Category: Web/Tech

  • Newsvine is dead, you stink!

    NewsvineI will admit that I enjoyed my initial experiences with Newsvine. It was a fun social/news bookmarking site for a while.

    To me, it is representative of all that is bad about a social network…

    • The interface is the same today as it was when I joined. Lame!
    • The community is extremely catty about what gets posted.
    • Their "popularity" reward system was as lame as they come. There were people (like me) who had posted tons of news stories and was never escalated. But there were others who just had 1-2 things posted, made a couple comments, and earned all their little stripes.

    I suppose this proves hos finicky a web-user can be. 6-9 months ago I loved the site and liked getting email reminders the second things posted in my categories I’ve tagged. Today, I deleted my account when I realized that I hadn’t logged in in 4-5 months. Best part is, no one noticed or cared.

    I’m waiting for my form letter.

  • Moblog test message

     

    I am testing out the mobile blogging feature from typepad on my smartphone. so far, so good.

  • 6 Free Ways to Generate Web Traffic to Your Blog, Money-Back Guaranteed

    Here are 6 basic tips that will help you build traffic for your blog. These 6 things are simple to do and generate plenty of traffic for me. Best part, they don’t you a dime.

    1. Post regularly. (1-2 times per day seems to be a good pace)
    2. Post comments on other blogs you read; if you refer to a blog consider posting a trackback
    3. Tag your posts into categories and ping Technorati
    4. Join a referral service like BlogRush.
    5. Link your blog to your Facebook
    6. Put a link to your blog in your email signature

    Depending on the feedback I get from this post, I may give 4-5 next step secrets for unlocking the power of the web to drive traffic to your blog or website.

  • Reflections on Online Community

    Reflections on Online Community

    Last week I sat in on Kent Shaffer’s session on “Communicating without Words” at the Internet Ministry Conference. And tucked deep in the session were his “7 Steps for [creating/managing] an Online Community”

    After all, if Seth Godin said this is one his top new jobs of the future, it’s worth talking about.

    I wanted to take a few minutes to apply those thoughts… letting them play out.

    1. Define your purpose. For an existing community, I would swap the word “define” to “defend.” I’ve found that to be the hardest thing with managing YMX. There are both internal (mostly from myself) and external pressures to take the community in an unintended direction Effectively managing an online community takes overseers who are willing to guard the purpose. I think this has been one of the strengths of YMX, but it’s tough sledding too.
    2. Define the user experience you want. This is actually pretty important. Because taking the time to map out both what you want the community to be and how you want to form that community are two entirely different things. The platform your community uses is tremendously important to this. For YMX, we use a forum software package that really compliments the type of community we want to be. Open source, willing to try new things, secure, and flexible. That kind of paints a picture for who we are as an online community. But YMX is so much more than just our forum community… and as that picture gets more and more clear for us… we’re able to add features and remove features based upon our user experience design.
    3. Evaluate the system. We do this all the time. Better yet, our users do it for us. Every time I add a feature to the site I start a thread asking for feedback. If people try it and don’t say anything I presume that it worked. If they don’t give us feedback I take it to mean they tried it, it worked, but they didn’t like it. But if it doesn’t work, we always hear about it! Another important element of evaluating the system is noticing how people are using your online community in un-anticipated ways. When you notice that (for us, this was our recipe section) you have to decide… do I kill this? Do I allow it to be an abnormality? Or do I embrace it? For the recipe section… we decided it would be within our purpose to embrace it. And it’s taken off.
    4. Tweak it. Patient users of YMX will know we constantly tweak stuff. Features, design, layout… we tweak big and small things all the time.
    5. Observe it. Often times I perceive something as not working when it really is.
    6. Tweak it.
    7. Observe it. Getting the idea this is an ongoing process? I think this is one of the reasons why MySpace failed so hard. Once they got big they never added features, got rid of abuses of the system, or listened to customer feedback.

    I’ve had loads of people tell me that online communities are just a fad that will quickly fade. Well, as someone who manages a community (rather, I’m part of a team who manages a forum) I feel as though if we just continue a process similar to the way outlined… we’ll just continue gaining steam.

    YMX just crossed the 200,000 post mark. We’ve got about 1100 members. And overall I see us as “just getting ready to go public with our service.”

    At the end of the day… any organization would be wise to obey this process. It isn’t a God-ordained, perfect process. But it is a process that works.

  • Google Docs launches Presentation

    Google_docs_logo
    First off, I love the word "Launch." All products/services/and ministries should launch.

    The folks at Google have gone and done it again… they have created something so cool and forward-looking that the average web-user will not even notice or think that they need until that one day they see it in action. This time they’ve launched a product called "Presentation."

    That’s right boys and girls. They have mastered the collaborative document, spreadsheet, and calendar… now they are looking to master collaborative presentations.

