From the category archives:

Social Media

‘Tweeting Wall’? ‘Twestern Wall? ‘Twailing Wall’?

July 24, 2009

T’were awful puns, I know. Twitter user @TheKotel has established a free service whereby prayers tweeted on his profile will be printed and placed in the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is by no means an ‘official’ service, and the associated website’s FAQ attributes it to “a young man [...]

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Facebook says ‘No’ to hate

June 14, 2009

Facebook has disabled the ‘I Hate Muslims in Oz’ group from their site. This was due to its “explicit statement of hate”, rather than any sense of religious vilification. Holocaust denial groups have also been removed in the past, but only when similarly related to a message of hate. apud AFP ‘Facebook shuts down Aussie [...]

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PopeTube

May 23, 2009

No longer do you need to make the long trek all the way to St Peter’s to see the Pope: now you can stream him direct to your smartphone! The Pope2You portal features links to their Facebook and iPhone apps, WikiCath and the Vatican’s YouTube channel. This is something of a turn-around for the Vatican, [...]

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Towards an halal Facebook

May 22, 2009

Indonesian clerics met at the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school to discuss, among other issues, possible guidelines for Muslim Facebook users. Fearing that Facebook, Indonesia’s most popular site, may encourage “pornographic chatter”, clerics considered an edict on the matter was necessary. “The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on virtual networking, because this [...]

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The New Twitterment

April 11, 2009

Bach’s Matthäuspassion takes almost 5 hours to perform in full, and the passion plays at Bozen in Tyrol were known to last for 7 days. Wall Street’s attention span is a bit more meagre, however, and from 12-3pm the Episcopalian Trinity Church delivered a passion play via Twitter in no more than 140-character ‘tweets’. Dramatis [...]

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Jesus Is My Guild Leader

April 9, 2009

(With apologies to Penny Arcade.) Seen the other day on Oceanic World of Warcraft realm Nagrand: “Efimovich: is recruiting now. We are a Christian guild dedicated to following Christ’s example and playing Warcraft as he would wish us to. We are looking for a Christian warlock and Christian shaman to join our 25 man Naxx [...]

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Italian bishops call for moratorium on digital media on Lenten Fridays

March 10, 2009

Several bishops of Italian dioceses have suggested their parishioners give up modern technology alongside meat on Fridays during Lent. Turin has suggested not watching television during the fast month, while Modena, southern Bari and a few other dioceses asked for a ban on text messaging on Fridays. The Modena diocese stated this is to draw [...]

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False Dalai Lama flees People’s Republic of Twitter

February 10, 2009

Twitter have suspended an account that purported to belong to the Dalai Lama, although there has been no report as to how they discovered it wasn’t genuine. In only a few days the account had attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, making it probably Twitter’s highest-profile suspension. I can only assume this anti-Dalai Lama will [...]

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iSlam

December 12, 2008

That was the best pun-tacular headline I could come up with. The usual apologies to all. Finnish Muslim social site Muxlim has created a virtual world, Muxlim Pal, which is currently in open beta. Muxlim chief executive Mohamed El-Fatatry said this world is primarily for Muslims in western countries, for whom expressing their religious selves [...]

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Shiva when you kiss me, Shiva all through the night

December 12, 2008

I’m sure I’ve heard of this before, but a brief note in this article in the Washington Post on inter-caste marrying in India reminded me. Apparently many Indian dating sites allow you to specify particulars such as caste and skin colour. I’m just trying to imagine what the reaction would be if we had such [...]

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