I guess she bear 1,000 here. It is Saturday night slash Sunday morning. It's about We've got here about 312 in the morning It is exactly 312 in the morning See that so All right, we got 312 in the morning My first 3 a.m. Challenge I kind of gave it a little bit longer because The very last video we just uploaded like literally half an hour ago if that Well, I was telling you guys I would do it live if I got three yeses well It took so long to upload that I'm not talking about putting it together to upload it That's crazy. So anyway I'm gonna go ahead and do this But I would like to take a minute and just say that I've got the best family in the whole wide world I know everybody thinks that but I know it. I live it every day Awesome, that's another video in itself, but I do just want to say to all my family. Love you guys Let me say let's let's get back to this hot pepper challenge now The first video of this series of this playlist, I should say it's not really a series because I'll keep doing as long as you guys want me to It was called challenges with question mark I did get one challenge from my niece Courtney That view She said hot pepper. She said 3 a.m. Hot Pepper challenge. So Courtney this is for you, honey. I couldn't find Any ghost peppers I could find them online, but they wouldn't have been here soon enough The Carolina ghost pepper is supposed to be the hottest pepper in the world or whatnot So what I did was to make it interesting about three peppers Monkey and I went to the storm about three peppers this one here is a a What is it called a? Help me out guys. I'll think of it here in a minute So I got that one. It's supposed to be pretty hot It's kind of a toss up between that and a jalapeno, I guess but Speaking of which I Do have a jalapeno here Okay, so I got that one What the hell is the name of this little one again? I just thought of I should have wrote it down and then What I guess used to be the hottest pepper in world or what people thought or I don't know whatever But it is supposed to be very hot and I have had these before is Habanero pepper now They had a couple orange ones and it was all mostly green they had one red one I had it my hand and I noticed it was real soft It was kind of starting to rot away there So I didn't want to have to cut it out and cheat. This is This is it. This this is this is what I'm going to do. What is this a Forget now what I've got here. I've got some water and it's partially frozen there. I shouldn't There we go It's got a little bit of ice in it from where it was frozen. I have some ice Right here. I know you can't see Before you guys start typing really fast or pushing them buttons about you should drink milk You should do I understand about the milk and it does help from what I understand Due to a lactose Disagreement with me. I can't have the milk so I'm gonna have to do that and it's gonna make a worse I do have a beer in the fridge Maybe I'll drink that later. I don't know how hot this is going to be. I've had both of these peppers before But I've never had this one But it's not supposed to be like really super hot, but it's supposed to be up there like I said with the With the jalapeno pepper Damn it. Sorry guys. So anyway Like I said, it's after three Always up. I was jamming, you know, there's some music in the garage there and Of course monkey's asleep like we knew she was gonna be so what I want to do is By the way, don't try this at home Go to someone's else house and do it So listen what I'm gonna do is I want to take a bite of one take another bite of one and take another bite of one I'm not gonna get rid of the seeds.   Damn it monkey's asleep.   That's just plain stupidity. This is not very bright probably It's a challenge.  So here we go. This is for my knees corny as I said so Wow All right guys It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. All right. Yeah, move your reference All right the hell with it Excuse me I'm getting over Illness, I don't know if it's cold or what but all right. Here we go. That will take I Don't take your brother wake up if the ghost peppers hotter than that.  I Didn't hardly get a swallow any of it.  Please comment rate subscribe Send in some more challenges I'll get the name of that pepper and put it on the screen for you. It was hot All right guys It's late Thanks for watching. Mm-hmm. I gotta get this video put up for y'all listen Courtney, Uncle Marty loves you very much and Remember I'll see you next Sunday Christmas Eve. Thanks for the challenge, huh? All right, listen Monkey sleeping. She was there. She'd say monkey out.  I'm gonna say She bear 1000 I'm gone. Bye. Bye guys. Have a good one


The third of cat owners let their cats on the counter, but it's actually not that gross. While other things we put on the counter carry viruses, harmful bacteria, and even fecal matter, it's not necessarily true for cats. Why? Cats are extremely clean. Not only do they spend 50% of their waking lives cleaning themselves, but they're saliva is antibacterial, so their paws definitely get washed more than yours. Also, shouldn't you be wiping down your tables and counters before making food anyway? If you really want to try and keep them off, though, clean surfaces regularly or try covering them with foil. Now, dogs are a different story.


OK, so we're going to dive right into it. Back in August 2017, Think With Google released this article where they said that they'd seen a 150% increase in the number of local queries that people were doing without the use of the near me modifier. And that across the entire SERPs or across all their searches, they were seeing a decrease in people doing local queries with geomodifiers. So people were dropping geomodifiers from their queries. And the reason for this, Google said, is that people tend to think that they're able to find what they're looking for by just looking for a simple phrase or a simple word. So for us as SEOs, the lesson is super obvious. It means that we can't ignore the fact that our searchers may be searching for things that have implicit intent rather than explicit intent. And we need to figure out exactly what queries people are using that have implicit intent, dig into that intent, and then find ways to optimize ourselves accordingly. That's it. Problem solved. Everything's figured out. I hope you have a great MozCon. Thank you very much. Except, of course, we forgot about one really important thing. And that's the middleman. It's the middleman whose job it is to understand that intent and to match that intent with the right kind of content to service to the searcher. That middleman is Google. Google's the middleman. So in other words, we can spend all the time we want trying to figure out exactly what our searchers mean when they search for something. Except, well, if we don't understand what Google is doing and what Google understands, then we're missing a really key part of the puzzle. To explain this, I'm going to show you some queries. Sushi near me. It seems to indicate that close proximity is the most important thing. Sushi in Seattle, it seems to indicate that anywhere is good, anywhere in the city, cast a city-wide net. Sushi, it's ambiguous. Are you hungry, or are you doing research for a school project? Best sushi. It seems to indicate that quality is more important than proximity. Understanding intent is hard. And Google doesn't always get it right, but they're making some kind of executive decision. So we're here to ask, what is Google deciding to do? Before we dig into that rabbit hole and fall down it, I think it's important to take a step back and talk a little bit about why this is so crucial. You see, back in the day, we used to be able to rely on the idea that, as SEOs, we could track a national SERP in the United States and trust that that was accurate for what a searcher was seeing, whether they're on the east coast or the west coast. National SERPs got the job done, but nowadays we're living in a new world and the realities have changed. Nowadays, every single SERP is localized to at least some degree, right? So it's no longer going to cut it for us to track these national SERPs because Google is blending in all sorts of local results based on the telemetry that you get from your searching device. We're advising our clients to move away from these strategies of national versus local keyword tracking and to move towards local versus hyper-local because that's just the reality we're in now. Every SERP is local. We just can't keep denying the fact that localization is an important, if not the most important factor that Google filters its search results through as it builds a SERP. We have Danny Sullivan on the Twitter record saying just as much. And in the past few months, we've had several updates from Google that reinforce the importance of local to them. So here's one near the holidays where Google actually baked localization into the core of the Google search experience. So now when you search, all of your location stuff or your localization is done automatically for you. And then we have another update that came a little bit later where Google was tinkering with local SERP some more. So what we know is that local search is important to Google. And we know that they're making changes. And we know that with change comes opportunity. So we're here to ask a couple of questions. First, does Google actually know what people are after when they search for something? Is Google able to define or divine their local intent? Second, does Google have a nuanced understanding of local intent? Does it understand the different types of local intent? Does it respond differently? Or does it have a one-size-fits-all approach for any kind of local intent on display? To answer this, we did a research study, which is what we love to do at STAT, because we sit on a ton of data. We took geomodified and non-geomodified queries. We analyzed the SERPs, and we looked for patterns. And we hoped that those patterns are going to shine some light on the questions we're asking. And if you're super confused, don't worry. I've got definitions, and I've got explanations, and we'll get through this together. So here we go. First up, a definition. Geomodification. Geomodification is when a searcher includes a geographical term in their search query. The definition I have here or the example I have here is best shoes in NSW Australia. I think NSW stands for New South Wales. Are there any Australians in the room that can confirm that for me? Maybe. All right. Geolocation is the telemetry and metadata that comes from your device that helps tech companies like Google know where you are.  