This audio story on the August 1 broadcast of All Things Considered talks about churches podcasting the weekly sermon. Living Water Christian Church for which I’m the volunteer Technical Director has been podcasting sermons for a couple of months now. The story gave me the idea that we should try to get some PR in our local community out of the fact that we’re podcasting. This is a brand new, tiny little church that’s surprisingly high-tech. I’ll let you know if we get any local news outlets to cover it.

Gardner Campbell is a college professor who blogs on technology and education. In a recent post on “A digital skill set for educators“, he comments:

“I think my older students were just over the line of the divide between those who go to the Internet to find or do something and those who go to the Net to meet their friends and do the equivalent of watch TV or listen to music together.” (Thanks to Richard McManus for linking this.)

As the parent of a 17 year-old daughter, this makes sense to me. When she’s home, my daughter “hangs out online” all the time. She multi-tasks. She has multiple AIM windows open, listens to her Zen, and sometimes is also on the phone. The TV is probably on too (Disney Channel, ABC Family, TV Land, etc.) for background noise and an occasional chuckle. My experience as a parent resonates with Gardner’s comment.

This shift in how the Internet is used has great significance for our strategies for youth ministry and young adult ministry. People in their teens and twenties are hanging out online all the time. We’re working on ideas at Church of the Resurrection for how to hang out online with them and join in the theological conversation we know they’re having. For this audience, only a small part of their Internet activity is about obtaining facts (what time is the movie showing?) and accomplishing tasks (buy a ticket). It’s predominantly about friends and shared experience.

Richard McManus points to Wikipedia’s definition of Web 2.0. The definition lists a number of technologies/techniques that make for a 2.0 site.

Technical:

• CSS, semantically valid XHTML markup, and microformats
• Unobtrusive Rich Application techniques (such as AJAX)
• Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM
• Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data
• Clean and meaningful URLs
• Support posting to a weblog
• RESTian (preferred) or XML Webservice APIs
• Some social networking aspects (share your data with friends, etc)

General:

• The site should not act as a “walled garden” – it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.
• Users should own their own data on the site
• Purely web based – most successful web 2.0 sites can be used almost entirely through the browser

What would it take to make our church websites “Web 2.0” sites?

I realize this post from Robert Scoble at Microsoft is more than a month old, but since it’s kind of long I just now had the time to read the whole thing. It’s a though-provoking take on what Microsoft should be doing to support the new web. It will be a new world if they end up doing what he suggests.

In summary, he wants Microsoft to make it easy to take content and data from existing Microsoft applications and publish them to the Internet — pictures, e-mails, appointments, music, documents — literally everything. By publishing to the Internet, he means not just traditional web sites, but blogs, podcasts, and every other Internet publishing technology.

MSN’s new Virtual Earth service will give Google Maps a run for its money. In fact, Virtual Earth seems better to me in some ways. I’m in a hotel in downtown Portland. The auto locate feature said I was within about 3 blocks of my actual location. I’d say that’s amazingly good. Some other locations I checked had better satellite imagery than Google Maps. Cool!

Terry Storch got his podcast on the iTunes directory. We need to get our sermon podcasts (such as Living Water’s podcast) to show up there too.

Search Engine Guide talks about churches using paid search (like Google AdWords).

Richard McManus has posted a bunch more Web 2.0 links.

Another in our series of posts on social networking. Jambo helps people at a conference (or people in a large church?) connect with each other and then physically get together.

Cool! Church of the Resurrection is #7 and Ginghamsburg is #9 on the list of the Top 50 Most Influential Churches.