21st Century Sheep » pobriant

Social Media and the Church

Paul — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:27:50 +0000

This post is a followup to a session I conducted at the Do No Harm Conference in Houston. The conference was a powerful experience for me and I was honored and humbled to be a part of it.

I used a website called Jog The Web to link to all the resources I mentioned in the session. Go here to see the resources.

The PowerPoint presentation has been uploaded to SlideShare.net and is shown below.

Social media and the church

View more presentations from Paul OBriant.

Documents have been uploaded to Scribd.com and can be found here. This includes a sample church e-policy or acceptable use policy.

Twitter Goes Mainstream

Paul — Sun, 31 May 2009 22:37:12 +0000

Twitter, the hot micro-blogging messaging system is one of the fastest growing services on the web. Even Oprah twitters! Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” You type in your answer, using up to 140 characters, and your response goes out live on the web. Each user chooses other users to follow. You can also make your updates private.

FromChurch.com provides a much more extensive explanation of what Twitter is in this blog post.

Anthony Coppedge has written Twitter for Churches. You can follow his blog here. I purchased the book but have not read it yet. I’ll report back after reading it.

I’ve been slow getting started with Twitter but I’m making an effort. My twitter messages automatically update on this blog, see the right side of the page, and on FaceBook. My Twitter name is pobriant.

Head in the Clouds (computing that is)

Paul — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:54:33 +0000

Have you heard the phrase “Cloud Computing” and didn’t know what it meant? You have probably used cloud computing and didn’t even know you were doing so.

Very basically, cloud computing is using the Internet to deliver software applications to the end user. Let me give some examples. I often use Google Docs. This is an online word processor. I don’t have to have Microsoft Word, or any other word processing software, on my computer. I go to my free Google Docs account, type my documents, and save them on the web. The word processing, aka the computing, is done on the web, or in the “cloud”. I don’t know exactly where the software is located, or where my documents are stored. I just know I can access them anytime I have Internet access.

Cloud computing has many advantages. Many of the applications are free. They can be accessed anywhere you have Internet access. You do not have to maintain the software application, or buy multiple copies to use on different computers. There are also some disadvantages. In many cases, if my Internet connection is down, I can’t access my documents. I don’t have the same control over my documents I would have if they were stored on my computer, so I’m very careful with private information.

Some of my favorite cloud computing, or web-based applications include Gmail (for email), Google Docs (for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), flickr (for photo sharing), Delicious (bookmarks), and YouTube (for video). All of these services are free and I can access my information anywhere.

Google has an added bonus. When you use Google Gears you can copy your online docs to your local computer for a backup. This helps with peace of mind!