i found this story reassuring that it's not just church groups who struggle to adapt to the new environment
For a brand to really understand Web 2.0 (and I apologise for using that term but you all know what I mean) what it takes is someone in the organisation who already understands Web 2.0. Someone who is already blogging, someone who has a Flickr account. Etc etc.
is it just me?... i am getting sick of facebook oppression
there are so many facebook evangelists out there, by which i mean people keen to convert me to the delights of facebook (for those that don't know the social networking software of choice of the middle class). i am resisting their charms but last night whilst on ichat i got an automatic message via facebook from someone who shall remain nameless inviting me to an event they were speaking at and to join facebook (it was actually in the US so fat chance i'd make it!). this was the last straw. i can no longer keep silent. i do not need facebook in my life. stop inviting me to be your friends and to your facebook diary events. i have not chosen to receive this info so as far as i am concerned it's spam!!!!!!!
why?
i blog, and have a network of friends around the world online through that and i follow conversation through a newsreader and feeds and occasionally technorati (though i honestly don't have time for that either). i use flickr and have a network online through that of people interested in photography. i have a myspace page (well two). to be honest i never look at that other than answering friend requests - i joined because i make music and felt like i ought to. seems like every musician is out there. (i actually think myspace is a mess but that's another story). i am also in a network or five of e-mail groups/password protected spaces - youthwork multimedia, alternative/emerging, IASYM, UK alt/emerging leaders/groups, and network of entrepreneurial talent (NET). managing information often feels like holding back the tide so i don't want to open up another gateway to the sea - e-mail alone is always on the edge of being out of control in my life. so sorry everyone - i will not be joining facebook any time soon. you can of course look forward to the day when i eat my words if that day comes and remind me of my futile resistance. (i confess my heart sank when i saw that even andrew jones (my digital mentor who got me blogging, using ecto, newsreaders, and then shifting to typepad) was evangelising the masses about facebook.)
i have nothing against it or those that love it. if it works for you... great. but i am happy with my old fashioned blog world. ok i am now bracing myself for a reaction. hit me with it!... or discuss it amongst yourselves on facebook ;-) - of course i have been suspicous that blog readers are leaving less comments now because they are all so busy on facebook but now i am sounding paranoid!
photografr.com looks to seek out the best pics from zoomr and flickr - all subjective of course...
on the subject of images, if you use safari (mac) or firefox (windows) piclens just got an upgrade. it enables you to turn an image search into a slideshow or click on an image and see it full screen. it's pretty neat. i blogged about version 1 here. i still don't use safari for mac - in fact i think it's terrible. so how about a version for firefox (mac) or flock (mac)?
i completely agree with gill's thoughts about posting sermons on youtube - why?!
i remember a term from one of len sweet's books - categorical imperialism - i.e. imposing the categories from one world/media into a new one rather than understanding that new media change everything. i'm also thinking about this marshal macluhan quote :
official culture still strives to force the new media to do the work of the old media. but the horseless carriage did not do the work of the horse; it abolished the horse and did what the horse could never do
cowforce.com won the peoples choice award - wow! congrats jon and the team. very cool indeed...
congratulations jon birch! my friend/ proost partner in crime/ inspiration/ fellow song writer does all manner of amazing creative things. one of his recent projects has been doing the flash animation for the send a cow web site. it is very cool. they site cowforce.com has just won a yahoo find of the year award for the charity category. this is no small feat. there is now a peoples choice award so if you like what you see go and support jon by voting for them to win that... well done to the rest of the design team.
the new 100 most useful sites from gaurdian technology section of today's paper.
i also really liked the editorial in praise of the bbc as one of the best innovators - the bbc is fab especially in its interaction with new media.
worldchanging - nice site (thanks bob)
i have joined the world of myspace. not sure why?! well other than it seems every one has joined it and i had a couple of spare evenings last week and it's a good place to be if you make music or so it seems so i have also set up a page for proost. all my myspace friends so far are teenagers but if you are an adult you are welcome to say hi too!
the guardian weekend magazine has a huge feature on web 2.0 - the bigger bang. there is a main feature and then lots of interviews (link to them from the main feature page) with some of the leading lights of web 2.0 companies. it's a pretty good selection though you might have chosen a few others to add to the list. if you are wondering what web 2.0 is each of the interviews asks that question.