All these things are used to determine your location when you connect to their services. It's this capability of Googles that supposedly, according to Think With Google, is causing searchers to geomodify their queries less over time. Now, whenever we do a study, the very first thing we have to do is to build the keyword set. I'm going to take a little bit extra time here, and I'm going to explain this because, one, building a keyword set is important, but it's super daunting. And two, the way we segmented our keywords was essential to our findings, as segmentation tends to be.  So we have things like restaurants and nail salons and mechanics. And then we're going to duplicate that keyword set, and we're going to add in relevant adjectives. So we have Chinese restaurant, acrylic nail salon, auto mechanics. These are what we call our base keywords, and they're going to help us measure how well Google really understands that implied local intent. These form the first two-thirds of our keyword set. Then, to make things both more difficult and more interesting at the same time, we're going to layer and qualify our words. These are words that may compete with geolocation or geomodification for the amount of local intent signal they send. Hold on to that. We'll come back to that later. But for now, understand that we layer it in three different kinds of qualifier words. Quality terms, affordability terms, and brand terms. So we end up with best Chinese restaurants, affordable acrylic nail salon, Porsche Auto Mechanic. At this point, it's time for us to layer in the geomodification. So here we have three geomodifiers that we appended to the end of our queries. So we have near me, in Portland, and in New York. So you end up with best Chinese restaurant near me, affordable acrylic nail salon in Portland, Porsche Mechanic in New York. At this point, we stuff it all into stat. And we track it in two different zip codes and two different cities. We tracked it in two different zip codes because we wanted to be able to measure the differences in the SERP when somebody is standing at two different locations in the same area or the same city. We track it in two different cities because we want to smooth over any word outliers in the data. This is about 1.2 million queries we track for this study. And in case you're curious, we tracked about 70% on mobile, 30% on desktop, the justification being that, well, Google's pushing their mobile first index really hard. And we know that when people are doing hyperlocal searches, they tend to use their mobile phones. Whoops, too fast. So with that in mind, we're not ready to actually dive into the findings, which starts with an analysis of everything we found in, around, and about the local pack. You know, the local pack. It has a map. You got some handy pins. You got three brick and mortar businesses. There's a name. There's ratings. There's reviews. There's descriptions. There's times you get the picture. It's a local pack. The thing I want to know at first is how many local packs am I dealing with? Across our 1.2 million keywords, we found that 73% of them return to local pack.  And they're a huge, syrup-hogging annoyance if you're not a brick and mortar business. I feel you. The next thing I want to know is, how does the appearance of those local packs change based on the geomodifier that we use? Here we see that when the word near me is used, 96% of the time, we see a local pack, which is about par for what we expect, because these queries are explicitly local in their intent. So Google's just delivering the goods as we expect them to, which is why we're a bit surprised by the in-city queries, because in my opinion, those are also explicitly local in their intent. Yet they don't perform quite as well as the near me's. And then we have our base queries, those ones with implied intent. 52%, the worst performers. So think with Google maybe telling us that those base queries have implicit intent, but Google is not servicing the local packs to service that supposed intent that they say they should. We think that Google does understand that at least some portion of people who search for a base query, like one of ours, has an intention of visiting a local business, but they're not willing to go all in with that assumption every single time. We know for sure that that local pack opportunity that we have varies by a geomodifier. And it's one of the first and earliest things we discovered in our study is that, when you use near me, you have more local pack opportunity than when you use in-city. So a very first early finding for us. And based on that, we started to realize that Google doesn't see these three different geomodifier and keywords quite the same. So the next thing we want to know is, how well does Google understand the meaning of our different geomodifiers? And where does Google place local intent, like near me intent, and far away intent, in-city intent, on the map? And how about that base implied intent? Where does that fall? So in order for us to figure this out, we had to do something pretty creative and a little bit weird. We took the maps from the Google local pack. We measured the distance between the center point in the map and the center point of the zip code. The justification being that the center point of the map is where Google tends to cluster its results on the map. The center point of the zip code just happens to be where the search is coming from. So the shorter the distance between these two points, the more hyper-local the results are. You got me? We good? Everyone follow me? All right, so we're gonna carry on. So we took that analysis method and we applied it to our keyword set. And what we found was about what we expected and that's a good thing. We found that for near me queries, the distance between the searcher, like where the search is being conducted and the results being returned was the shortest. So these are hyper-local requests and Google is delivering hyper-local results. For in-city, the distance was the longest, which is Google agreeing with our assumption that when somebody searches for sushi in Seattle, they're willing to go further afield and willing to accept results that are not immediately close to them. The base queries fall somewhere in the middle. And Google basically, when it does deign to show a local pack for a base query, it's willing to assume that your needs are not immediate and you don't need something right next door to you. You're willing to travel a bit further away for it. Next, we wanna understand how geomodifiers influence the composition of a local pack. In order to do this, we have to do a ton of side-by-side comparison. And we have to control our variables because we only want to look at the influence of geomodification and nothing else. So here's the scenario. We have two searchers standing in the exact same spot in New York City, both looking for a cheap night out. One searches for a cheap night club near me, one searches for cheap night club in New York City. And what we can see is that two of their results are the same. This trend was born out across our entire keyword set. And we can tell you that geomodifiers will change a local pack by roughly only about 20%, which was quite surprising to me. We expected more volatility based on the different geomodifier used, but it turns out that 20% is about the same no matter what geomodifier you use. So if you're trying to think about how to be more budget conscious with your tracking strategy, you can just track one geomodifier. You don't have to track them all based on our results. You just have to accept the fact that there may be 20% variance if you're not tracking every different one. Now, if we're gonna look at the influence of geomodification, we also have to look at the influence of geolocation. Here we wanna know how is the local pack different when the searcher is standing in two different locations? So again, side-by-side comparison, controlling the variable. This time we controlled zip code. So the scenario is this. We have two searchers, both in New York, standing in two different locations, and they search for the exact same thing. And what we see is only one result overlaps. And