    The new collaboration features will allow several users to view and edit a
    document at the same time, tracking changes and alerting other users in real
    time when someone is making a change.

    Multiple users can also view a set of slides while a moderator controls the
    presentation, and work on or present presentations through Google’s email, chat
    and calendar applications all from within Google Docs.

    I will readily admit to being addicted to Google docs. For YMX it is perfect. We have authors all around the country submit articles, reviews, and other stuff… and all of it goes on Google docs. Why? For Amy Sondova, our managing editor, Google docs solved some major headaches! It’s a single platform and we can invite collaborators to edit an article and finalize it before it goes live on the site. Then once they are ready I literally can cut/paste the text into the site and publish a document in 5 minutes. As little as 12 months ago an article took 45-60 minutes to publish and now I do it in 5 minutes.

    Googlepresentation
    What use will this have for youth workers?
    First off, it’s a price that 100% of youth workers can afford. Free. Secondly, as long as you have an internet connection where you are doing your presentation… you can do a presentation without any software. Simply drag the presentation browser to the display screen and your good to go. Third, this is perfect for meetings that exist in multiple venues and various times. I don’t know how often this is happening just yet… but there are a lot of different meetings and such I can see happening this way. Simply publish the presentation and your done. Same goes for sharing your stuff with parents, just publish and send the link out… you look like a pro. Lastly, this is the perfect tool for teams. I know most youth workers think of themselves as Lone Rangers… but for the rest of us, we work together. This is a tool that allows that to happen instantly and free.

    What uses can you think of for Google docs, and especially presentation?

    HT to Patti Gibbons

  • Internet Ministry Conference: report #1

    Internet_min_confLater in the week (early Friday morning or Thursday night) I’m headed over to Calvin College to attend my first Internet Ministry Conference.

    Since this is my first real entry into "Christian internet world" I have a whole bag of assumptions. And since I’m going to the event to learn, network with fellow nerds, and evaluate if I’ll ever go back… I thought it would be best for me to just write out what I am expecting at the conference. Wouldn’t any good sociologist do the same?

    Assumptions and pre-conference thoughts
    Revenge_of_the_nerds
    Remember Revenge of the Nerds? The 1984 comedy where a group of nerds ended up living in a college frat house together… finding friendship while the "cool kids" ran around going to wild toga parties and picking on the defenseless nerds. Remember that movie? That’s about how I feel going into this. We’re a bunch of nerds, laptops in tow, Starbucks on our breath, and the latest Google Analytics of our website floating through our minds as we check into Calvin for 3 days of embracing our inner geek.

    I expect to see "funny" t-shirts. I expect to see guys in ties. I expect to see folks wearing gear that represents their company/ministry. And I have a feeling there will be superhero’s represented. Can’t explain that one, just preparing myself for it. Superman, Spiderman, and others on adults… breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.

    Looking over the schedule, I’m not sure what most of this has to do with YMX.     It seems like stuff is either "way below" or "way above" of what I’m interested in. But I do see some useful stuff for romeochurch.com. But maybe I’ll be surprised? As far as "value" goes I’m hoping to get more out of it than what I’ve seen from the pre-conference stuff. There must be something more to it than I’m seeing.

    I expect to meet a lot of new people.     Being a newbie Alliance member also means that I expect to say "Youth Ministry Exchange is an online community for youth ministry volunteers and staff" a heck of a lot. And I expect to hear people say, "Oh, that’s nice" a lot as well.

    I expect the release of Gospel.com to be a wow moment.

    I’m looking forward to putting a lot of faces/email addresses together with the Gospel Communications staff.

    Vacancy
    I’m hoping to find a place to sleep.     So if anyone in Grand Rapids wants to hook me up I promise to be a good boy. Otherwise, I’ll be driving around looking for a place to sleep during breaks. Why is it that this always happens to me in Grand Rapids? If all else fails, I know a few good places to camp.

    I’m hoping this isn’t one of those conferences which is a "you either know people or you don’t" kind of things. I am really hoping that people are friendly and welcoming… even to a newbie.

    Revengenerds1
    More than anything.    .. I’m interested in figuring out how all the new stuff that’s out there… too much to list… is going to help me encourage our users at YMX reach people with the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ.

    That said, if I see a single person wearing a cape or a Darth Vader mask… I’m out.

  • An amazing tool… from Microsoft

    I know. It seems almost like an oxymoron to say… but Microsoft has an amazing utility for web developers. I’ll even go this far, it’s better than anything Google has in this category?