wikipedia
bebo
blogger/odeo
flickr
writely
myspace
digg
craiglist
wordpress
last fm
feedburner
del.icio.us
technorati
netvibes
one of the things i do in my job is to try and give some sense of what's happening in culture because the church in mission must engage with it - ideally positively and incarnationally. several people in the blogosphere (me included) have been banging on about the significance of this stuff for a while now. i think many people see it as either an irrelevance or an indulgence, but this stuff is changing the way people (especially younger people but increasingly all of us) construct their lives and interact. i'll be photocopying this article/feature and giving it to many youth workers/church leaders/mission leaders. this is part of our context.
i uploaded a presentation earlier this year that i gave on communication. these are some of the questions i was suggesting we need to be thinking about. and just asking them shows up just how much lag there is in many churches practice and thinking...
can we imagine...
church beyond gathering?
church beyond once a week?
church as always on connectivity to christ and one another?
church where community is the content?
theology and resources of church being open source?
church valuing the wisdom of the crowd rather than the knowledge of the expert?
our church/spirituality being easily found by seekers because we tag it that way?
an ethos of low control and collaboration?
an economy of gift?
church as spaces for creative production and self publishing?
church as providers of resources for spiritual seekers and tourists?
Technorati Tags: a bigger bang, guardian, web 2.0
i mentioned a couple of weeks back that the grace web site had been revamped. on the surface it may not look that different but the big shift is one of participation. a year and a half ago at a grace weekend away we came up with three words that capture our ethos - create, participate, engage. we subsequently added a fourth - risk. this ethos has really shaped what we have done since, much more than i imagined.
so that the web site carries our ethos it has been changed so that any members of the community can create/participate and add content to the site - either new pages or editing existing pages. on the one hand this saves the current web master from being a bottle neck/controller but more importantly it just opens the whole thing up and captures what grace is about. none of us quite know how we will use it or what exactly we'll add but that is half the fun. some of us had an initial play around with it on friday and liked the shift in approach. a good example of the way we can work with it is the new archive section. this has dates of grace over the years. any of us that have bits and pieces of liturgy/titles/outlines from those services can add them in to develop a collective memory/archive/resource. that should evolve. clearly the site could remain static if none of us do anything but i expect it will grow organically to reflect who grace is. one of the outcomes is also that it will end up looking less slick and be more messy.
one of the phrases that stuck in my mind about web 2.0 was that they were applications/sites where 'community is the content'. for grace or any other similar group community really is the content so it makes sense that the technologies and communications we use work with that notion.
co-incidentally i got an e-mail from pete today letting me know that ikon have shifted their web site to a wiki based site. this is even more open than ours - anyone can edit any page on it.
pictobrowser is a very cool web tool that works with flickr. you can choose any slide set you want and it gives you the code to paste in to your web site so that you can display a silde set in your blog. here's an example (above) - the slide set walking on water that i blogged about yesterday. only this time you don't need to leave my site to visit it. just click on any of the thumbnails below the main image to see that photo appear. it works with flash - if you can't see it that will be because you haven't got flash plugin for your browser. as with virtually all flickr related tools and articles i have ever posted i discovered this via thomas hawk
i have just ordered a sample of 10 business cards from moo.com - dean gave me a tip off about it. if you have a pro flickr account you can get a sample of 10 free. and you can buy cards in a box of 100. the way it works is that you choose photos from your flickr account to go on one side and then can write 6 lines on the reverse. i'll let you know how they turn out. i found the site very easy to use, a very intuitive interface/process. there is a flickr moo group with a few pictures if you want to see what they look like.
Technorati Tags: moo
ebible is a dead cool web 2.0 application - type in a verse or search word to find what you want in several versions. right click a verse to bookmark it with tags of your choosing, share your bookmarks with friends, look up commentaries etc. i think i have a few invites to hand out. if you want one leave a comment...
