10/17/08 10/17/08

Twitter and the Church

Jeff Wilson over at imageForth.com has some feedback on his experience using Twitter to stay connected with his church. While he points out several advantages, there is one big disadvantage that can be difficult to overcome:

Twitter is a great way to keep those who “twitter” informed, but one of the problems that we have encountered is that there are not very many who use Twitter. So, a question comes to mind how do you inform both those that do have a Twitter account and those that don’t that Henderson Hills has a Twitter account?

I will be curious to see how many (if any) of Grace Church's friends and members start following the church on Twitter.

7/23/08 7/23/08

New Social Network Launched

After quite a few days of tweaking, I have officially launched my first social network using Ning. This is a social network for users of Logos Bible Software, the primary software I use for Bible study, teaching preparation, research, and anything else to do with biblical studies.

I have been a Logos user for 10 or 12 years. My first install of Logos came on floppy disks (a lot of floppy disks)! In the years that followed, I have continued to add to my electronic library to the point that I seldom crack open a paper commentary, Bible dictionary, etc. In fact, I have started donating a lot of my duplicate paper books (books that are in both my analog library and digital library) to our church library.

This will be a test project for me. I am interested to see how long it takes to begin to see a community develop. I am interested to see if the users of this social network contribute content that goes beyond simple back-and-forth communication. For example, will users begin contributing their own works created with Personal Book Builder, a tool Logos developed giving Logos users the ability to create content from any word or html document.

If you are a Logos user, please stop by the network and join us. If you are not a Logos user and are interested in Bible study, you should consider becoming a Logos user. If you are a student of social networking, I will continue to update you on the progress of this network and the lessons I am learning from its development.

You can find the network at http://libronix.ning.com/.