again, this trend was born out across our entire keyword set. And so we can tell you that geolocation has a bigger influence on the local packs than geomodification does. Google cares more about the location of where the searcher is when it builds the local pack than it does about what they actually search for or how they constructed their search. So this is not the same for different geomodifiers, and that's really interesting. The example could be that me and a friend are both in Seattle, two different locations, and we search for a sushi near me. We're not going to see much overlap. But if we both search for a sushi in Seattle, we're going to see more overlap. The data tells us that Google uses the location of the searcher to determine where the center point on the map should be. It then uses the geomodifier to draw a big circle around that center point from which it determines where it can select eligible results. So your location determines the center of the map. Your geomodifier determines the area from which the businesses are selected. That's a lot about how Google handles things on the searcher's side, right? But how does it handle things on your side? Like we know on the searcher's side, it handles things through the way they query and the location of the searcher, but what are some of the things that you can do to influence your ability to rank high in a local pack? Sometimes when we look at the local pack, Google will give us the results distance away from the searcher, which is pretty cool, and we can measure that. And we measure that to try to determine if there was a relationship between the distance away from the searcher and how high a business ranks in the local pack. And across our data set, what we found on the whole was that the third result in the local pack was usually the farthest away. So you might look at that and think, great, that means that the way one ranks in the local pack is inherently tied to how far away a business is from the searcher, but you have to factor in density because that remained true in Portland, but it fell down in New York. In New York, we have the first and the third result that have the same distance away from the searcher. So we believe this is happening because Google has a greater density of eligible results to select from, and it satisfies its need for the number of results it has to return before it actually expands its net to look farther abroad. So we know that Google tends to measure the distance of those results, and then, well, so we know that we can measure the distance of our results and then find competitors within that radius. You may think, like, how is this useful to me? Like, there's no way that I'm gonna know where a searcher is standing when they do their search, and you're right, you don't know where the searcher's gonna be, but what you do know is where your bricks and mortar are, and you know what keywords you care about, and you can look at your terms and you can look at the local packs for them, and you can decide how far away those local packs are pulling, and you can use that data for your own website. So I'll explain. In our keyword set, we found that in New York, the average distance was 0.3 miles. In Portland, the average distance was 0.7 miles. So if we had a brick and mortar in any one of those markets, we could put our brick and mortar on the map, we can draw a circle around it using those values, we can determine where the competitors are, and we can decide how we need to compete with them. We know that distance isn't the only thing that affects one's rankings in the local pack, so we also wanted to look at Google ratings, and what I can tell you is that the first rating or the first ranked result in the local pack has the highest rating. The second ranked result in the local pack has the second highest rating, the third has the third highest rating, and so on. But those differences are actually quite small between first, second, and third, so at the best, I can tell you that you need to have a good rating in order to appear in the local pack, fine. Not willing to leave it there, we took it a step further and we started a segment out, based on our modifiers, and that's where we discovered something really interesting. It turns out that for near-me queries, the average Google rating is actually quite a bit lower than any other query. Google's seeking to satisfy the proximity of the request before it worries about the quality of the business it's returning. It's very different for in-city. For in-city, Google has a larger area to select from, and therefore in that case, it's looking to only surface the best businesses, so for in-city queries, the average rating was actually quite a bit higher. So we know that Google cares mostly about the distance of the request before it cares about the rating of the business. One of the things that you actually have a lot of control over that you can influence is your organic rank in the SERP, and so we wanted to know if your organic ranking influenced where you appeared in the local pack. A couple of caveats here, first of all. One is that not every single business that has a local listing has a website. Shocking, I know, but not every business needs a website, surprise, surprise. Second is, not every business that has a listing and has a website has that website listed on the listing on the SERP. Yeah, Google likes to keep you on their stuff. Sometimes I have to click like three or four times in order to find their website for a restaurant and it's really disappointing, but that's the world that Google's created for us. So what we can tell you definitively though, is that you don't need to be ranking on the first page or ranking it all in order to be eligible for a position in the local pack. In fact, only 8% of our local listings had website links and of those only 12% actually appeared in the organic results, but when Google does pull local listings from the organic results, it tends to prefer the first 10 spots on the SERP. We can also tell you that base and near me keywords pulled mostly from rank four, right below the local pack. And this is actually really, really interesting. Google believes that near me has immediate priority intent signal for location. People want to get to things immediately because they're on the go or they're about to go somewhere. And so Google actually waits localized businesses highly in the SERPs for those queries. So you end up with those three businesses in the local pack and then their corresponding organic results right below because Google will do anything to satisfy their intent as quickly as possible. If you don't get it in the local pack, you're gonna get it in the organics. Where, meanwhile, in city queries, they tend to pull more from like rank seven and that's because you have aggregator sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor that appear below the local pack because they're not eligible for the local pack. Final part in this section is we want to look and understand about those positions that you pay for and you don't earn the ads. So we can tell you that 16% of our local packs have an ad. It varies on the different geomodifier that you use. Near Me has the most ads. Base has the least ads and the advice is pretty obvious.  Of course, those may not work for your particular strategy. They may not be targeted enough.  Although on the whole, there's not that much advertising happening in these local packs. Next, we want to understand how those different qualifier keywords, the quality, the affordability of the brand, will impact the local pack. So we want to understand, based on the types of word we use, how do the local packs change? First, we're gonna start with best and we're gonna understand how the local pack is different when I use queries that have words like best or good or recommended. When you think of the best anything in your town, you're probably thinking of like a small independent business, right? You're not thinking of a large multinational chain because they rarely have the best anything, best food, best reviews, nothing. And we believe that this reality actually explains the results we see here because we don't see a lot of similarity between two different locations when the word best is used. And this is actually really surprising for me. I come from Vancouver, it's not a giant town, it's not a small town either. But there are relatively few things that I would consider the best. Like there's 10 great restaurants and there's like maybe two great barber shops and a couple pubs that I think are really great. So I would expect best to have a lot of overlap no matter where I am in the city. Google doesn't agree with me. Google feels like there's a lot of different bests and it all depends on where you're standing. Now the differences were quite small so we wanted to understand that our quality words were indeed having an impact on the local pack and this chart proves that because this chart shows that when we use the word best or other quality words the average Google ratings are higher. Not only are they higher, but there's more ratings. So I can tell you that if you wanna be a best business you have to have two things. You have to have a certain threshold of results of ratings and you have to have good ratings. Those are the two things that are gonna make you eligible to be a best business. Next we wanna understand how things change