This new toolbar from Skype integrates with the Outlook address book and provides presence information. I haven’t tried it yet.

Mike Wendland has dropped his regular phone line at home in favor of SunRocket VoIP service. $199/year for unlimited local and long distance calling. It’s no longer an experimental thing; it’s real.

Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web gives some stats showing that Technorati has become the top blog search site.

Here’s an article on Facebook posted this evening on MSNBC.

People are comparing this new Yahoo service (now in beta) to del.icio.us. I haven’t had time to play around with either one.

In this post, Dave Winer explains how companies can and should use blogging to find out what their customers are thinking. It’s not fun to be publicly criticized, but it’s dumb to miss out on the conversation because failure to take legitimate customer criticism into account will open an opportunity for competitors.

Richard MacManus agrees.

I believe this thinking applies to the church as well. It resonates strongly with Adam Hamilton’s ideas in his book Leading Beyond the Walls. As church leaders, we have to work very hard to keep up with what is happening outside the four walls of the church. Yet that’s where the unchurched people are that we’re trying to reach.

A German blogger has posted a cool tool that compares Google and Yahoo rankings. I tried it on “church Kansas City“.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church built their website within Typepad, a popular blogging platform. The website doesn’t have a blog, or refer to staff blogs, it IS a blog.

iTunes Podcast Directory
iPodder
Podcast Alley
Podcast.net
Podcast Directory
Digital Podcast
Podcasting News
Podscope

I’m using Feedburner to take a Blogger blog and turn it into a podcast feed.

The Appian Way podcast feed is simply the Feedburner feed of The Appian Way blog. When you enable the “SmartCast™” option, Feedburner finds any MP3 or other attachment and surrounds it with an enclosure tag. Right now it’s finding the MP3 from Dave Winer’s podcast and the PDF in the post on Blogs and power laws. iTunes will actually download all of these, including the PDF. Interesting.

For a more traditional podcast, take a look at the Living Water podcast feed. It has sermon MP3s served from an ordinary web server over HTTP. It’s based on an LWCC podcast blog I created.

To use the feeds, the best “podcatcher” options are:
1. Download iTunes 4.9 and subscribe via a pick on the Advanced menu.
2. Download iPodder 2.1.