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?
One of the main goals that we would like to accomplish on New Media Ministry is to provide youth ministers with some new tools and resources so that they can in turn get to work in implementing these into their ministry. Chris Faddis wrote two weeks ago about the importance of connecting through text messaging, and I hope that many of you have given a shot at trying text messaging in your ministry. If not, read the post and try out the service for free that we recommended.
I wrote a review of a cool product last week called YooStar. YooStar is basically a video kit that allows you to superimpose yourself in the place of some of your favorite characters in videos. This is a great product for creating hype and promotion in your ministry.
I wanted to take a quick look today at a few ways that you can and need to begin utilizing video in your ministries. You might be a little intimidated to try and get involved in ministry because you think cameras are real expensive and editing takes a lot of knowledge, etc. But times and technologies are changing. We’ll cover this later on down the road.
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.
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.
I need some background on YOU (the readers) so that I can keep my blogs relevant (forgive me if I’ve been focusing on ideas/topics that are not)!
I appreciate any and all feedback.
Chat with you soon!