when we're concerned with price where it's like cheap and expensive, budget. And here I can tell you that when we have serves that are concerned with pricing we see a lot more overlap in the queries and this is the exact opposite of the quality terms. So here we believe that Google is having a harder time finding results that it can actually qualify as being eligible for the term affordable. And when we measure the median distance away from the searcher we see that it's farther away which again serves to prove the finding that Google has a harder time finding businesses that it can qualify as affordable and therefore it's willing to search farther away. Unsurprisingly when we look at the Google ratings we see that on average those ratings are worse for affordable businesses than they are for best businesses. It seems like when people want to go review an affordable business they usually wanna give it a bad review. And this makes me think of Great Clips. And now Great Clips is probably the place to go if you want an inexpensive haircut. You sure, I mean like the GMB listings may have worse reviews than the location may be further away from you but it has what you want. It has cheap haircuts, at least cheaper than that super expensive barber down the street who has great reviews and is really close to you but also charges $50 for hair wax or Pima gel. I don't know what the kids are calling it nowadays. Anyway, moving on we have brand keywords. We have words like Ford, Mazda, iPhone, Pixel and so on. Admittedly we had fewer words here because we only had two verticals that were eligible. We had car mechanics and cell phone repair. So even though we had fewer terms we saw a very strong signal. We saw lots of overlap here. And when we looked at the distance away we saw that on average for brand searches that distance away from the searcher was greater than any other keyword. All of this makes sense when you consider like for example think of the Porsche mechanic in your town. How many Porsche mechanics are there versus how many like every car mechanics are there, right? These businesses are a lot more specific. Some of them even have the brand in their business name and Google knows that these needs that people are searching for when they use a brand word are quite specific and they're willing to travel farther to specific locations in order to satisfy them. Okay, so that's the local pack. I wanna quickly look at organic results because we know that Google handles organics differently than it handles local packs and other search features. So the first thing I wanna know is does Google interpret the meaning of our geomodifiers for organic results the same way that it does for local packs? In other words, if I search for near me are my organic results more localized? This type of analysis is a lot easier to do for local packs where we can rely on the fact that everything there is a local business and sometimes we have like distances to measure. It's a lot less clear when it comes to the organic results, what websites are what. But we need a way to separate out the online only stores or the non-e-commerce websites or the large multinationals from that local mom and pop sandwich shop down the street. And we know that that's really hard for us to do manually at scale because we can't go through and manually categorize every single thing. So we came up with a nifty workaround and that was to allow us to take a look at all the top 20 results in our SERP set, group them up by domain and then separate the top 1% of most frequently occurring domains from the bottom 99% of most frequently occurring domains. The logic here is that Wikipedia say will rank number one, two or three a lot so they'll appear in the top 1%. But your local mom and pop sandwich shop is gonna be chilling in the bottom 99% with everyone else. So therefore the more that the organic results pull from the bottom 99% of domains the more localized it is. And we know this works because in looking at the local pack we can see that it pulls heavily from the bottom 99%. Regardless of geomodifier 69% of local pack results come from that bottom 99% of domains. And we can tell you that it appears that Google interprets intent the same for organic results that it does for local packs. So when I do a near me search my organics are more localized than when I do an in city search. Next we wanna look at the influence of geomodification on those organic results. So earlier we looked at how geomodification influenced the local pack. Now we wanna do the same thing for the organics. And you're gonna see this familiar kind of screen. We did more side by side comparison. Only this time we're looking at the organics and not the locals but again we controlled the variable. So here we have two searchers standing in the same spot searching for two different things. One searches for near me, one searches for in city and we can see only one result overlapping. And again this held up at scale across our keyword set. And we can tell you that geomodifiers have a very significant influence on organic results. The exact inverse of the local pack. So we can say that geomodifiers don't impact the local pack very much but they do impact the organics a lot. And of course we have to do the same analysis for geolocation. So again side by side and the scenario is two searchers, two different zip codes searching for the exact same thing. And here we see a lot of overlap. And again this held up at scale across our keyword set. So here we can see that geolocation while it has a lot of influence on the local pack has very little influence on the organic results.  It's hard to keep track of. I'm gonna try to break it down. Geomodification affects the organics but not the local packs. Geolocation affects the local packs but not the organics. And it's all just a crazy witch's brew that you have to hold on to and keep in mind and good luck. This is the world that Google's created for you. Anyways, moving on, we wanted to look at the types of businesses that we see appearing in those organic results. And in order for us to do this, we took our top 1% and we grouped them into the two types of domains we see most often. Those are the aggregator sites and the local sites. And I can tell you that the brick and mortar businesses tend to perform the best on near-me serves. And this was a really cool finding. Because Google is so interested in trying to satisfy those near-me searches by hook or by crook, they really wait well towards localized businesses in the organics there.  If you're like an aggregator-style site, you gotta go after the in-cities. That's where you're gonna win. You're not eligible for local packs but you will find yourself in the organics right below the local packs for queries like in-city. Okay, there's a ton of data, I know.  That's a lot to follow. We put it all together at getstat.com slash MozCon. You can go there, you can pull down the white paper, you can follow all the individual threads of discussions that we have, but for now I'm gonna quickly wrap up some of the key points for you. First of all, every single SERP is localized. Keep that in mind. I at STAT, my team at STAT or the Moz team, we can give you national SERPs. Like our business was originally built on providing people national SERPs, but they're kind of a weird artifact. Like national SERPs don't really exist in the wild, right? Like we manipulate Google to make it set to just give us a national SERP but it's not accurate to what your searchers are actually seeing, it's just cost-effective. So I want you to keep in mind that location matters but so do geomodifiers. Like Google can say all they want that people are searching less and less with words like near me but the fact is is that geomodificated searches are still on the rise. People still love to display their intent by using words like near me or in-city and Google still needs to figure out how to interpret all that. People love their near me searches and they're not going away. If you're not sampling at least some local SERPs in your strategy, I promise you you're not seeing exactly what your searchers are seeing. So I want to encourage you to try to drip some local SERPs into your strategy and do like what we're telling our clients. Move away from national versus local to local versus hyper local. You may look at my talk and go, man, Rob is not giving me like this one crystal clear takeaway for me to walk away with. And that's true and it's because everything that we presented here is based on segmentation and that's where you're gonna find all the best success, all the best sort of golden nuggets. Smart segmentation is key to your success. And I gotta tell you guys, I have the immense privilege of working with hundreds of the world's smartest SEOs and I have a front row seat to some of the like most sophisticated SERP tracking and keyword tracking strategies and on the whole, people don't segment enough. So if you take one thing away from my talk, it's think about how you can segment better because that's where you're gonna find the things that no one else sees. It's gonna be specific to your business. It's gonna be an insight you own because you dreamed of how to better slice your data and you're gonna be able to take that to the bank.  You can go to getstat.com slash MozCon. You can download the talk there. Thank you very much for your time.  Have a great MozCon. Thank you.