(if you want a daily pattern for reading join with mark berry's safespace who are follwing the lectionary (c of e pattern of reading) and posting some prayers on a new blog)
[update: the subscriptions were while ebible was in beta testing. but it has now gone public so you can go and sign in for free which is why you haven't had an invite from me if you requested one. i had no idea this was about to happen. but all of you who have expressed an interest can sign up. thanks jeremy and scott for tip off]
i have been trying a new browser - flock. and i think i am going to switch over to using it from firefox...
if you blog, use del.icio.us, flickr and a news reader all of these are integrated into flock in a very smart way.
first up, when you switch from firefox or whatever it imports your favourites, bookmarks, and toolbar.
then the first thing you notice if you have a flickr account is that either your photos, your contacts photos or even better any new photos from your contacts are on a strip at the top. it scrolls easily along and you can lose it at any point... it really is good. you can also look at the strip of photos in two sizes.
if you put in your blog account details, click a button and you can blog directly in the window that opens (in both wysiwyg and html). and what is particularly sweet is that you can drag any photo with a choice of sizes from the flickr bar at the top. this is genius... i can't remember if i have said this before but if you don't use flickr to upload your own photos you can still blog anyone's photos if you sign in as a member as long as you link back to that flickr page (this way of dragging photos writes that code for you). of course you can do the same with photos from your computer and all the usual things.
if you follow blogs an other web sites in a newsreader you can do that from the browser (other browsers do this too). click on the feed symbol in the address bar and a sidebar appears that you can add the feed to. then arrange them in folders as you like and save any entries as articles for future reference. now that wireless is available so much more, having this all integrated into one place makes a lot of sense. you don't have to open another programme and update and so on... it just all happens. the interface is great.
if you also like to save your favourite sites either as bookmarked favourites or on something like del.icio.us so that others can access them then the beauty of flock is that it integrates the two. add something as a favourite and it gets added to your del.icio.us page as well as bookmarked. sadly this doesn't seem to be working properly for me yet on the mac version. i'm sure it will get resolved. but it will be very good when it works properly. it just makes perfect sense. it is also very simple. in the address bar is a blue star. click it and it turns orange to show it is a favourite. double click it and a box opens where you can add description, tags, and choose favourite folders for it to go in.
it has good search bar tools much like firefox and to cap it all includes a very neat flickr uploader. you can upload individual photos with descriptions, tags, as a set and so on. and all of the interfaces look good, the speed is fast. in short it is brilliant. i have only been trying it for three days and it has crashed once. it is in beta so i guess some bugs are to be expected but browsing just got a whole lot smarter.
it is available for pc and mac btw and is free. click on any of these screen shots and you'll see what it looks like and the various bits i refer to
flickr is brilliant - if you follow the blog you'll know i am a fan. i have been accused of being a flickr evangelist. when i discovered it i described it here but i thought it worth an update after 3 months use so let me give you an idiot's guide to flickr and try and convert you (again)...
flickr is an online photo sharing application - you should be interested if
a) you take photos
b) you look at photos
c) you use photos in presentations/worship/desktop/artwork
go to flickr and sign up. you will be able to look at photos and participate much better if you sign up. it doesn't cost anything to sign up.
your own photos
upload your photos
if you take photos you can then upload them. the free account lets you upload up to 20mb a month and see 200 pics. you quickly realise that it's worth paying for the pro version which is incredibly cheap and gives you a huge amount of space each month. as well as being able to upload within flickr itself there are free tools to upload photos for both mac and pc - i have downloaded two for mac - one so i can upload directly from iphoto and one that is a stand alone uploader. both are incredibly easy to use and especially useful for uploading in batches or sets..
i upload photos at full size - for me it provides a great way of backing them up. flickr is worth it for that alone. flickr resizes them into a number of different sizes for people interested in looking at or downloading them from thumbnail through to the original size.
tag your photos
you can tag any photo with as many words as you like. this isn't so much a description as a facility to enable you to retrieve your photos at a later date either by you or others when you search on a particular tag or combination of tags.
decide who you want to see your photos
you can set who can see any photo as family, friends, contacts, or public (anyone).
arrange your photos
it is easy to arrange photos into sets - you can then share them with people by them watching them in a slideshow - it's very well done. so you might have favourites, art pics, london photos or whatever...
share your photos
flickr is a photo sharing site - this is where it is really brilliant.
a) add family friends and contacts
you can have a set of family, friends and contacts. you can either invite someone or add them when you see photos you like or if you know them. when you have added contacts, you can check your contacts page and see who has uploaded any photos - you will be shown their latest photo. at first i added people i knew - family and friends but quickly realised that contacts are worth adding if you like particular peoples photos or if they like yours.
b) choose what level of copyright you want
your photos are protected by copyright but this can limit what other people do with them (technically anyway). but you can choose to have a creative commons license that means you give permission for people to use your photos in different ways. the one i have chosen means anyone can use my photos and manipulate them as they wish for any non commercial use.
