Hey, I just now interrupted my work to post a link to an article I just now read about interruptions. How’s that for self-referential?

Are any of you out there actually getting real work done? If so, please tell me how you do it. 😉

Check out this post by Beta Church in which they quote an article from Fast Company about how people use the web to get opinions on products and services they’re considering for purchase. No doubt people are going to the web for opinions on churches too. Large churches particularly need to be aware of what is being said about them online so they can become part of the conversation.

Dave Winer said some thought-provoking things yesterday about the potential negative consequences of using Feedburner to generate RSS feeds for your blog or podcast. Hmmm … I’m using Feedburner heavily now, including on this blog (see the orange XML button there on the right?).

Along the same line of thought, I insist on registering all domains with a registrar of my choice, rather than allowing a hosting service to do it for me. If you don’t control your domain registration, you don’t control the domain. Do you really want to be dependent on a service provider that you’re leaving in order to successfully move your site to a new provider? Me neither.

One caveat: doing this occasionally causes hassles when the hosting company needs to change IP addresses of their DNS servers since the provider’s network operations people generally assume that they control the registration and DNS for all their clients. Any time they want to make this kind of change, they’ll need to coordinate it with you to avoid a site outage.

I just now discovered that Jeff Kirby, one of our pastors, was featured in this NPR story on how Christians are responding to The Da Vinci Code. Cool!

Richard McManus has an interesting post today about Superglu, a service that creates a site out of feeds from multiple sites such as blogs, del.icio.us, and Flickr. Called a “content aggregator,” Superglu is a cool example of the kinds of things Web 2.o enables.

Brian Bailey: “One of the biggest challenges of web development is balancing the big things and the small things. My goal is to get the main thing right while still being obsessive about the details.”

That philosophy applies to most things we do in the church, not just web sites and applications.

Ben Gray of Blog Ministry: “Realize that they [students] view email as outdated and almost useless. They only use it to communicate with authority figures. They use Myspace and IM to communicate with friends.”

Check out Jason Powell’s recent post about Eric Busby of Saddleback speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed. I commented and shared one of my own Eric Busby stories.

My friend Jennie Ver Steeg is Director of Online Libraries for Career Education Corp. She asked me to post the following in case any of you out there are looking for consulting opportunities.

I am in the process of gathering prospective Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for the various courses in the Network Administration, Management, and/or Design field. Prospective SMEs will be contracted to help on coursework and will be working with instructional designers to develop appropriate course materials.

Prospective SMEs are required to have at least a Masters Degree in the appropriate field with at least five years real world experience. Potential SMEs must also be used to working under aggressive deadlines and take feedback well. SMEs will ideally also have previous experience in teaching, training, or developing coursework. This is a short-term (8 week), part time contract. Please contact Brandon Morrison at bmorrison@careeredonline.com.

Dave Winer, the father of blogging and RSS, says that blogs are not primarily a means of conversation. Rather, they’re primarily about sharing your thoughts and things you’ve discovered. Search engines (and I would add hyperlinks and RSS) then connect your blogged ideas to others who are thinking about/struggling with similar issues. In Dave’s words, “I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.” He doesn’t feel it’s his job as a blogger to write things that provoke a reaction.

I really like this idea that bloggers should share what’s on their minds, without concern about whether it will get others talking or draw attention and traffic. Having said that, I still think blogs are a means of public conversation. It’s simply a different kind of conversation. It’s a distributed, asynchronous conversation in which many people are talking at once and many people are listening at once. Blogs are about “shared discovery,” as Dave put it, and conversation. These two different ways of thinking about blogging are not at odds. If you’re thinking that “conversation” means comments and reactions to a post, then your view of the term “conversation” is too limited.

As I’ve said before, I like blogging much better than forums because they’re driven by the blogger’s creativity, writing ability, and personality. Unlike forums, they’re not dependent on achieving a critical mass of community in which some people pose questions or make comments and then others react. And blog posts do contribute to the public conversation whether or not anyone reacts or comments.