What's going on everyone Sam here with lane sports cards dripping 21 upper deck skybox metal universe champions hobby 1 box break number 29 Random pack stylers will look again at your random results as always you can find these on the website Under the results tab as well as the link that's currently in chat. So good luck everybody Let's do this again again. I am I posted the results as you saw them After they came out of the randomizer on the website, I did sort them for myself to make it a little easier though So ladies also work is we'll open the box one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen So like I said one through five six through ten and eleven through fifteen Good luck everybody put those back Number one is low Y. Good luck low. Good luck. No Isbell Chloe Kim sky brown Fresh foundation Isaiah Todd. We've got a Jean Montero reach reaching for the stars on the die cut nice one there Congrats on that. We've got Jalen waddle and Naomi Osaka Nice first pack for you there low to Dylan F Dan Smith Taffer Mojave King there's a blast furnace of trail ants nice one there Congrats on that. That is a rookie Ken Griffey Najee Harris and Paige Springyak Jake does that after every break and it like after every random and it just freaks me out every time Number three H. Lee. Good luck, buddy. I'm like what did I do? He's like, no nothing. I'm just double-checking my guide. It's not a good chain right Jalen green fresh foundation on to Fati. There's a metalized Chloe Kim a Skybox premium Scotty Barnes rookie nice one there H. Lee a Nate Robinson and a Gabby Butler number three there you go. Congrats H. Lee. We're on to Nicholas S at four See to Gala fresh foundation as intimidation nation Colin more kawa Nice one there. Congrats on that There you go. Nicholas a Devonta Smith and set that up pack number five H. Lee Good luck H. Lee Christopher Zach Wilson fresh foundation Matthew Wolf a Skybox premium Devonta Smith followed by Mike Mencius and Trevor Lawrence. All right. There you go H. Lee on to RB at number six. Love RB riff-riff metalized Justin Fields There's auto John Tapper Nice one there. Congrats on that RB picking up the auto out of this box John Tapper very nice on the auto. We'll take it Troy Mullins, John Moncero and Dot Richardson Do it for number six. Congrats are be on to number seven of Peter M Peter M Bryson DeChambeau Fresh foundation is Bryson DeChambeau There's Corey Kispert We've got intimidation nation Devonta Smith on the refractor. Congrats on that Peter Toby Miller and Tommy Caldwell Number eight Nam cue. Good luck Nam cue. Here we go, buddy. It's Lockwood Vanessa Hansen Mojave King Fresh foundation is Sabrina Inescue Jalen Green Skybox premium Moses Moody and Tiger Woods. I actually agree with that. Are you a golf fan? Wahoos? Do you follow golf at all? Glurcio C Number nine Glurcio C number nine. Who's your favorite golfer? I kind of agree with that take right there about About Sergio you like Garcia Sergio is awesome Rebaker so happy to see him when a major Tiafima Lopez Franz Wagner Paige Sprinjak It's now an Iverson Ark weld nice one there. Yeah. Yep, Ark weld Congrats on that Glurcio Call more Kawa and What is that Joanna? Jebrezek I think I don't know she's a she's a fighter. I know I know that for Perfect Number ten Joe G at number ten. Good luck Joe You hate Bill Robb really I guess after the whole live thing I could see why people kind of got a distaste for Mickelson Hudson's Swafford Trace Sermon Michaela Schifrin Tony Finau Plexi Thompson Abbey Ruchman and Tatiana West Weston web all right nice one there Joe congrats Joe That's on to Nicholas S Yeah, true. I like Phil still Scotty Lewis Nice card there Manaras Tony Finau Fresh Foundation Scotty Barnes. There's PMG Devonta Smith That is to 75 There's a PMG congrats on that Nicholas there you go, buddy. Nice PMG our first one of the day PMG Devonta Smith will take it for sure congrats on that precious metal gem That is Tony Finau and Justin Fields Very good time to pull that PMG is right there you go Nicholas. We're on to Isaac H at number 12. I Love golf dude, I'm a big speed fan personally I'm a very big speed fan I like some of the new guys coming up too But some I there's some I don't like as well Vincent Zau Wayne Gretzky Jonathan Kaminga Collin Morikawa love this guy. Absolutely love Collin Morikawa like him. I like Finau. I like see heat to Gala Bar and Laura on the Metal Universe Blast furnace grats on that Isaac Is the chain zone there is LeBron. Yeah, Colin's a stud Colin is a stud for sure Brian F on to number 13 Brian F. How's our Munoz? Michael Jordan. Nice one there Is Josh Christopher Fresh Foundation is a woman Diaz. We've got Carlos Coleman are as Skybox premium. I Love Bob does sports Sabrina INS Q and Ryan Whitney. I he's his tiktoks are so funny Yeah, P read and stripes. That's a problem today My favorite is to heat to Gala when he goes some people come to see tiger. I come to see so heat to Gala, baby We got number 14 Jacob C.  So he'll be like I Be like how about some birdie knuckles from the the old Colin Morikawa camp. It's so funny. It's so funny, dude Cory Kisbert Carlos a lotion There's Jaden Springer There is Jalen Johnson intimidation nation Nice one there Refractor Olivia Taylor Dooley Carl Pitts and Byron Laura My favorite who rocks the salmon pink better than Tony Fiennow, baby Gilded spot came in a couple of gilded spots came in. Thank you guys And number 15 we're on to Peter M. Good luck Peter to round us out. That's a boy That is metal eyes Jalen Johnson. There's a Cory Kisbert cold Scotty Barnes and Ben Simmons that will do it for the break guys. Thanks again for filling this on up We've got one more of these coming as well


Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan coming to you from ITW 2020. Joining me today is Lori Abrahamson, Director of Business Development at Edge Micro. Lori welcome to JSA TV. Yes hello thank you for having me. Well for those who don't already know could you tell our viewers about Edge Micro. The first really exciting news is we have our three production micro data centers in Austin and Raleigh and St. Pete which has been announced previously and everyone's aware. What's next for us is we have two anchor customers that are ready to deploy and exchange traffic inside those micro data centers and we're thrilled because it's taken a lot of effort to get the team players to come together. The cable providers, the fiber network providers and really the objective of our anchor tenants is to distribute content to the edge right so and so those are the first three markets and with this extra funding we're able to you know bring that to bear but in addition we've identified four more markets which are customer driven as far as where we're going next. So we're now funded for an additional four nodes which those should be released on our website soon as far as where that's leading us. So it's exciting although this is still early in the story. This is you know this round will get us to that point and I have to also say that right now the emphasis is largely on terrestrial where our main anchor tenants are content distribution so there's more to come but that's the immediate project for this year. Awesome well where can folks go to learn more about Edge Micro? I hear you have a new website. We do and thank you JSA for being our company that has assisted us with them with the website development. We do have a new website available and also goes into more depth on the website about our other products and services such as mobile ETX. We are also in the mobile space. I mentioned that we have a lot of movement on the terrestrial side with content distribution but we also are working to enhance internet performance at the mobile side too and we also have other products and services such as out-of-band management too. So www.edgemicro.com is more specific to answer your question is the website where you can find more information. Wonderful thank you so much Lori for your time with us today. We appreciate it. Okay thank you very much for having me. And thank you viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.


