jonnybaker

advanced social network

i rather like this which i spotted on james henley's blog though i have no idea of the original source...

paper 53 and taking notes

last week when i was on the missional entrepreneurship week mark simpson took notes by sketching on an ipad with the app paper53 . i had this app and had enjoyed messing with it but i really liked watching what he did by way of catching some moments of what was being said. he has posted some sketches on his blog

anyway i thought i'd try doing the same and did so today at the fresh expressions day - i have posted the results on my facebook page if you're interested. this was my attempt at a sketch of archbishop rowan williams who hopefully felt the huge appreciation in the room for what he has done to encourage mission through fresh expressions. now any real artists out there?

visible tweets - digital prayers

i had a complaint (yes really though it was said tongue in cheek!!) that not many worship tricks have been forthcoming on the blog. the honest truth (what other kind of truth is there i wonder?!) that the blog has had less of everything in the last two years because of one crazy maxed out life. but point taken and i will get my butt in gear and add any i come across. so here goes - worship trick 24 in series 4: digital prayers using visible tweets.

i have been at plenty of events where a twitter feed scrolls on a screen on the stage. it's fun and creates some level of interaction/commentary on what is going on. we've done this before now at grace which felt like it enabled people connected to grace but not physically present to participate which was brilliant. as i mentioned in the last post i was doing a few reflective/prayer slots at a conference last week focused on communication. one of the sessions was on social media so i tried to use that in the worship slots. one of the things i did was to get people to pray using a twitter hashcode. i am sure this has been done by many people in different ways so am not claiming any originality here. however i did a bit of scouting around to see what is around by way of showing a live feed on the screen. the problem very often with ones i have seen is that the tweets are very small and so quite hard to read from a distance unless there is a very large screen. but then i came across visibletweets. you don't even need to download it. it's a flash based website. type in a hashcode, a search term or someone's twitter id and then one tweet at a time fills the page and beautifully animates to the next. it's slow and feels meditative, just right for tweeted prayers or reflections. there is a button at the bottom corner to go full screen. it's clean, simple and very nicely done. 

presentations and the dreaded powerpoint + links

last week i was taking part in a cms training conference for people in mission on communication. there were sessions on story telling, photography, movie making, social networks, and presentations. people takng part worked in pairs to present in whatever media they wanted on the last morning. these presentations were really wonderful and moving. 

i was invited to lead some short reflections/prayerful spaces and tried to incorporate a mix of media into them. for those people that were there here's a few links to some of the pieces...

network of christ

mobile confession was originally described here and i used sms2email.co.uk to set it up - click on the section with interactive messaging and keywords

st hilda community prayer - be still...

prayer of commitment

twitter prayers used visible tweets (which i will also blog about separately)

the jesus deck which we used for storytelling is available here

the prayer/blessing related to mobile faith is here

prayer of francis drake

tour de france road psalm

i was also invited to share my thoughts on presenting with the likes of powerpoint or keynote or equivalent. i found this a good challenge as it helped me reflect on my own approach. and i produced a handout summarising it here called presentations and the dreaded powerpoint (pdf) . you had to be there to experience the presentation itself! a friend seth who presented on photography used a quote saying that there is no such thing as a right way to take good photographs - there are only good photographs. the same could be said of presentations so by signalling my approach i am not for one moment suggesting it is the right or only or best way of presenting - it's a way! love to know your thoughts on your own approaches...

mobilefaith

i took part in a conference in austin in the run up to sxsw interactive exploring mobilefaith - how faith and practice can be animated, supported and enlivened with mobile technologies. it's a great question and always interesting to see how new media change a lot more than we initially expect. the highlight of the day ended up being texan bbq at rudy's after it was all over to unpack all the talks and talk about these changes more. we ended up discussing education, politics and religion in the new environment for quite some time!

i was last on and felt people had been sitting for a very long time but if anyone was there (or not) and is interested in the slides they are on slideshare here. i used some of the ideas i explored a while back in digimission if anyone remembers that. it was great to bump into paul soupiset again. he was sketchbooking notes which are simple but delightful. 

