Memo to Campus Crusade for Christ Staff

Subtraction 7.1 Beta: If It’s Too Social, You’re Too Old: "When it comes to a site like Facebook, whose proposition as an integral part of how we will all communicate, commiserate and transact in the near future is almost a sure thing, the time I spend on it seems more like homework than play. For many months, my position has been: email me and instant message me all you want, but please, whatever you do, don’t make me sign into Facebook. It’s just too much of a drag.

I admit that’s a bad attitude. Actually, it’s an irresponsible attitude for someone who purports to be a forward-looking designer. It’s a disservice to my colleagues and my employer, to begin with, as it basically amounts to sleeping on the job. But it’s also a terribly ineffective way to manage my own, long-term career development; ignoring social media in 2008 is not dissimilar to ignoring the emergence of the World Wide Web fifteen years ago. Those people got left behind, and the same thing could easily happen to me."

The Future of Students (and the rest of us)

King Solomon's mines

Researchers may have found King Solomon's mines - CNN.com: "Researchers using carbon dating techniques at Khirbat en-Nahas in southern Jordan discovered that copper production took place there around the time King Solomon is said to have ruled the Israelites.

The research findings were reported in this week's issue of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which came out Monday."

Twitter at Church

Vertizontal: Twitter Church: "In my church, I have seen life-altering small groups formed and forged through Twitter. I have seen teams of people mobilized to do volunteer service like nothing else in the past through Twitter. I have seen needs met financially through Twitter. I have made friends through Twitter. I have witnessed theological discussions, seen prayer answered, seen surprise rendezvous’, connected with leaders better, I've seen friends come to the aid of others health . . .

So we started wondering, what would it be like to bring the Twitter kind of participation into Fusion in the same way we would think through any other worship interactive—something that gets people involved in what is happening—so Fusion isn’t happening “to” them but rather “with and because of and through” them."

Read the whole thing if you want to figure out social networks and ministry.

Man Down

The Apex Fallacy: An Interview with Dr. Helen Smith | MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory:

BC: In contrast, what are your impressions of the male sex?

Dr. Helen Smith: More men tend to be at the high end or low end in our society and because of this, people mistakenly believe that all men dominate in our culture because they see a few men at the top. Professor Roy F. Baumeister explained this in an invited address to the American Psychological Association:

“When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually ‘How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?’ This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men. Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.”

Music to my ears

LaLa: How Does 10 Cents a Song Strike You? | Listening Post from Wired.com: "Could the price of digital music be simply too high?

LaLa hopes so. On Tuesday, the company launched a new pricing plan that lets music fans buy songs from all four major labels plus 170,000 indie labels for a mere 10 cents a song, delivering on their promise to do just that. The catch? For that 10-cent investment, you only get to stream songs from the LaLa website, or through their online player with an iTunes-like interface and fast response time over a broadband connection.

Oh yeah, and there are no ads anywhere on the entire site.

Aside from the dramatically different price point and striking lack of advertising, LaLa's special sauce is its ability to suck your entire music collection into that online player for free so you can play it 'from the cloud,' as the saying goes. The site says it's the only one in the world with the labels' blessing to do this."

Church 2.0 Notes

I'm in Lexington, MA today for the Church 2.0 conference. I'll be taking notes here and liveblogging throughout the event.

Update: http://church2pointo.unifyer.com/ web site for Church 2.0

Notes from Greg Atkinson

Innovation is not a dirty word

Design: Do you matter?

Listening through technology.

Virtual relationships: can you have a real relationship online? Some that see Greg everyday don't know who he is or what he is doing. Others who have never met him face to face know all about him and what he is doing on day to day basis.

Open Sourceness

Innovation:
Apple, BMW, Ikea, Starbucks; all of these are known for design in a comprehensive way.

Many Apple users keep the box that the product came in.

Update:
youversion.com and lifechurch.tv

Churches must consider design comprehensively. Some are hiring mystery worshippers to help them.

Some decide whether to come back to a church before they ever hear the pastor from the pulpit. Some will never enter the door of your church because of what they see online.

