It’s been one of those weeks. And I still have mountains of stuff to do for this weekend.
Yesterday I talked about goals and benchmarks. It was funny because I worked hard on a benchmark thing that will make the new RomeoChurch.com mucho better than the existing church website. Unfortunately, that benchmark took more than 8 hours when I had hoped it would take less than 1 hour.
Web 2.0
As I’ve mentioned before here… Web 2.0 is changing the way the internet works. From an end user perspective you see what you want to see which often leads to that weird feeling of seeing a Coke in a Pepsi machine at the mall. Those two things don’t go together do they? Web 2.0 has really started to change "who owns what" and "what does it mean to ‘own’ something that exists digitally?" Getting to see the the internet the way that you want to see it simply changes the game. And any time the game changes… users tend to benefit. For example… DSL and Cable internet changed the ISP game. While there are still loads of people on dial-up, many more now pay very little for unlimited, wireless, high speed internet. That changed the game and created a whole new market. Web 2.0 is doing the same thing. Now that content doesn’t "live" on a site forever because it can go anywhere… this has changed the game.
What that means for web developers (Which I don’t really claim to be but get a bird’s eye view of a lot) is that people collaborate now when they wouldn’t have before. Just yesterday I was working on this "benchmark" for RomeoChurch.com and I ran into a wall. I couldn’t get the thing to work! I scratched my head. I tried it a bunch of different ways. I even had to talk a walk around the building to clear my head and pray for an idea. Just then, literally in that moment, a person from YMX contacted me about a website problem he had with his youth group site. I said, "Sure send me a link." When my AIM screen flashed my jaw dropped as I could see he was working with the same exact code he was working on! And he was having the same problem and had been banging his head against the wall for 2 days.
So, we did what anyone living in a Web 2.0 world would do. We contacted the guy who published the code to ask for help. Within an hour both of us were smiling as our websites were now doing something we had long hoped for.
In a Web 1.0 world, that collaboration wouldn’t have happened. Certainly not for free. But Web 2.0 changed the game. Now you see loads of novice developers having access to experts as we all share ideas.
Which leads to the question the church has to deal with… "How will the church adapt to a Web 2.0 environment?" How will the church be the authority when we can’t even control content anymore? Is there biblical justification for collaboration? And what about churches who refuse to collaborate?
Anyone have answers? Let’s here ’em.
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