Welcome back everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful week. I just returned home from a great night out with my wife, and good friend Jayme Braun. He was in town with his band for a gig they had at the FBR (Phoenix) Open and invited us over to see the show. It was great [...]
If you are a GMail user, you most likely have seen a new little icon pop up on your menu bar for “Buzz” – or perhaps logged on and got a pop up message about setting up “Buzz”.
So what is Google Buzz exactly and how is it supposed to improve my life? Is it the same as “wave” or something entirely different? Many friends asked, “So is this like “Facebook News-feed” in Gmail?”
Well, the answer to all of those is yes and no.
Buzz is essentially both a “micro-blogging” and “chat” tool all in one. You can post news and updates to buzz just like Twitter or Facebook, or you can post your thought for the day, pictures, videos, links, etc. It is entirely up to you. You can make your posts public or private and even set up private groups to have a threaded conversation. Buzz can pull in updates from other social networking sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Picasa. It also will automatically share your “shared items” from Google Reader.
While Google is obviously doing its best to compete with services like Twitter and Facebook, it has a long way to go before Buzz will be much of a comparable option. Personally I am not sure how much time I have for yet another service to help me social network. I already use Google Chat, Facebook, and Twitter, plus run three websites and co-manage another. How do you find time to have real conversations when trying to manage all of these virtual ones?
I’m finally back!
Hello readers and friends,
It’s been a few weeks since I last surfaced here at NMM.com. Please, forgive me. It’s been a CRAZY hectic time in my life (my wife and I bought a house, I’ve been knee deep in work for the Cardinals even though its the off-season, school is back in session, [...]
I have been in ministry for twelve years now. Most of that time has been spent working in parish youth ministry. One of the best things about parish ministry is the long term investment in people’s lives. Getting to know not only teens, but families and watching them grow. It is amazing how time and presence can lead to some incredibly life-giving relationships. I still am in touch with so many of these teens and families from over the years, and while I wish I would have been a little better at keeping in touch with more of those beautiful people that I’ve encountered I am ever grateful for those who I have been able to keep in touch with.
As a Catholic speaker it is very different. You go into a parish or event, you spend a couple hours, or maybe a day or two with a community and hopefully inspire and enliven their community. Then, you leave. Sometimes you come back, but most times you don’t. I often felt a bit of guilt going into a community and then leaving with no way of keeping in communication. I would leave a community and feel a longing to keep in touch, to leave behind something to help them continue the journey. Some communities didn’t need that because they had vibrant ministries going on to serve the people, they just needed a little spark or spiritual boost. For some communities, they didn’t have much going on in the way of active ministry for teens or adults. Often, this was the only retreat they got. I often wondered about the teens and adults that I would meet at these events, those who came forward for prayer or wrote to me later. I often wondered how they were, where they were, and if they were still on the journey.
Today we continue our series on the site called “Where to Start?” Where to Start? is a step by step series that helps you build a website from scratch on your own by giving you a variety of options to choose from.
So you’ve spent a few hours working on setting up your new WordPress blog. You’re now (hopefully) more motivated than ever to get your site up and running to help manage your ministry and put some resources online. But there are still some things to do before you’re ready to go.
We’ve put together a quick run through of some things to work on before launching your site. As always, if you have any questions, give us a shout in the comments.
If you’ve been following our new site for the last few weeks, you’re well aware that we’ve shared some great articles and resources with you (at least we think we have!). But, being in that we’ve all been involved in ministry in some way shape or form, we are all well aware of what you’re first reaction is – It sounds great, but I would rather spend my small budget in a better way.
Well, I’m here to tell you today why New Media needs to be one of the top items in your budget.
The biggest hesitation that I’ve run into both socially and professionally with my own clients’ hesitation to invest time or money is that they see things like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, etc. as a fad. In their minds, as soon as they finally spend the money and finally get around to launching, everyone will have moved on to the next greatest thing. If you’re one of these people, I invite you to check out the following video. This video is put together with facts and data from Summer of 2009, but the numbers are astonishing. Simply put, you can probably be safe just doubling each number to find current data.
