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 [...]
Worship Presentation Made Easy
In celebration of the newly released ProPresenter version 4, I wanted to take a few minutes and introduce everyone to the incredibly powerful and user-friendly lyric presentation software that’s being used in churches and ministries around the nation. However, in order to understand the ease of use and power behind ProPresenter, it’s [...]
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.
Unless you have been living in a soundproof cave for the past few weeks, you are probably well aware that Wednesday was what I like to call another “Stevenote,” or an Apple product launch keynote. There has been tons of hype growing in the interwebs over the last month or so about whether or not Apple will be launching a tablet, what the features will be, pricing, availability, etc. Below, we’ve taken a a closer look at the hype and how the rumors have resonated on Twitter, YouTube and blogs over the last 30 days. According to data provided by Sysomos, for example, Twitter users sent more than half a million messages – with an average of 6,545 tweets per hour – with both words apple and tablet in them.
Sysomos also found almost 50,000 blogs posts. The post that resonated the most in the blogosphere, according to Sysomos’ data, was yesterday’s article on the Guardian’s Technology blog about Terry McGraw leaking information about the tablet on CNBC.
