Most Tweets are Lame ... Except Ours by Motte Brown on 08/19/2009 at 11:30 AM

Thomas Jeffries was right. Most tweets are lame.

According to a recent study, 40% of all messages on Twitter are classified as "pointless babble" like "I am eating a sandwich now."

From an AFP report on Breitbart.com:

Pear Analytics, based in San Antonio, Texas, said that it randomly sampled 2,000 messages from the public stream of Twitter and separated them into six categories.

The categories were: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

Pear said "pointless babble" accounted for 811 "tweets" or 40.55 percent of the total number of messages sampled.

Conversational messages -- defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between users or try to engage followers in conversation -- accounted for 751 messages or 37.55 percent.

Pear said tweets with "pass-along value" -- messages that are being "re-tweeted" or passed on by users to their followers -- accounted for 174 messages or 8.70 percent.

Self-promotion by companies was next with 117 tweets or 5.85 percent, followed by spam with 75 tweets or 3.75 percent.

It said tweets with news from mainstream media publications accounted for 72 tweets or 3.60 percent.

In an interview earlier this year on the Boundless podcast, Dr. Albert Mohler said that social media provides us with "quantum opportunity to leverage influence." It's why Boundless has a Twitter account. We try to leverage influence with "self-promotion" tweets that have potential "pass-along value."

Boundless tweets new blog posts, articles, and podcast releases, as well as giving updates about new resources like the Girl's Guide to Marrying Well.

So while most tweets may be lame, all of ours consist of meaningful information. Right?

The Weeping Editor by Ted Slater on 04/03/2009 at 12:03 PM

When you think of a newspaper or magazine editor, maybe you think of a grumpy curmudgeon sweating over words, red pen in hand, adjusting grammar and punctuation, from time to time consulting his AP Stylebook.

While that does describe me on occasion, this past week I've found myself tearing up several times as I worked my way through soon-to-be-published Boundless articles.

I choked up as I read last week's article "Bye Bye, Pebble Baby," where author Brenna Kate Simonds recounted the day she lost her baby, the moment she first saw him: "He was as tiny as a pebble, still inside an intact sac of waters. It was really happening: I had lost my child."

My eyes welled up with tears as I read an article by Elisabeth Adam that we're publishing next week. I was profoundly moved when I considered how the Lord has, in specific ways, been so kind to people who deserve no kindness.

And as I became engrossed in George Halitzka's narrative "Imprisoned Joy," I found myself just unable to keep my composure. The pain, the more-than-occasional boring bleakness of our lives this side of Heaven, the breaking through of God's grace, hearts recreated from dark and destructive to hopeful. For the third time in a week, I had to clean tear spray from my glasses.

I think what affects me is the wonder of that chasm between the loss and rejection and struggle and pain that we deserve, and often experience, and the pure grace and joyous hope found in Christ the Victorious. As I wrote in something I wrote last year,

I find that as I meditate on the gap between the severity of my helpless condition and the Lord's insurmountable grace toward me, and how He so mercifully and sovereignly chose to make me "alive together with Christ," my love and appreciation for Him deepens.

So from time to time, for whatever reason, as I read something before sharing it with you I find myself moved to tears by the kindness of our Lord, and the hope found in Him. May they move you as well.

Willful Ignorance, Uninformed Opinions by Ted Slater on 02/26/2009 at 9:28 AM

The girl's comment stunned me. She admitted that she "didn't read the article," and yet she had an opinion about it. A strong opinion against it.

Great.

And then yesterday two commenters on the Boundless Line acknowledged that neither of them had read the article about which they had opinions.

After confessing that she doesn't usually read the articles, one of them acknowledged that "it would've been good for me to have read it before I commented."

Yeah.

The other wasn't so eager to own up to her rash opinions. In fact, she accused me of not providing an adequate Cliffs Notes version of the article being discussed, going on to demand that I apologize for her ignorance of it.

Whew.

Here's the thing. In both of these cases, the clear purpose of each blog post was to discuss an article published over on Boundless Webzine. This should have been obvious. In both cases, for example, the title of my blog post was the same as the title of the Boundless article. In both cases, I included a hyperlinked thumbnail image of the article. In both cases, I included a link directly to the article being discussed.

There really was no excuse for remaining uninformed about the article that was the very focus of each blog post.

Which leaves me wondering: Why are we so often so eager to share our opinions with others that we bypass the necessary step of sufficiently informing ourselves about the very subject at hand?

The Faithful, the Marriable by Suzanne Hadley Gosselin on 01/13/2009 at 4:24 PM

If you're single, you may have had a moment (or 16) where you wondered if you were "marriable." I know I have. That was the inspiration for today's article, "10 Ways to Be Marriable." In it, you'll discover a dozen stories of matches made. Some of the couples met in college. Others were in their thirties before they tied the knot. All of them cited fairly standard character qualities as the things that drew them to their spouses.

Something I noticed was the overlap between singleness and marriage. Good qualities cultivated in singleness paid off in marriage. Josh described it this way:

"Some girls I knew were sitting around waiting for this wealthy, good-looking man to take care of them," Josh says. "Danielle was living life to the fullest and that attracted me to her.

"I thought, If a girl is sitting on the couch at home all day at her parents, will she sit on the couch all day as my wife? In Danielle, I could see a glimpse into the future and knew she would carry the same passion and energy she had for God, our church and her job into marriage. As it turns out, I was right."

Being a good candidate for marriage comes back to faithfulness. How faithful are you with the opportunities God has given you right now? You never know where that faithfulness will lead. I hope you'll find the stories in the article uplifting. If you're married, what drew you to your spouse?