Frank McPherson Thinks Churches Need To "Shift," Too.

"Today I had a good conversation with Matt and his wife, Kim, about the unique perspective that Gen-Xers have on church. In particular, Gen-Xers expect far more use of computers and electronic communications such as e-mail, instant messaging, and yes, even PowerPoint.

One of the things that Matt said that really stood out is that he and his wife checked to see whether our church had a web site, and if it didn't that would have told them a lot about our church. The lack of a web site might have caused them to not come to our church.

I think that for anyone associated with Christian churches today, Matt's comment has got to make you think about how you are reaching out and communicating with today's generation.

The conversation inspired many thoughts. One would be, wouldn't it be cool if churches provided mail servers, message forums, online chats, and web server space for weblogs tools to extend their community into cyberspace? When a person joined the church they would be given an email address. They would be provided the webloging tools to contribute to the community by providing their own content. Not many churches have the ability to provide all this themselves, but it wouldn't take much for technology providers to provide this type of service. Take for example Yahoo, which provides mail, forums, and web server space.

Another thought I had would be to set up the entire church with a wireless LAN. When I say entire church I mean even the sanctuary. Then I would set up an internal web server (effectively building an intranet within the church) and put as much information on that server as I could. You could simply store PowerPoint files on that server to retrieve and view from anywhere, but a church really doesn't need PowerPoint for the types of things it would use. Here again simple weblogging or HTML generation tools would suffice to do things like project words to a song up on a wall. (Of course, you would need the projection hardware to do that too.) Video can be played using many different free tools.

Actually, projection might even be too old today. With a wireless LAN worshipers could access the words to songs, scripture readings, sermon notes, etc.. directly on their PDAs. This could also be an nice application for Mira and Tablet PCs....

The label doens't matter, but the spirit does. The point is that churches today have got to start using technology as a means to reach out to their membership and communicate with them in ways that make sense to the membership." [Notes From The Cave]

[The Shifted Librarian] comment [] 13 9:15:53 AM G!.

categories: Weblog Technology Stuff

Review of RU's features versus Live Journal

More Follow-up On RU vs. LJ (with gblake). gblake wrote me the following (with permission to post here, my comments and questions interspersed):

Your questions echo a lot of mine when I started. I was a Blogger user originally and decided to give Radio a try when it was released last December. 1. A lot of people use the typical design for their blogs. If you look at mine, I don't. (I also enhance my stuff with a lot of my own code written in PHP. Mostly because it lets me keep what I had when I was using Blogger. How do the RU scripts integrate with your server-side PHP? 2. Stories are for longer permanent posts. A lot of people will use them for longer articles. I haven't really found a ton of use for them. Though people like Adam Curry use them periodically to write about things they'd like to highlight. I'm thinking that these comparisons and their follow-ups may get archived as "stories." Should I do RU versus MT next (this is the decision I'm most interested in), or RU vs. Blogger (probably what most people care about)? 3. The part of Radio that is not obvious is how it works. If you haven't browsed the Radio documentation I recommend it. It answers a lot of the initial questions I had. Here's one example of the kind of thing you can do with Radio: If you look in the Radio Userland directory there is a directory called www. Anything you drop into this directory gets upstreamed to your site. If you have a template designed you can even write up a page of content and have it upstream it while wrapping it in the template for your site. ...and where does it end up in the site's hierarchy? 4. I host my blog on my own site via the ftp stuff. It was actually quite easy to do. AND I still remain part of the community. When my site updates it pings weblogs.com. My site shows up in the pageview stats for Userland. It tracks pageviews via a an image load from userland at the bottom of my page. So even though I host my own site I'm still part of the community. OK, that's good to know. I don't mind my site living at Salon, for now, but I have plenty of my own hosting space, domain names, etc. 5. The macro language. People have done some neat things with this. For instance, on the righthand side of my page I have a recent posts area. This is all done through Radio with some code I wrote. Anytime I do a post it gets updated. This stuff interests me, but it makes me think that there are two blogging user types: D.I.Y. types who like fiddling with scripts and code, and people who want an out-of-the-box solution. Radio actually seems to satisfy both. So far I've used Blogger, Radio, MT, and LJ. I liked Blogger at first, but it suffered from lots of load issues. LJ tends to feel like the AOL of blogs to me. While there are some people with really nice content it's hidden among lots of noise. Yeah, I haven't visited much of the LJ universe but there is a lot of "I'm mad at my dad" type of stuff there. Some interesting subcommunities though. I think I'll probably migrate my personal LJ blog, as an experiment, either to MT or Radio. MT and Radio are my two favorites. MT lets me have a group blog at work. Everyone in my team posts stuff to it and it is so useful and easy to work with. I think if I'd found MT before Radio I might be using it. But at this point I've gotten used to Radio. Now, I'm torn. Radio is also a bit more then just a blogging client. There is the instant outlining stuff that is pretty neat. And the outliner is actually pretty handy for writing html. I think the outliner is Dave Winer's original baby. In the end, it really all comes down to personal preference I think. I do think that currently MT and Radio are kind of at the top of the heap though. Hope I didn't end up rambling too much Not at all. Thanks!

(There are also a few more comments at the original RU vs. LJ article.) [Radio Free Blogistan] comment [] 12 9:00:23 AM G!.

Diaries, Bookmarks, and Everything Inbetween. Reading Chaords Everywhere I Look I was prompted to jot this info down about the types of blogs in the blogosphere:

There is a range of weblog types, from the personal journal at one end of the spectrum to the annotated set of links at the other. Somewhere in the middle is the new pundit/commentator type blog that is merging with the professional-journalist-moonlighting and edited-blog-at-an-online-'zine models. It is a spectrum, though, not a polarity, and every version of the mix seems to be out there. My first regularly-updated personal site was a pure personal blog designed as a place for me to quiet down and write my thoughts every day, a way to keep my writing chops fresh. It was called breathing room and it rarely contained any links at all. What linking I did was based on the usual web hypertext possibilities and it was never intended as an annotated bookmark site. But this was back in 1998 and the idea has since evolved rapidly, helped along by the various tools that help automate the updating of a log site. Ramble on.

[Radio Free Blogistan] comment [] 11 8:58:13 AM G!.

categories: Weblog Technology Stuff

Categories Discussion for Radio UserLand

Feeding Multiple Blogs with Categories. Thanks to a pointer from John Robb at UserLand, I can link to Paolo Valdemarin's explanation of how to direct different categories to different website destinations. I haven't worked through this myself, but it will enable me, for instance, to send my MemeWatch category to my as-yet-unignited memewatch.com website. In a sense there is a Darwinian competition going on in my mindspace for which solution I will rely on for my blogging needs. If Radio solves all my problems, I'll probably just keep running with it. Meanwhile, I'm still experimenting with MovableType. May the best blog tool win! [Radio Free Blogistan] comment [] 10 8:56:25 AM G!.

categories: Weblog Technology Stuff

Reviews and History of Blogging software

Radio Free Blogistan has a bunch of stuff yesterday and today comparing Radio, LiveJournal and Movable Type. [Scripting News] comment [] 9 8:26:51 AM G!.

categories: Weblog Technology Stuff

NY Times Weblog Article

A NY Times weblog article by Glenn Fleishman that I missed due to surgery. [Scripting News] comment [] 8 8:18:22 AM G!.