestall an almost 50% decline in church numbers forecast for 2030 by Frank Page, past president of the SBC.

"The reality is it's our fault," Page said earlier this year.

Yes, and that means the problem of decline is one Baptist leaders can solve by altering course to seriously apply effective new solutions.

Yet solutions that work for comparable organizations are left on the shelf, or when one like Twitter is taken down and used, merely tasted. Toyed with really, although Ed Stetzer of Lifeway's "tasting" was almost a game try at tweeting the Indianapolis convention.

Game, but unsuccessful. Stetzer's twitterstream did almost nothing to help his followers understand the direction, real import and impact of events. Even Thorn gently derided Sitzer's effort as keeping "people informed about who’s wearing what at the SBC."

Worthwhile application of available wireless technology at the SBC convention in Indianapolis would have seen application of Twitter, not as though it were a toy, but in ways that made it possible to follow the content events. Well, follow the content of events as understood by the Southern Baptist twitterati (an elite which currently has no members).

BrightKite would have been put to work mapping attendee travels so that everyone could follow those in whom they were interested, often literally from room to room.

There would have been proliferation of individual audio and video streams via Qik, Sesmic and their competitors to provide remote audiences with sights and sounds as they occurred and from a wonderfully enriching variety of perspectives.

An entrancing, enlightening, audience-recruiting measure of virtual attendance and participation would have been the result.

Instead of the SBC's continued embrace of inflexibility and decline toward death.

Any blogger who tries to slip past issuing corrections by declaring "I'm not a journalist," is deleted from my bookmarks.

With decades of experience in mainstream daily newspapers before decamping for the world of bits and bytes, I am irretrievably a journalist (among other things), and I know you don't have to be one to be honest. Failing to report the facts and refusing to correct when you're clearly wrong is dishonest, and folks who do that don't deserve my attention.

As naturally as a bear killing rabbits, I salute Jocelyn Newmarch's criticism of a fellow South Africa Mail & Guardian Thought Leader blogger for using that excuse. She was at her best when she wrote:

... the promise of blogging is that all this multiplicity may enable us to think more rigorously and critically, to deepen the level of debate, and to respond to our society with greater compassion. But it can only do that if we?re willing to find the truth, however quiet or mundane it may be.

Buster at the Biblical Recorder Editor's Journal addresses that challenge to religious bloggers, concluding:

Yes, the unofficial motto of the blogosphere -- "we fact-check your ass" -- can be relentless and unforgiving.
Shouldn't it be?

Andrew G.R. seems to me to be close to the mark when commenting on March's piece for the Blog Herald. Addressing the question, "Are bloggers journalists?," he concludes:

In my humble opinion, it all depends on the type of blog you are running. One thing, however, is certain: you should always tell the truth and be prepared to defend your post, regardless of your blog?s size.

There seems to be a coherent standard here:

Write honestly, with painstaking attention to the facts when facts are used, and be prepared to honestly defend your work.

Having once upon a time served for years as a newspaper opinion writer/editor, that sounds to me very much like the meat of a job description for a newspaper editor.

Which brings me to a longstanding personal conclusion:

Bloggers who aren't journalists and who are blogging about matters of factual import, should all aspire to be.

It isn't a joke.
Congress is on the verge of [wrecking|http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29086] one of the most important and powerful economic engines of our era.
Worse than sad, it would be thoroughly idiotic.
They're on the verge of enacting law that will lay waste to the public interest.
Just as the digital divide is [starting to close|http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/us/31divide.html?ex=1301461200&en=6fd4e942aaaa04ad&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss], Congress is set to act next Wednesday to open it up again, giving to the rich hand over fist, and tossing the rest of us overboard.

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