Google recently launched it's page creator to help individuals design websites and even hosts them. It's primarily for static pages but I was able to redesign the look of our main site, ldsteenhelp.com using it. Being a site for teenagers, more colors were appropriate and I spontaneously received emails from users telling me how much they loved the changes. It took about an hour and it was free. I've moved our site analytics over to Google also which has provided great information, much better than any of the other free stat sites that I've used. I know that this isn't new information for some, but I'm often slow to get on because I go through the wait list.

All we have been hearing about since last Friday is the decision regarding the Department of Justice and Google. Brief Background: URLs and search queries were subpoenad by the Department of Justice in order to collect evidence against those providing inappropriate images of children. Google resisted, mainly for the purpose of making a statement, that individual's search privacy will be protected and Google will never give out information compromising that privacy. That's good. However, being a Google fan, I hate to point out amidst all of the celebration that there is a downside to this decision. The United States Government is attempting to find those that are breaking the law and taking advantage of minors. I have long believed that those in a position to fight against things so contrary to morality, should. For example, profile providers such as MySpace, MSN, and Yahoo have always had a responsibility and privilege to work against these things by watching over the content on their profiles and placing safeguards to protect the innocent. I have told Google that I wish, with all of their information and resources, they could do some more good with it and create a filter. Inappropriate sites make something of a webring with each other and no other organization has the information on every link from one site to another as does Google. With a simple program, Google could create a filter that didn't have to scan a page before loading it, but decide to show a page based, not only on content that had been scanned long before, but also on links in and out. The majority of inappropriate sites could be removed this way. Google has the opportunity to do a lot of good and their decision to not work with the government means that it will be more difficult to find those that are destroying lives and adding to the immoral climate plaguing our society.

On February 15, 1982, Jeffrey R. Holland, then President of Brigham Young University, gave an address to the student body entitled "The Inconvenient Messiah." The premise is that when Jesus was tempted after his fasting, the real temptation was to do something "the easy way, by abuse of power and without a willingness to wait for the right time and the right way." Christ virtually said, "Yes, but not this way." He related this to sexual misconduct, saying "It, like every good thing, is God's right to bestow, not Satan's. When faced with that inherent appetite, a disciple of Christ must be willing to say, "Yes, but not this way"...I ask you to be inconvenienced until you've earned the right and paid the divine price to know the body and the soul of the one you love."

Over the past week, I've been having an email conversation with a young man using one of our websites. He says that he struggles with same-gender attraction and his problem was that he may have messed things up between himself and one of his best friends. I don't pretend to be a counselor, but in this case he is not a Latter-day Saint, as many site users are, so I cannot tell him to go talk to his Bishop. After a few semi-lengthy conversations, we got down to what the real issue is. You see, there's something wrong with the fact that a 15 year old feels he has to make decisions regarding his sexual orientation right now. That warrants a post of its own, but this young man said, "I like getting close to people, I like having them know they can trust someone, and out there someone one really does care." We talked about him turning this need to be close to others into something sexual when the curiosity of puberty hit, and now, his desire to be close with a friend went awry because he tried to take the convenient way, as Pres. Holland would describe it. He attempts to bypass what a real friendship is based on and get right to closeness, thinking that anything physical is the fastest and easiest way to get close with someone. He might wonder, "If these are good desires then why do I have to suffer alone rather than take what's available to me right now?" You see, someone wanting closeness might find a cheap substitute, really a counterfeit, readily available in any community of homosexuals or curious friends. He might accept this without being willing or realizing that with some effort he can have a real relationship, real trust with friends and have it be based on principles of mutual concern rather than fast gratification. Those who partake in this lifestyle early are in essence cheating themselves of what they really want, the relationships that will really help them to feel the closeness that they are looking for. I'm concerned with the number of youth visiting our sites feeling like they have to make decisions now regarding these things because so many of them are entering addictive lifestyles while they are really just learning how to cope with the combined effects of curiosity and lack of close male role models. If they could understand that real and healthy relationships go beyond the physical availability of someone, they might be willing to wait and actually go through the development process. It's the desire to bypass what they really want for what they think might be their only option and their need to just be close to someone right now. The inconvenient relationship is the only way to effectively build one based on trust, any relationship, friend to friend, boyfriend to girlfriend, etc.

I received an email a few days ago about VIPBloggers.com. I thought, "For a few bucks I can support a fellow classmate." However, not long after signing up I began to see some great benefits from this site. I learned from reading someone else's blog about Gcast, a new service much like Blogger or something similar that hosts your podcasts and you can even create a podcast by calling it in. Then I saw that Chad Blodgett's blog was up there, who runs Weightlosswars.com and ehealthcompete.com. I had been wanting to get in contact with Chad to find out if his program could run other types of competitions that would be helpful on some of our sites. In short, it seems like this might be a community of Utah Valley entrepreneurs that The Hive and Linked In are trying to create.

There was a study conducted in which videotaped interviews of married couples were examined and the emotions displayed during those interviews were listed and ranked. The couples were followed and after 15 years, the conductor found out whether they were still married. The emotions displayed were broken down into twenty emotions. The single greatest emotion that had the most statistically significant relationship with whether the couple stayed together or not? Contempt. Contempt being defined as "trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It's hierarchial." (Blink, Gladwell) In some settings, we also call this pride. The amount that contempt is displayed is more closely linked with divorce than any other emotion measured. And the study is 95% accurate in its predictions. My question is this: If contempt is the most closely related to failed relationships in the most personal of relationships, husband and wife, then is contempt also the most closely linked with failed group relationships?

I have been working with sociograms for a few months now and have been trying to create better questions that will get at the heart of whether the group relationship will flourish or fail. Do I need to find a way to measure how hierachial the group dynamics are and whether or not individuals in the group feel like they are valued equally? Will this turn out to be the greatest influence on group relationship success? Sociograms are often used to identify outliers, or loners. To do that one might ask each group member, "How well do you know...?" And if you add everything together and find out that no one in the group knows a certain individual, then you have a loner on your hand. You can also find the opposite. This tells us something about the individual, but does it really tell us if the group relationship is flourishing? How would I go about measuring that? I don't want to ask, "Do you think you're better than...?" or "Does...think they are better than you?" simply because it is focusing on the negative and somewhat encouraging those types of thoughts. Maybe we should ask "How much does...treat you as an equal?" We might have to try this out on a class and just see what the results are. I know, it's not scientific, completely without hypothesis, but it's good enough for now.