    What is it?
    It’s Microsoft’s adCenter Labs

    What is it good for?
    If you are an internet marketer or an internet publisher… you need to know who your readers are and what the likelihood is that they’ll use your site for commercial reasons. In other words, are users of your site willing to spend money via ads on your site or not? Interestingly, saying "no" to that question is not saying "no" to advertising on your site. All it means is that you should run ads on your site for informational purposes or non-commercial purposes. (Still plenty of money in that, too.) And if you are an online marketer, you need to know if you are spending your money on sites that are both in your demographic and interested in buying products that you sell.

    It’s a powerful, simple tool that is worthy of a bookmark. Even for Microsoft haters. Or Google lovers like me.

  • Thunderbird: A brief review

    Thunderbird
    I’m an email junkie.     There, I said it. I have at least 20 different email accounts.

    Why? Well, between the church and YMX I operate a bunch of sites and each one has an "adam" account and a "generic" account for information. Then I have my personal email and stuff like that. So before you know it or can control it… you end up with 20 email accounts.

    How to manage that?
    Thankfully all of them are POP3 based accounts meaning I can have use one resource to manage them all in "one" account. The question is always… how do I keep stuff sorted in the right places?

    In July, our church went to an exchange server system so I lost the capability to have all over my accounts go to my Microsoft Outlook on my laptop. I then tried to use gmail’s POP3 manager to have all of my accounts sent there. While it worked great, I didn’t like that it didn’t use my outgoing server to send mail so YMX email wasn’t coming from my YMX accounts but rather "on behalf" of my accounts. So I started looking for an email alternative.

    That’s where Thunderbird comes into play. It’s made by the same people as Firefox, the best Windows web browser. I’ve now been using "the Bird" a few days and have some initial reactions.

    Setup: Pretty standard and fast. The settings look like and act just like Outlook. The learning curve was actually very minimal.

    Account management: It has a wizard to run through for adding POP3 accounts. That was really no problem if you know all your passwords, addresses, and incoming/outgoing server information.

    Downloading email: Again, this acts a lot like Outlook in that you can either have it go look for mail every ___ minutes or you can do it manually. Just like Outlook you can have email with various subjects or email accounts or subjects sort to various folders. I found this process to be a little easier than Outlook.

    Sending email: Very easy. I like that you can set-up different signatures for different accounts easily. All you need to do is create an html file and point that account to it on your local PC. So YMX accounts can feature this while non-YMX ones won’t. I love that!

    Youth Ministry Exchange

    ↑ Grab this Headline Animator

    Spam: The one thing Thunderbird definitely does better than Outlook is handle spam. It learns the types of things I label as spam and then automatically filter them into a spam filter, deleting them on my schedule. And flagging it is as easy as a click. Very cool.

    All-in-all, if you are looking for an Outlook alternative to manage your email… look no further than Thunderbird. And you can’t beat the price… it’s free!

  • New Innovation: Youth Ministry Classifieds

    Over at Youth Ministry Exchange Headquarters Patti Gibbons and I had a board meeting where we decided to launch a brand new line of business. In truth, Patti and I chat over AIM all the time and we came up with this idea Friday morning and ran with it. We don’t have an office and we don’t have meetings. We’re way more progressive than that. 

    It’s a totally new, from scratch, ground up idea. What is it?

    It’s not 100% ready, but check out the Beta release of www.youthministryclassifieds.com.

    Here’s a couple reasons I’m really jazzed about YMC.

    1. It’s a totally free resource to the Youth Ministry Community.You can list and buy stuff with no transaction fees.
    2. It’s going to fill a gap of something that is not already out there. There simply isn’t an "after-market" anywhere for Youth Ministry stuff.
    3. It’s very simple to use. It’s actually a very "plain" site intentionally.
    4. It’s totally independent of our main site, www.ymexchange.com. Other than being owned by the same company… they are independent sites with different goals, different audiences, and different measurements for what makes it a success.
    5. It integrates all that we are at Youth Ministry Exchange. It’s a compliment to so many other things out there and competing with nothing. How cool is that?

    So… even if you aren’t in youth ministry. It’s worth checking out.

  • Blackle

    I saw this on an old high school friends Facebook. Sorry Sharna, you aren’t really old… but you are an old friend.

    It’s called "Blackle" and it’s a Google alternative that is essentially Google with a different style sheet. The theory is that by making the screen black/gray that the combined monitor energy savings will save 750 megawatts of power in the world each day. I don’t know if that theory is really true. But I do think it’s actually a very cool idea.

    Slick marketing!
    From a tech geek perspective what I like about Blackle is that it’s really just a super slick way for its developer, Heap Media, to get people to use their custom Google search… which they will make a tidy profit on the ad referrals. That’s right, they’ve rebranded something that is free for their own profit. Gotta love America. Oh wait, Heap is from Australia. With the Google custom search just around the corner expect to see a lot more sites like this one. No judgment one way or the other, just in awe!