As in the kind of “nakedness” talked about in a new book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. I think I read somewhere in the intro that this book could be considered a sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto (by different authors with the same message, with updated stories and new blog-enabling technological innovations.

So I sat and read a little of the intro on the way home at a Starbuck’s as I sipped my latest favorite, Toffee Nut Latte. (I got 3 gift cards for Starbucks for Christmas, so I’m still plowing through those a month later).

After a fairly troublesome and worrisome day, my reading in this topic seems to have enlivened and lifted my mood a bit. It seems that this is the sort of thing that makes me feel I am close to what drives me. As you might know if you have clicked around the various categories on this blog, I feel rather strongly about the possibilities for the church with blogging. I have written several posts in the past about how The Cluetrain Manifesto showed me into a new innovative world of conversation. The Web had been called a conversation before, back at its beginning, but the barrier to entry into the Web World was a bit higher back in the early 90’s, when one had to be something of an HTML user to figure out how to build a web and tell a story.

The blog world has changed that. The Blog tools have created a Word Processor for the Web, but much more than that, they (the tools) have joined the blogs together via RSS and Blogrolls, BlogRings, and Technorati’s blog aggregating service and their innovative “Technorati Tags”, which provide for the means to find posts on particular topics.

Most importantly here, the tags, the RSS, and the blogs amongst which these things live and join together, is the conversation. Readers here may also know I have been feeling quite estranged from church as usual. THey have in large part allowed themselves to be dragged into the world’s way of top-down/ even/entertainment programmming-oriented , one way communicaiton. The conversation is perhaps even given lip service. But there seems to be little room for the relationships. I’ll have more on this later.