This Street Prophets Coffee Hour is brought to you by Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Today’s article will feature a look at a past article by Pastor Dan and discuss the Internet Archive a bit.
Street Prophets was founded by the Reverend Dan Schultz, AKA “Pastor Dan” and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga around the same time as the website Daily Kos was launched. Originally Street Prophets had its own internet address and its own hosting. It was a separate website with the domain name streetprophets.com.
As the Daily Kos site grew it became logistically difficult for the Daily Kos IT staff to maintain two sites, so with the introduction of the groups feature of Daily Kos it was decided by Dan and Markos to let the separate site go and move its function to a Daily Kos group. For better or worse the groups feature of Daily Kos is just not the same as having our own site.
Today beyond the fold I will share an article Pastor Dan posted on July 18, 2008 and reflect a bit on the difference between the orange Street Prophets group and the old blue Street Prophets website. Also, I was going to do an article about Professor Antonio Damasio’s books today, but I got sidetracked by exploring blue Street Prophet’s past on the internet archive.
This article is continued after the fold. The comments for this article are are after community links and its sub thread.
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I first came to Daily Kos in 2006 and was immediately overwhelmed by its size and its overwhelming number of comments. I wanted to learn to “blog” and I had a preexisting interest in Progressive politics and religion. As it turned out for me the smaller “blue” Street Prophets met my needs at that time better than the main site. It was much easier to deal with only a few new stories per day and a membership of only a few hundred. I also appreciated Pastor Dan’s “hands on” approach to refereeing or mentoring Street Prophets.
To right is an image of the old blue Recent Diaries list. As you can see at least half of the article listed are about God, Religion, or helping people. On every Friday there was a article taking prayer requests. This was a popular diary and I saw a lot of community love expressed there.
Even though I was a “spiritual atheist” Pastor Dan and the other members of Blue Street Prophets treated me with respect. Back then we had members that were individual armaments of weaponized religion and Pastor Dan actively worked to moderate their dogmatic and often exclusionary approach to Religion.
I must say the “pie” fights were horrific. But Pastor Dan, to his credit, maintained control over the site. At times when he was displeased with something he would joke about being upset by pretending to be the Hulk by saying, “Hulk smash something.” (This paraphrased as this was from ten years ago my memory may be slightly off.)
Pastor Dan even got a little nervous about one story I submitted about Why God Won’t Go Away. This story was based on Andrew B. Newberg book about the neuroscience of spiritual belief by the same name. I guess he thought the title was a bit “snarky,” but to his credit he did not say anything more about it other than be careful about what you say.
It was just about the time old blue Street Prophets ended that I posted another article on brain science by Professor Antonio Damasio. Again the article bothered a few members and I was criticized in the comments. The old site had a number of hard core Christian believers that could not stand their beliefs being challenged. Even though my article was about why the concept of moving consciousness used in the television science fiction series Caprica was flawed it disturbed them.
Below is an hopeful article by Pastor Dan. note in his “cookie jar” comment his mentioning the press confusing the old blue stand alone site with the main orange Daily Kos site. Back then we had “cookie jars” not “tip jars.”
JCHFleetguy was a daily contributor to street prophets. See image below. As noted he was a defender of the faith. He often got in “pie fights” over dogma.
Below is a screen grab of the the “site map” display of Wayback Machine. On the left is a grab from 2019 that allows access to all the captures done in that year. One can run the mouse over the colored marks and each one is an capture. To get this function go to the Internet Archive Website and type streetprophets.com into the search line as illustrated below.
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The image on the right is of one of Ojibwa’s historical articles and an Coffee Hour article I did.
As you can see from the sample articles in the images and recent diaries list image I posted we had a large and vibrant community back then. And there was some hope that our site would make a difference in the world. But, as it is said “all things must pass.”
Pleas feel free to talk about the old site and share any memories you have about it. I for one was lost for hours viewing the articles and comments. I think it might be worthwhile to re-publish some of articles. The Wayback Machine makes it easy by providing a link that grabs articles by text so that all that may be left to do is re-post the image to the Daily Kos image library.
Lastly, everyone should support the Internet Archives with a donation. Click on the link below.
I hope everyone enjoys this taste of the old Blue Street Prophets brought to by the Internet Archives.
JON