My post a few days ago asked the question: Can blogging be a bad thing in ministry? The answer was, “yes, if used incorrectly.” It is always my hope that any church or ministry will not let the bad overshadow the good. The “bad” would be to let a fear of blogging (or some unknown consequence) prevent a church from ever diving into the blogosphere. The good is obviously to use blogs as a great communication tool to reach more people more quickly. Tonight I found a couple of churches who have put together some staff blogging guidelines that seem to be the perfect mix of blogging freedom, awareness, and parameters.

• Granger Community Church has a list of blogging suggestions for their staff. I really like the tone and entire approach they took with this. It communicates that the church trusts their staff but also wants them to be aware of a few things too.

• Fellowship Church takes a little more time to discuss the potential repercussions for a blog gone wild but their guidelines also clearly communicate the church’s official position on blogs without limiting a blogging staff member’s freedom. They extend this same policy to personal staff websites.

A little over a month ago I saw the eBible.com site in beta and I remember thinking it looked exactly like what I thought a web 2.0 version of a Bible reference tool should look like. A few days ago it opened publicly and yesterday it was causing quite a stir over on Digg among the community of Diggers. Take a look at the comments within Digg…it’s very interesting to read the reactions to eBible as a Christian. If anything, it provides good insight into the misconceptions and false ideas about the Bible, but onto the eBible launch…

eBible is truly a web 2.0 version of the Bible complete with tags for different topics, internal bookmarks, and its very own Firefox plugin. The eBible bookshelf has a full list of free reference resources and Bible translations as well as some additional resources you can purchase if you’re so inclined. It has some very cool features like a quick scroll tool within the window and a right-click instant commentary reference feature. The site design is very clean and intuitive…just as a web 2.0 version of this should be. I think in time eBible will become one of the top Bible reference tools online.

Two weeks ago a new blog called Reel Pop started to “focus on how online video is changing the content creation, marketing and distribution process” of video as we know it. Last month I posted what I call the six categories for web 2.0 and online video was one of those six…so I’m very excited to see what will come from Reel Pop as they focus exclusively on this topic.

One thing that is particularly interesting on Reel Pop is the “Brief History of Online Video (in Pictures)” post that seems to have a very thorough overview of online video growth in the last year. It astounds me how much growth with we’ve seen with this medium in just the last 12 months. Look at the time line closer…it was just a year ago that there were less than 25,000 online video page views a day. Now, there are over 750,000 online video page views a day. This trend compels me to continue encouraging people to work toward understanding and making good use of online video since viewers are increasingly interested and accustomed to finding content there.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who surprised me a bit with his perspective on blogging. He is very knowledgeable of technology in general and web 2.0 specifically so I expected he was well on board the blogging bandwagon. As we talked I discovered he was actually quite cautious about the use of blogs in ministry, particularly churches. In no way did he think blogs were inherently bad but he raised some interesting points that got me thinking.

Can blogging be a bad thing in ministry? Prior to the conversation with my friend I would have answered “no” to that question and never given it a second thought. Now my answer is “yes, if not used correctly.” Below are three reasons why I’ve changed my perspective.

• Breach of confidential information – In every church there are situations and circumstances that are highly confidential. Whether the church staff are dealing with a couple going through a marital struggle, a suicidal person, or simply a disagreement between members, there must be a level of confidentiality in working through each of these issues. If a pastor or other staff member blogs about a situation that names, infers, or implicates a particular person or people the confidence in the church staff as a whole will have been compromised. The rule of thumb here should be to communicate clearly without giving away any information that will directly or indirectly breach confidence.

• Compromise the church’s views or mission – If a church or staff member posts something contrary to the church’s known views or mission the unity within the staff will have been damaged. Let’s say, for instance, a pastor has been teaching about the priority of tithing and a staff member writes a post on his blog that tithing is really not a big deal and that if you have personal debts it’s better to take care of those before you give to the church. I can only imagine what the church members would think with the mixed messages, not to mention the rift between the pastor and staff member. The issue here is not just the disagreement on the topic but the new divide between staff. This creates an instant line that will separate people within the church because some will be on one side and some may be on the other. Churches have enough to worry about already. An internal conflict because of one staff person’s blog would be a terrible distraction from the church’s mission and purpose.

• Priority with other responsibilities – This was actually one of the concerns my friend brought up and it makes sense. I don’t know of many churches where the pastor or staff are lacking for things to do. I’m a huge advocate for making blogs one of those “things to do” to communicate, but I can see where it would be possible that anyone could become sidetracked with their blog posting and begin to neglect their other responsibilities. This is both a time management and priority issue and one that should be considered and thought through as anyone begins to blog. If you’re going to do it (and again, I think a church should) how are you going to shift existing responsibilities or adjust priorities that the blogging staff member(s) have?