there were a few good lines thrown out in the day - one of my favourites was that the bible should be thought of not as a piece of content but a piece of community...

if anyone wanted the piece i read on the network of christ it is here. it was actually part of a series where i was reflecting on clay shirky's brilliant book here comes everybody - see also posts on sharing and collaboration , i participate therefore i am and its a small world 

to conclude the day i wrote a final piece of liturgy that went like this...

god of connection
your presence is always on

god of relations
to you we belong

god of community
you have called us friends

god of participation
your possibility never ends

send us out in the power of your spirit
with #mobilefaith
on an adventure of the imagination 
to join in where you already are

in the name of the Open Source
the Portal
and Flow

#amen  #isthishereticalorinspired

(thanks to karlie for the join in where you already are line which i 'borrowed' from here). it's about time i added some worship tricks so the #mobilefaith prayer is worship trick 18 series 4

blogging for beginners

i did two training sessions this week on blogging. there were quite a few people there interested in starting a blog who were not interested in getting too techy or anything. the first session was terrible in that i couldn't get online for the only time the whole week. but in the second we started a blog on blogging for beginners and it occured to me that if i tidied it up it might be useful for other people and might be something for the first group to make up for the rubbish session i led! it is and will remain only ten posts in total - i don't intend to expand upon it. and it's also just on setting up a posterous blog and nothing else. and it's aimed at people with not too much tech knowledge. anyway it's here

blogging4beginners

flickr hacks - suprsetr

thomas hawk posts 10 flickr hacks - but suprsetr looks the most interesting enabling you to manage flickr sets by keywords and tags

singles

both tallskinnykiwi and steve taylor are excited about the kindle single format for books - the argument is that digital formats suit shorter lengths. i think there is a lot of truth to this so it will be interesting to see what transpires...

posterous groups

posterous have added a new group facility that looks pretty good. i certainly love the way their blog works for groups. call me a heretic but i find facebooks groups almost completely useless! hopefully this is better...?

congratulations sophia network - blog of the year!

congratulations to the sophia network who won the blog of the year at the christian new media awards. jen is the person who makes it happen and writes a lot of the content and chases the rest. it's a brilliant site, has great content and has a perfect niche which often suits blogs well. i designed the site - i remember that animated walking woman taking me hours taking screen grabs from a movie i shot in new york! so it was also nice from that point of view. in fairly amusing fashion my blog was also in the final but was beaten into runner up by jen. how i was even in the final i have no idea as i have put less time into it this year than before because i've been busier than ever in the last 6 months!

so how do you read the news?

clay shirky was interviewed in the guardian yesterday. i read it in a physical newspaper. that's mainly because jen loves to get a paper most days. in practice though i have the guardian app on my ipod and tend to download it and read it on the train or in the car on the way to work most days. if it was just me i suspect i'd only get a paper on saturday... clay shirky suggests that in fifteen years newspapers as physical things will seem archaic and won't exist in fifty. the behaviour of under 25s is the biggest indicator as they read on screens. i suspect he's right. i was delighted to see the interview because i hadn't realised that he had a new book out (there never seems to be just an interview in the paper - you always think i wonder what is being promoted!) so i have ordered cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. his last book here comes everybody is brilliant. i can't remember who i loaned that to so have ordered another copy of that as well (how many books have i done that with?!).

i have to say though for someone who is writing on the web and surfing the zeitgeist his web site is completely lame - last post april 1 and hasn't yet got round to mentioning a new book...

social media boot camp

jason clark sent me an e-mail to say he is hosting a day on social media in september covering these four things -

• What is Social Media, why is it here and why is it important? 
• The main popular tools of Social Media including blogging, Facebook and Twitter 
• How you might better use Social Media for your own communication and life 
• How your organisations, church, and ministry might engage strategically and meaningfully with Social Media

 details here 

prezi - for a different sort of presentation

a friend [thanks martin] put me onto prezi, an online presentation piece of software. it's easier to see than explain so just go and have a look at their samples. you basically create a big map or flow chart of your presentation that you can add images and text to and group into frames. then follow the path in a linear way or click on any image or text to zoom in on that at any point. and whenever you like zoom back out to see the big picture...

