Kineti 2010 Kicked Religious Tukis

Excuse me while I toot my own horn, excuse me while I whip this out.

The Kineti blog had its best year evar in 2010.

With it receiving some 80,000 views, this blog is one of the most popular on the Messianic blogosphere. And now that we’re going on 8 years old, Kineti is the oldest personal Messianic blog on the whole entire intarwebs.

You’re readin’ the good stuff, boychik.

And even when this blog is junk, e.g. most of the time, it’s still better than those other blogs that, without end, wax poetic about possible future implementations of airy, theoretical theologies, most of them harmful.

We’re a little more practical here at Kineti.

2010 saw a 37% increase in traffic from last year. Aw yes. Also, the total visitor count increased by over 3000 – whew, dog! On top of that, 2010 was the most active for me: 131 posts, more than any other year.

Granted, I’m not an insane blogger like Derek Leman. Poor Derek. The man is addicted to methamphetamines, and has no personal or professional life. At least, that’s the only way I can explain his insane multi-blog writing schedules.

But enough about Derek, and more about me. (I’m really enjoying this, you see.)

As for me, I do have a non-religious job and a family, and therefore Kineti is entirely a labor of love.

Even so, I’m bringin’ in the peeps by the peep-load, and rakin’ in the green by the…uh, well, the amount doesn’t matter much.

How do I accomplish such great things, you ask in sheer awe? Pure Messianic macho ego. With a teaspoon of awesomeness.

Actually, that’s a lie.

The truth is, it’s a simple recipe:

• blog consistently
• keep throwing haymakers

That’s a 3 year old resolution I’ve stuck to, and it’s paid dividends.

I blog twice a week, and I throw the occassional haymaker:

• Yes, but what have you done?
• Defining Two House
• Bilateral Ecclesiologists announce discovery of Messianic who gives a turd
• The Surprise Ending of the Frum Gentile Story
• Our Survival Does Not Depend On Religious Approval (with follow up)
• Deut 14: Can Gentiles Eat Unclean Meat
• Divine Messiah and the Messianic Movement
• Last Words of Moishe Rosen
• One Law as the Foundation for Civilization
• Some things we agree on

In 2007, after sporadic blog posts of little value, with a tiny readership (read: my mom + wandering internet nomads), I wanted to get serious about blogging and produce something of value for God’s blog-reading people. In How to Achieve Ultimate Blogging Success, I wrote,

To follow prolific blogger Jeff Atwood’s blogging advice, here is my schedule and I'm sticking to it: 2 blog posts a week.

Shalom, and thanks to you few loyal readers who come to visit despite my sporadic postings. :-)

This worked out quite well – 2008 saw a 600% increase in blog posts, and a 60% increase in visitors.

Things kept improving. The next year, instead of just arguing about theology like everybody does, I introduced some things of real, tangible value to the Messianic movement:

• The Greatest Commandments Project – Map every commandment in Torah into a massive visual hierarchy. See the latest snapshot.
• Weekly Bracha – Shining the light on gems in the Messianic blogosphere each week.
• Paul’s Epistles – Putting Paul’s letters in plain language, in blog form.

The bracha gets lots of click throughs, if only occasional comments. In fact, the bracha is the reason Kineti is one of the primary sources of traffic for a number of Messianic blogs.

And last year, I continued with these projects, while introducing 2 additional projects:

• Messianic music chords – Almost every Messianic congregation has music as part of their service. Why not amass and index and make freely available the music chords for every Messianic song in existence? This directly benefits congregations.
• Chavah – The best darn Messianic radio on the web. Like Pandora, only for Yeshua’s disciples.

Chavah has been insanely popular, and is a great service for the Messianic community. Introduced this spring, Chavah’s already streamed over 100,000 tunes (!) to Yeshua’s disciples.

Did we accomplish our goals for 2010?

At the beginning of 2010, I wrote,

In 2010, the Kineti blog will have more brainstorms. Sometimes, you just want to get on your soapbox and start talkin’. Get out there and call’s ‘em like I see’s ‘em. I refrained from this in 2009 to keep the quality high, but in retrospect, that didn’t pan out. We can improve.

Grade: success. I did this several times in 2010, with good results. My thoughts on 2 House, on Bilateral Ecclesiology, and others were kind of spontaneous thoughts flowing from my gray matter to my fingertips, and the result was good.

In 2010, I will continue avoiding fruitless fights, but will not be pulling any punches in the posts. Lots of people will be offended, there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, yada yada.

Grade: success. I mostly avoided internet arguments. Woohoo. At the same time, I didn’t pull any punches when it came to speaking the truth, or standing up for what’s right.

In 2010, I’ll be frank and plain, as if addressing a note to myself. No worries about who’s gonna think what and what consequences there will be – this is a stifler. There’s a subtle quality to writings in which the author is not putting up a facade, or hiding behind the material in stoic fashion, or kissing religious ass. 2010 will see new direction in this area.

Grade: fail. This turns out to be really difficult to do. I don’t think there’s a single Messianic blogger who writes like this, barring perhaps Dr. Schiffman.

Prophe-sizing and pscho-predicting 2011

I love that word, “prophe-sizing”. I always thought it was “prophesying”, but American televangelists have set me straight.

I’m going to listen to the microphone in my ear, or do whatever it is that scamming televangelists do, and make Judah’s Prophe-sizing Predictions for 2011!

What’s in store for Kineti in 2011?

I want Kineti to be the voice for the independent Messianic movement. More and more blogs on the Messianic blogosphere represent some organization, or speak from that organization’s perspective. Derek Leman is MJTI. Yinon is UMJC. Even if a blog is not officially endorsed by these organizations, their content is heavily influenced by them.

I think a lot of these organizations, indeed some of the popular Messianic blogs, are not representative of the vast majority of Messianic people in the real world. They not only out-of-touch with such people, but in fact their views often run against the grain of the good people in the Messianic movement, Jew or gentile.

I want to counteract that. I want Kineti to be the blog of the people, not of the big organized religious group.

I had been regularly reviewing materials for several Messianic organizations. In an effort to maintain independence, I will be more discriminating in what gets reviewed, and when I do reviews, they will be honest, not ass-kissing.

I want to evolve an existing project: the Weekly Bracha. I want to move it to its own site, make it community-driven, democratic, community-rank-based, do some Bracha-Chavah cross-spamming, and generally be the go-to place for Messianic news on the web. See Bracha Futures for more info.

It’s an ambitious project, the most ambitious yet. I hope to launch that this year.

I want to resurrect Epistles of Paul. I let that project down this year.

I want to get back on track with Greatest Commandments Project. While we moved it forward this year, progress is slower than I’d hoped. The hardest part of that project isn’t the mapping of the commandments – we already wrote software to automate that – but rather, the hardest part is actually piecing together a blog containing all the commentary, images, and all that. If I could simply write commentary, then generate a post based off that, we’d be somewhere.

Happy New Year, fine blog readers! Thank you for making Kineti a blog of the people, not of the organization.

Here’s to 2011, a good and peace-filled year for Messiah’s disciples. Cheers!