So where does all of this leave a church that wants to blog? I’m still as committed to the idea that blogs are a great communication tool as ever. The additional perspective I have now is just that a church, ministry, or any other organization should enter into blogging with a keen awareness of the full scope and impact that it can have on an organization…both good and bad.

My church just got a new website! No, it’s not very web 2.0ish…not yet anyway, but Long Hollow launched it yesterday and I think it’s a great improvement over the previous site. I know the team had been working hard for quite a while to get it up and although they are quick to point out changes and modifications they want to make soon, I think it’s a great step forward. Hopefully there will be some podcasts, blogs, and video on the site very soon.

I found a site tonight via a guest blogger at ChurchMarketingSucks.com that is simply shows everything that’s right about churches using technology. LifeChurch.tv has a site called My Secret that serves as an online confessional booth of sorts and from everything I can see has generated a lot of interest.

I like this for two different reasons:

• It’s a great use of technology for significant spiritual impact. It can be easy to get caught up in the technological developments and functionality and neglect the spiritual uses (which is, of course, the important part) and this site uses a well designed website to lay the foundation for life change to take place.

• Confession is always good and I’m convinced there’s not enough of it today. For most mainline protestants (like myself) confession is one of those things that the Catholics do, but it’s clearly something for all Christians. It’s not just vital for salvation but also for healing…and healing is necessary for us to fully achieve our purpose and destiny in Christ.

I hope this site continues to grow and is used by God to encourage, challenge, prompt, urge, embrace, convince, comfort or anything else people may need to live more fully for Him.

Google’s in the news again (aren’t they always) and this time they need your help. Turns out they’ve got to put labels on all of these images they have in their ever growing database so they got creative with a solution for it. Rather than paying people to label the images they created a game. To play just visit the Google Image Labeler page and they’ll give you a random partner. You and your partner then have 90 seconds to guess names for the images. If you guess the same name you get points.

I played a few rounds and the most points I got was 600 but it was surprisingly fun. This is web 2.0, user-generated content at its best. It’s also a great way to tap into people’s willingness to donate a few minutes to you when you present them with a low risk opportunity…and that’s sheer genius.

I recently discovered two corporate websites that have search engine problems…at least I think they have search problems. The issue is simple, I can’t find what I’m looking for.

The specific problem I’ve had is that when I type a word into the search field on the website it displays responses that don’t appear to have any relation to my search term. For instance, I was on a publisher’s website and searched for the word Bible. Since it’s a Christian publishing company it’s reasonable to expect to find something quickly for Bibles. Instead I was presented with four t-shirts, a marriage book, and an parenting book (which actually had the word “Bible” in the title). None of these were what I was looking for and then I remembered that I might need to put quotes around the search term. After doing this I was quickly taken to the intended Bible area of the website.

If I hadn’t thought to include the quotes I would have left the site in frustration because I was given information that was nowhere close to what I was looking for. With the emergence of Google and other search engines, the use of quotes in the search field are used less often. It wasn’t but just a few years ago when you needed to use the words AND, OR, and NOT in your searches but now that’s not really common. In fact, if you use the word AND in a Google search you’ll see a small notification on the results page letting you know that it wasn’t necessary. For specific titles, quotes still apply and Google has a scheme of pluses and minuses that replace some of the old Boolean search methods. You can read more about it at the Google Search Basics page.

Since the new way of searching is now prevalent and the old way is dying off, any website that has a search engine within it must consider incorporating the new rules into their engine if only for the simple fact that it needs to work in the way most people are used to. The IT guys who maintain the sites I’ve seen recently aren’t really going to like that because their search engine works…and we can’t deny that. The issue, however, isn’t whether or not it works but whether or not it works the way most people will use it. If the current way to search is the Google way (and I contend that it is) then any site which doesn’t incorporate the new method runs the risk of becoming a point of frustration rather than a tool to let people quickly find what they’re looking for.

I have no idea if this is something IT departments around the world are addressing for their sites. Having worked for a large company with a vast IT department, I can only imagine the moans of disgust when an IT staff is asked to consider this modification. From my observations, there’s nothing IT guys hate more than doing something over…particularly something that’s technically working. So when and if they are asked to make this change, they will likely discover they hate Google…or at least the change Google’s made in the way we search.