in a few moments of centering silence. Please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn to 95. The words are in your order of service, and someone pointed out to me between services that the words on here and the words in your book are different. So if you're one of those folks who likes to look at the music while you're singing, that's fine. We all may be singing different verses, but just be aware of that in case it matters, OK? And thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual. As together, we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler, and on behalf of the entire congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning.  Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You might also want to look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are sometimes available to lead tours after the service, but I don't think we have one for this service. If you are particularly interested in a tour, you can see one of us. Can you do it, Harry? Great. Harry is going to lead the tour. Thank you very much. So anyone who's interested, meet Harry after the service up here in what's your left-hand corner of this auditorium, and he'll show you what we've got. Thank you, Harry. OK. We welcome children to stay for the duration of this service. However, some people have difficulty hearing in this acoustical environment. So our child Haven in that corner and the commons behind are excellent places to go if your child wants to sing and dance and run around, and you guys agree that it's better to go to a different place. There was a baby crying during part of the last service, and I just loved it. It was so joyous. It was so life-affirming that I thought, we should hire babies to come and cry in every service because it's very, very spiritual.  We have places. We'd also appreciate if you would turn off any noise-making devices which would primarily be cell phone ringers. That's helpful. And also, unlike darling babies crying, that's kind of annoying during times we're trying to read, trying to hear people doing readings. So turn off the cell phones. Welcome the babies. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. And for this service, we have Mark Schultz doing sound. We have Anne Smiley as our lay minister. Our greeters were Becky R, Becky Dick, and Pam Winnie. And let's see. I've got my list screwed up here. Our ushers are Carol Ferguson, Tom Dolmich, Patricia Becker, and Dan Bradley. Then our hospitality folks making coffee are Jeannie Hills and Terry Felton. This morning, we had John Twos to thank for watering our plants and carrying after them. And he did that at the first service. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service. This describes upcoming events, things that are going on today. There's a lot happening. It's a very active social environment for us and for the community at this time. So in addition to a list of upcoming services, please look at everything that's going on that's listed in here, as well as the agenda for our parish meeting, which is happening soon after this service. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. As we come together in this light-filled room, may it be a place for us to find meaning, to choose justice, to remain faithful to our highest values. Here may we reaffirm our conviction that truth brings freedom, that freedom inspires reason, that reason fosters tolerance, and that tolerance reinforces the search for truth. With true collegiality, we welcome all who would travel with us along this road of interdependent thought and worship. We invite your queries. We invite your companionship. With a sense of gratitude, we welcome each in the name of all to this hour of search and celebration. I invite you to rise in body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And as Karen Rose kindles the flame of our faith, please join me in the responsive affirmation. Would you please read the bolded italicized sections. We have gathered here in search of answers to life's riddles. We have come in search of hope and healing. Let this be a place not only of inquiry, but of insight. Let this be a place where healing fosters giving, and hope fosters service. And now in the spirit of that circle of love, please turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated. Good morning. Leslie Ross, the director of Children's Religious Education here. This weekend we have the pleasure of experiencing our annual banner parade that each of our children's RE classes participate in. We have 29 classes here, spread out over our three service times, and over 450 kids enrolled in our classes. So there has been a lot of serious decorating happening in our classrooms.  We hope that you'll enjoy their creations as they march through the auditorium. And then during service, I will hang them up in the commons area, so be sure to take a look at how awesome they look out there. The place just fills with creativity and color. It's really beautiful. And lastly, I just ask that you save your applause for the very end of the parade so that we're not here for too long during the parade. So let's bring them on. This is an outstanding religious education program. And in a few months, the program will be, once again, soliciting teachers for the fall semester. And so when the call comes out, we would hope that some of you who perhaps have never done this before would take advantage of the opportunity to work with the youngest members of our community. So we continue our service with two selections from Unitarian Universalist clergy, the first one from Brandy Lovely, who actually was one of my teachers in seminary back in the early 1970s. He also served our Unitarian congregation in Pasadena, California. Brandy writes that simple direct observation leads me to believe that especially in religious matters, most people do not want to think and judge for themselves. Most individuals expect the minister, the priest, the guru, the rabbi to be the religious leader who knows the saving truths and the moral oughts. He or she tells the people what they are to believe, how they are to act, and points out who the heretics and the sinners are. This expectation is held not only by most churchgoers, but also by those who completely ignore organized religion. There are only a very few individuals who take religion seriously and are also willing to take the responsibility of thinking and feeling it through for themselves in concert with other thoughtful caring individuals who are involved in the same process. Now, some religious liberals think that we should do more to attract the multitudes, positioning ourselves as the church for all people. I believe this is misguided. If we attracted multitudes, we would be unable to practice our faith. Our task is to attract curious, independent religious seekers, and there are simply not hordes of them. The purpose of our movement is to serve our uniqueness in ways that are religiously nurturing and spiritually expanding. Most people could care less about this kind of church. And so what we need to do is to accept the reality of that situation, forget the inane myth that we ought to have universal appeal, and conscientiously seek those who, like us, are willing to doubt, to test, to think, to affirm, and to live our religious values day by day. The second selection comes from the Reverend Judith Walker Riggs, who has served congregations both in this country and in England. Some years ago, some friends of mine, including the dean of one of our theological schools, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and a philosophy professor from Canada, this group, along with others, were midway through a trip to our sister Unitarian congregations in Transylvania. This was before the end of the Cold War, when travel in Eastern Europe was still difficult, and at times rather risky. Now, as this party was leaving Hungary, where they had visited many descendants of the Unitarian churches of the 1600s, they were about to enter Romania, and of course, they had to pass through customs. Their belongings were thoroughly searched. Why do you want to come into Romania, they were asked, to attend a religious festival of our faith and meet with local religious leaders, they replied. Well, this answer provoked an even more thorough search of the Westerners' baggage. The guards were looking for Bibles, religious tracts, the importation of which was strictly forbidden by the repressive Cecescu regime. Our colleagues felt completely secure. They were not hard-shell revolutionary Baptists trying to smuggle in seditious religious material. They relaxed, nothing to find here. And indeed, nothing was found, not a single Bible, not a single tract, which led my friends to being detained for another four hours. The customs agent's suspicions had been raised another notch. Are you trying to tell us that you are religious officials and you don't have any Bibles? Who are you anyway? Some days you can't win for losing. You see, it's not