i have put together one so we'll see what people think when i use it - i'll let you know in the comments next week! it makes a change anyway from keynote or powerpoint. like all these things the free version has limited storage and options but you can buy a version fairly cheaply. i'm sticking with free. it was very intuitive and easy to use.

nifty

this is pretty nifty if you ever want to convert a web page to pdf - html-pdf-convert

starting a blog could not be easier - posterous

i took a training session on IT for cms last week. one of the questions that came up was about blogging and what the easiest free interface was. the answer is posterous.com . rather than repeat myself this is the post i wrote having set up a blog by simply sending an e-mail

Last week I took a training session for people in mission and one of the questions that came up was how to start a blog. I did the usual thing of mentioning various providers and in particular I showed www.tumblr.com as I think it has a very easy interface to get started with. However since then I have been doing a bit of scouting around and the solution that is the simplest and most remarkable seems to be posterous.com . With this you simply send an e-mail to [email protected] and a blog is created for you. The address is sent back to you and then you can send posts via e-mail, with audio, photos, movies, pdfs, even powerpoints attached that will be converted to a reasonable format and posted to your blog. What could be simpler especially for people not wanting to engage in the techy side of things or for people in parts of the world where internet access is limited? Wonderful...

There's more of course - add your profile pic, give it a different look and so on. But rather than bedazzle anyone with that I have just left it exactly as it gets set up, other than adding a profile photo and blurb in my profile which is what appears under the photo

yes you read that right - just e-mail and attach anything you like and it will be on your blog. you can also select to link it to facebook, twitter and all that at the click of a mouse so your posts scatter across your networks. and you can group blog. so for example, i am considering switching the ealing lip blog to posterous as it could not be simpler for people to post. you register them and they simply send to an e-mail you give. you can also link to an existing blog so whatever you e-mail to posterous will then appear on your existing blog. i'm not thinking of switching personally or anything and am used to the typepad interface and like it but this is more of a useful tool for any of you encouraging others to blog and trying to find a simple way to get them started... [ht: tim snyder for putting me onto it]

digimission talk and presentation

the talks from the digimisssion conference are online at slipstream. you can download mine directly here

as i'm a fairly visual person some of it only makes sense with the presentation so a pdf of that is here... (thought you mac users would like this slide!)

maggi dawn was one of the speakers. while there i took some photos for her for publicity shots one of which i have added to flickr...

#digimission

today i am one of several speakers at digimission - an EA gathering reflecting on mission and digital culture. it's from 11-3 at st pauls church, robert adam street w1u . i think it's being broadcast/streamed here and the twitter hash tag is #digimission.

amazing

Dungeness timelapse experiment with Canon 7d from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

this time lapse movie just blew me away - read the detail on how long it took to make! thanks to bill kinnon for pointing me to this site which has lots of tips and inspiration if you have either a new canon 7d or a 5dmkii and shoot movies. there is clearly a whole technical debate on how many frames a movie should be shot at and then edited at. movie making is so complex. i honestly don't have time to do the process philip describes so if it's important to change movies from 30 to 24 or 25 frames per second i'll have to wait until canon upgrade the software. however in trying to wrap my head around the process i was reminded of a piece of software mark had mentioned to me ages ago for converting movie formats - mpeg steamclip which is free to download here and is brilliant.

speechbreaker

if you're having a dull day rewrite cameron, brown or clegg's speeches. here's my assessment of cameron last week inspired by  conversation with mike last night ;-)

happy third birthday moo.com!

i loved moo from the word go and have used their moo cards ever since as well as ordering greeting cards. the way they interface with flickr is simply brilliant. anyway last night was a free party in london at the queen of hoxton with hog roast, a free drink all round, music and moo-ites. all to celebrate their third birthday. i recently upgraded my phone - (no i'm not in the rich iphone user bracket! it's a sony ericsson phone). this is the first pic with it - takes a photo 2592x1944 which is pretty impressive. it will certainly do for those occasions where the 5d is too big to carry around...