c) add your photos to groups
flickr has hundreds of groups. to add a photo to a group pool you have to join the group. then when a photo is open you simply click on a button to select one of your groups to add it to. there are groups for everything imaginable - light, colours, portraits, religious kitsch etc...
d) create a group
if you want to share photos on a particular theme create a group. i've created gracelondon so we can share pics from grace. there are also discussion boards as part of the group.
cultivate interest in your photos
this may or may not be of interest to you. i confess that it is of interest to me. if i take a great photo there's nothing like having other people notice it. rather than me share from my limited experience read thomas hawk's article top ten tips for getting attention on flickr (btw have a look at his photos - fab). these include making peoples photos favourites, adding them as contacts, joining groups, adding your best one last so it is top on your contacts pile, and so on...
see if any of your photos have made it
flickr identifies 500 photos a day as interesting - these then change over time. you can use scout to see if any of yours have been deemed worthy. i have had three make it...
blog your photos
if you have a blog you can set it up so that you can blog directly from a photo page in flickr which is pretty neat. this relates to the previous point as well as it lets people know about your best photos.
print your photos
there are various third parties who work with flickr so that you can print books of your photos - anyone tried it? qoop looks pretty good... i haven't tried it yet but no doubt will.
other peoples photos
there are loads of photos in flickr. so there must be loads you would love. when you find one you like just click favourite to add it to your favourites so you can find it again. and while you are at it why not leave a comment on it to let the person know what you think of it. if you look at their photos and decide you like the look of their photos then add them as a contact as well. you can come back and look at your favourites any time and if you make someone a contact you will be able to see their latest photos at any time.
how do you find good photos?
thomas hawk has saved me the trouble again by writing a piece top 10 ways to find great photos on flickr but this is what i do (and it's much shorter)...
add people whose photos i like as contacts and track them
use flickr leech - this is an unbelievably brilliant search tool. i mentioned it before but it was down at the time so you probably didn't check it out. you can use it to either type in a date to search by interestingness, a tag, a group or a user ID and it fills your screen with a sheet of thumbnails. i generally have a look at the 500 photos labelled most interesting each day by flickr - it sounds a lot but they are all on one page of thumbnails. here's a screen grab (click on the thumbnail to see it) so you can see what i mean... it's simplicity is its genius. i have found it loads better than using the flickr explore page though that often highlights interesting groups and picks out a good photo.
Technorati Tags: flickr
today i gave a presentation/seminar to the communcators of the porvoo churches. it was on communicating the gospel creatively on the internet/new media environment. for anyone who was there and asking for the slides i have made them into a pdf file porvoo.pdf. it's about 11mb so make sure you have broadband. i didn't have any notes - sorry... just the slides to trigger my thoughts.
in terms of other links. these were the ones i mentioned i think...
emergingchurch.info
habbohotel
small ritual network church pages
probes (including movie)
tallskinnykiwi
the complex christ
what is web 2.0?
flickr
technorati
del.icio.us
worship tricks
out of bounds church
i enjoyed the session - had to create some new stuff which is always good. i was particularly struck again by the connections between the new media and emerging church. (thanks to all the people who unknowingly helped me with this - steve c, steve t, kester, rachel, mark w, tallskinnykiwi, ben by way of quotes, thoughts, pics, inspiration or just genius)
kester told me about lulu when we went round for a meal before christmas and i checked it out then. a very cool idea to add to the huge opportunities there are for self publishing. i've been waiting for kester to blog about it - but not only has he blogged about it he has gone and used it to publish his blog in a book format with comments and all. it looks great. obviously it's all available online for free but nice to have a personal record and maybe there is a blog or two you love so much you would buy as a book?...
it does seem quite a lot of work though so not sure yet whether i will follow the certain to grow trend. though it might be a good way to keep a hard copy of particular posts. quite a lot of my posts have very little content and are just linkages to other peoples interesting posts! one of the weaknesses of course is that you immediately lose the hyperlinked nature of the text that you get online. but it might be a good way to publish a hard copy of the worship tricks say? or stories on emergingchurch.info? but then there is so many other peoples stuff in there.... who knows...
kester is calling it plogging. jason suggests that word is taken and asks for other ideas. i thought an obvious one for kester would be for sale blogging - FLOGGING - ha! ok so it doesn't quite work but you can see where i was heading ;-)
way to go kester - nice one...
Technorati Tags: plogging, lulu, publishing
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