easy to explain to a border guard that your religion is a connectedness to the power of life itself, one that constantly challenges us to love and think in an ongoing search for an ever-elusive truth. That doesn't pack very well in a suitcase. And it's hard to communicate in a few simple phrases, but it's no less valuable or tangible for all of that. Thank you, Dan. Linda, thank you, choir, for that perfect compliment to today's message. So many moons ago, with a newly minted PhD in hand, I accepted a call to serve the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton, New York. And after the holidays in my first year of service, I became aware of a longstanding custom of pulpit exchanges among clergy in the Protestant community during what was called a week of Christian unity. So hoping to build some bridges with my local colleagues, I submitted my name and look forward to participating in this community event. And the coordinators duly paired me with a Presbyterian minister. And so a few Sundays later, I preached what I thought was an engaging and inoffensive sermon to a rather smallish crowd in their large ordinate sanctuary. I came away feeling pretty good about that morning. And my own congregation, they seemed to appreciate its inclusion in this ecumenical undertaking. It was not an opportunity that my immediate predecessor had ever taken advantage of. And so when the next year rolled around, I again applied, and I was duly exchanged with a Methodist minister, beginning to feel like one of the gang. But then in the third round, something shifted. Shortly after I had applied, I was informed that as a Unitarian Universalist, I was not eligible to participate. This is a week for fostering Christian unity, I was told. And you and your congregation simply do not meet that criterion. And to be quite honest, the coordinators did have a point. My Bigampton congregation was comprised primarily of humanists with a few pagans and cultural Jews thrown in. And although its lineage, which went back to 1885, was indeed Christian, just like this one, only a minority still self-identified as Unitarian Christians. And frankly, my own convictions have always been more closely aligned with Buddhism than with Christianity. Nevertheless, I was stung a little. And so I appealed the decision to no avail. There would be no comity between Unitarian Universalists and the Protestant community. Now, some of the hurt from that rejection was softened a bit because soon after that, the Jewish rabbi and I, we began to have to enjoy some warm relations. And so we began our own annual pulpit exchanges, which made perfectly good sense from a historical standpoint because Unitarians have long been criticized for being more Jewish than Christian, owing to our historic rejection of the Trinitarian creeds. Indeed, our forebears three centuries ago were often described as Judaizers. Now, I found a much different religious climate when I came to Madison in 1988. One of the first calls that I received was from our near neighbor, who served First Baptist Church up here on Franklin. And he welcomed me into the community, and he invited me to join him at the next gathering of the downtown clergy group. Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Jewish, Presbyterian, Knight of Church of Christ, Baptist, and Unitarian leaders from Madison's Central Corps all participated in this informal body, which was originally formed during the tumultuous 1970s. And the founders included my predecessor, Max Gabler. They had come together initially to act as mediators when violent clashes broke out on campus between Vietnam War protesters and the local law establishment officers. But then after things quieted down, this band of clergy brothers, and they were all brothers back then, they decided that they liked meeting together. So they continued to meet weekly for coffee and conversation. And I became a regular participant, and I grew to appreciate how much we shared in common, despite our theological differences. And since that time, I have spoken in any number of Protestant churches here in Madison at their invitation. And we now, as a congregation, collaborate with many faith-based organizations in a host of different social justice causes. And in 29 years that I've been here, I have never seen anybody reject us for our lack of Christian credentials. But in matters of religion, as in so many things, Madison is remarkably tolerant and accepting. And the first Unitarian society enjoys here a high level of respect, which is not true in all communities in this country. And yet, for all of that, we are the quintessential heresy. At least if words have any meaning at all. Because you see, our English word heresy comes from the Greek heresis, which literally means to take for oneself or to choose on one's own. And this is, of course, what we do. In our non-cretal, non-doctrinal tradition, where the right of individual conscience is held sacred, we each choose what to believe or what to disbelieve. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it so long ago, no facts to me are sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back. But in confessional religions, one does not choose. One submits, at least with respect to the essentials of the faith. On doctrines like the Trinity, the Virgin Bird, infant baptism, the vicarious atonement, choice is not allowed. To even question these immutable truths is to invite an accusation of heresy. Now, from the standpoint of the world's great religions, this is a rather exceptional stance to take. Heresy is an utterly foreign concept in Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism and even in Judaism. These days, one can profess to be an atheist and still be thought of as a good Jew. The Hindu philosopher Sarvapali Radhakrishnan undoubtedly speaks for many in the non-Christian world when he writes that the principle of unity in variety, unity in variety, that's a profound spiritual truth and it makes utter common sense. Religious exclusivism, he says, has been a frequent source of fanaticism and of strife. So a little less missionary ardor, a little more enlightened skepticism, that would be good for all of us. And even within early Christianity, there was a lot of unity in variety, very little uniformity of belief and really no grounds for labeling somebody else a heretic. Those ancient Christians argued strenuously among themselves about the nature of God, the status of Jesus, the significance of the sacraments. They disagreed about so many things, Richard Rubenstein writes, but there was always this closeness between them. But then eventually that came to an end. Powerful figures within the early church decided that this unity in diversity was not such a good idea, that in fact it posed an existential threat to Christians as individuals and to the movement as a whole. And so these powerful figures argued successfully that salvation and belief were indissolubly connected. This was no mere academic matter, Rubenstein writes. If the correct doctrine wasn't imposed, millions of souls would be lost and Christ himself would be dealt a terrible defeat. And so it was in 325 AD, the reign of orthodoxy began. The Nicene Creed made belief in the trinity obligatory for all adherents of the Roman Catholic faith. On this question, the possibility of personal choice was eliminated and to ensure that the faithful would toe the line, a list of anathemas was subsequently attached to the Creed itself. But those who say there was a time when Christ was not and he was not before he was made and he was made out of nothing or he is of another substance or essence or the Son of God is created or changeable or alterable, they are all condemned by the holy Catholic and apostolic church. By the sixth century, deviation from doctrines like the trinity or infant baptism or eternal damnation, all of these heresies were made punishable by death and needless to say, that proved to be a pretty effective deterrent. And so for many centuries, people didn't even bear think about these things or privately imagine that there could be any alternative as the historian Stephen Greenblatt points out, the church had also rigorously condemned curiosity as a mortal sin. It would be almost a thousand years before anyone successfully challenged the major tenets of the Catholic faith and those who dared like the 13th century Cathars or the 15th century Hussites, a few willful theologians, they were all violently put down suppressed. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century broke the Catholic church's monopoly on sacred truth and saw the rise of numerous religious innovators, but certain age old doctrines remained inviolable. And so those who questioned the trinity were still condemned as heretics by Protestants and Catholics alike. One of the few things that they actually agreed upon. And thus Michael Servetus, one of our own Unitarian forebears was burned at the stake in Geneva, not by the Catholics, but by the Protestants. And his insightful book on the errors of the trinity was banned and all but a handful of copies were destroyed. A few decades later, the non-cretal Unitarian leading minor reform church of Poland, that church was decimated by a coalition of Catholics and Lutherans. A remnant from that church that fled to the mountains of Transylvania where they joined together with the one Unitarian movement that was able to resist this war on heresy. Throughout history then, Unitarians and Universalists for that matter have been regarded by mainstream Christians not just as your garden variety heretics, but as arch heretics. With the 18th century enlightenment, that began to change. Pedalties for disavowing the trinity were relaxed. Unitarian congregations began to spring up in England and Wales and here in the colonies. And although our forebears here in America were still decried as heretics by defenders of the faith, a state of uneasy coexistence began to emerge. And with respect to the 18th and 19th century, Universalists, not Unitarians, Universalists, well, for them the story was a little different. Their existence was a little more problematic. John Murray was one of our early Universalist evangelists and he was often pelted with eggs and sometimes even with stones when he came to a new town to preach the good news of universal salvation. You see, because they were not thought to be sufficiently God-fearing, Universalists were persecuted. They were prevented from testifying in courts of law. They could not hold public office in many of the new states of the Union as Max Coots riley observed.  And even the Unitarians, so similar to the Universalists in a number of ways, they had qualms about the latter's blithe dismissal of universal damnation. And many Unitarians agreed with their orthodox rivals that only a just and harshly punitive God could deter human beings from acting sinfully. Even the Unitarians had doubts about the Universalist Gospel. But for both of these two prongs of our movement, Unitarian and Universalist, freedom of conscience has always been important. It's always been a hallmark of our faith. But unfortunately, we ourselves haven't always been utterly consistent on this regard. Our own movements sometimes have been, had thought it was necessary to curtail people's right to choose, at least in certain particulars. And so in the early 1800s, when this transcendentalist, this American romantic movement was beginning to emerge, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to Harvard Divinity School to address the graduating students. And after he had apprised the graduating students of the premises of transcendentalism, another professor at that school, Andrews Norton, served up this scathing rebuke of Mr. Emerson. He said the words God, religion, Christianity have a definite meaning, well understood. But how shamefully they have been abused in modern times by infidels, by pantheists, should preachers like Mr. Emerson abound and grow confident in their folly, we can hardly overstate the disastrous effect they would have upon religion and the moral taste of our community. So Emerson found himself on the outside now looking in. In time, tempers cooled. Emersonianism prevailed. Transcendentalists gained acceptance followed in short order by humanists, pagans, and any number of other chosen faiths. And by 1894, the Unitarian Association had revised its constitution, emphasizing that no doctrinal test would ever be required and that membership in our association was open to all. And so we recognized, well over a century ago, that we could no longer be an exclusively Christian denomination and thereby strengthen our commitment to a free and open-ended search for truth and meaning, wherever that might lead. And that's where we still are today. Now the Universalist Church was something else again. They were much more fearful of losing their Christian identity. And so at one point, as transcendentalism was beginning to gain in popularity among Universalists, the leaders of the Universalist Church of America placed some limitation on members' freedom of conscience. And in fact, they even imposed, for a short period of time, a creed that was during this stressful time that the church actually conducted its first and last heresy trial. The Reverend Herman Bisbee of St. Paul, Minnesota was called onto the carpet for promoting transcendentalism and a post-Christian universal vision of religion. Natural religion is an all-embracing religion, he wrote in 1870. It recognizes the religion of the atheist, as well as the Hindu and the Muslim. It opens the door to infinite expansion. In natural religion, all information is welcome. There are no pet theories to maintain. Truth is the great requirement and all that helps the truth helps religion, he wrote. Now, Bisbee's perspective on these things would, just a few decades after that, become normative for Universalists. But in 1872, it just could not pass muster. Bisbee was tried, convicted of heresy, and expelled from the Universalist Church of America. And he forthwith joined the Unitarians. Bisbee's words are now a century and a half old. And they have, to us, a decidedly modern ring. And for more than a few Americans, they probably don't sound nearly as outrageous as they did to those who sat in judgment of Herman Bisbee in 1872. And yet I would wager that most Americans, when they pause to think about religion, this is not where their thoughts naturally lead. Like those Romanian border guards that I alluded to earlier, they'd probably say, what? You call yourself religious? Where are your Bibles? Repeat to us your creed of confession. But many of us who have discovered Unitarian Universalism have found it refreshing, a welcome change from that kind of doctrinal obedience that orthodox communities still insist upon. Heresy is not for everybody, however. And that is why we remain a small denomination. As Brandy Lovelace sagesly observed, there are only a very few individuals who take religion seriously and are also willing to take the responsibility for thinking and feeling it through for themselves. That's Heresy. Now, Brandy Lovelace wrote those words that I just quoted 35 years ago. And I've seen that much has changed since then. Yes, ours is still a relatively small denomination. But today, many mainline Protestant congregations actively encourage just this kind of spiritual investigation, and they are not particularly invested in creedal conformity. There's kind of a parallel here. You see, by the late 19th century, our universalist forebears, well, they began contracting. The church began to contract. And why was that? Well, there were a number of different reasons. But one of the primary reasons is because their Methodist and Lutheran rivals had pretty much by the end of the 19th century stopped preaching fire and brimstone. The universalist has succeeded in converting the opposition. Now, a hundred years later, we see much the same thing happening with respect to this whole concept of heresy, the right of conscience, the freedom to choose. It's a principle that growing numbers of Protestants and even Catholics are actively practicing. So yes, we have long been the quintessential heretics. But I would hope that if I returned to Binghamton in 2017 and asked to participate in that week of Christian unity, things might play out a little differently. The stigma of heresy is on the way out. And for that, we can take some credit for having paved the way. Blessed be Adam and man. And now I do invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offertory and you will note that we are sharing it this week with the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. Please be generous. This would normally be a time when we would share some joys and sorrows and concerns that were recorded in our Cares of the Conrogation book, which all sits right outside the main doors there. There was not an entry for the 11 o'clock hour, but I would like to add a little shout out to Patty Whitty, who was the person that purchased the theme, the subject for today's sermon at last spring service auction. And Patty's over here and she has had the stamina to sit through all three of my sermons yesterday and today. So thank you for inspiring me, Patty. I appreciate it. So we will now turn directly to our closing hymn, number 131, Love Will Guide Us. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude and the choral closing. Defined as a set of right beliefs and ritual observances, religion can become divisive, absurd. Religion as walking with others, listening to others, sharing with others. That's not a creed, it's a way of life. To be religious is to be grateful for what we have been given and to give in return as much as we possibly can. Religion is a way of life with sympathy, responsiveness, reverence for sacred potential, respect for one another and the miraculous earth and all of its creatures. Religion is a way of life that love makes beautiful. Amen. Blessed be all.