Update:

From Greg: I shouldn't have to search around for last weeks sermon. When I click on "Meet the Staff" I should see smiling faces.

http://citylifeboston.org/ is not too bad.

Update:

Top Web 2.0 from Colin and Greg:

1. http://www.flickr.com/
   
2. itunes.com

Some companies like Apple tightly control some aspects of their company and build loose collaborative communities in other spaces (ITunes).

Comcast and Dell know listen for people talking about them online so they can respond and shape the conversation.

Greg: we are missionaries to a new world. Listening through technology is important for missionaries. People post their heart and life online.

Update:

How does ministry change when it goes online?

Sticky Church

Fusion

Fellowship One

Break for lunch.

Update:

Twitter for small groups. Twitter can fill in the gaps between the times you are together and enhance the relationships for those in small groups: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Facebook is a place where your life can collide with others who you may interact with.

Web 2.0 rewards integrity. If you have integrity in your walk with Jesus, everyone who knows you can and will see that. If you are a hypocrite, that will be revealed as well.

Email is dying. Facebook is a preferred mode of communication. Kids don't answer their email, they respond to Facebook.

Broadcasting your service increases the audience: RSS, Mogulus, qik, blip TV, vimeo, truthcasting, Godtube.

Also using Skype and Mogulus to broadcast small groups.

Facebook ads used to connect students with www.everystudent.com

Outreach ideas: posting on Craigslist or meetup.

Update:

roov.com

http://www.dreamcenter.org/

Why web 2.0 innovation is becomes more difficult the older you get....

I've been thinking lately that the hardest thing about innovation with web 2.0 tools these days is not related to age specifically. It is a function of the last finite resource in a world of ambient findability: attention.

College students are often early adopters of innovative technology because they have an excess of time and attention. The older a person gets the more their time is "value added" with job and family commitments. Time does not equal money. Time = value. To the extent that a person values their job, their family, their hobbies, their health, they will spend time on it. Once those habits of time investment are established, investing in a technology that was invented a few days or months ago seems foolish. Often it is foolish. But the power of Web 2.0 technology exceeds the printing press. This is why investing the time to explore and discover new technologies is ultimately worthwhile.

Web 2.0 is really just a new kind of city. It is millions of people who are opening themselves up for real human connection. Investing time in connecting with these people is very important, even if the means of that connection changes so often that it requires a seemingly excessive amount of time to do it.

This will mean a divestment of time in other things for those who have good and healthy habits of investment in other things. I have divested time spent watching TV. I watch very little TV anymore. It is boring, static and feels like a waste of time when compared with finding my friends and new ideas and technologies in a Web 2.0 world. I believe most people have a slice of time that could be reinvested in Web 2.0 that would improve their life far more than what they used to spend that time on.

What is Church 2.0?

The McReynolds Story: What is Church 2.0? : djchuang.com: "I'll be attending this gathering in Boston."

How to explain how we got into this mess...

A tragic loss...

The McReynolds Story: The death of a namesake

I need to "go to" this conference...

Pixelated - Your New Business Conference Starts Now Online | Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Blog and Podcast - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image: "Pixelated is a free full-day online conference with some of the world's leading speakers on the topic of how business is changing including: Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan and many more.

It is 100% free and it starts right now."

Global Warming Update: Baby, it's cold outside

Public Information - NOAA's National Weather Service: "THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SO FAR THIS MONTH OF 27.1 DEGREES IS 8.2 DEGREES BELOW THE 30-YEAR AVERAGE. IT HAS BEEN THE COLDEST FIRST 5 DAYS OF THE MONTH OF OCTOBER SINCE 1992."

An Operations Saint

Local Woman Devotes Life To Doing God's Busy Work | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "'At a very young age, I felt the call to do God's busy work,' said Salas, spiritually fulfilled from a long afternoon spent photocopying hymn lyrics for Sunday's mass and changing the bulletin board's decorative seasonal border. 'I am just a vessel through which He cleans the church Tupperware.'"