Social Media: Blessing or Curse?

From the Desiring God blog:

Many have expressed concern that emerging social media will hinder authentic face-to-face gospel community, but Ed Stetzer (in an article titled The Blessings of the New Media) says Social Media can be a blessing to the local church in four ways:

1. While social media does not provide community it can assist in building it.
2. Social media can communicate news within the local church.
3. Social media can communicate biblical, inspirational messages.
4. Social media can better acquaint people with the life and ministry of public ministers.

Within the UK, Urban Saints are running the Totally Wired tour: "an essential seminar for all parents, church leaders, youth leaders and anyone who cares about young people and the technology revolution". This comes to Leicester on 1st July.

Internet Evangelism Day (25 April 2010)

Digital media have transformed the world in the last 15 years. We have entered a new ‘digital communication culture’ where all the rules for effective communication have changed. There are 1.7 billion web users, and over 3 billion people use mobile phones (increasingly these are web-equipped). The Web is not just another means of communication, but a hyper-medium that subsumes, links together, and enhances all previous media.

Internet Evangelism Day exists to help Christians understand the huge and growing potential to share the good news of Jesus through digital media. This involves two complementary concepts: an annual focus day on the last Sunday of April each year, and a year-round resource guide, with ideas and strategies for all types of digital evangelism

10 Tools for Lifelong Learners

Do your New Year resolutions include the usual "self-improvement resolutions"? If so, here's a list of free educational resources and start planning! There are free audio book classics, language lessons, university lectures, film libraries and more.

Karaoke Carols

The Rejesus site has a new front page and additional content for Christmas. This includes Karaoke Carols: enjoy a carol service in the comfort of your own computer screen with a choice of 10 karaoke carols.

Guardian guide to freebies

Why waste your hard-earned cash when people are queuing up to give you stuff for nothing, says Huma Qureshi in The Guardian's guide to freebies.

Wallace and Gromit's 20th birthday present from Google

Google, it seems, loves Wallace and Gromit as much as the rest of the world. Today marks the twentieth birthday of the first public airing of the plasticine duo and Google UK has honoured their achievement with a homepage illustration. Nick Park unveiled Wallace and Gromit to an unsuspecting public on this day in 1989 at an animation festival. Their public debut was the 22-minute romp A Grand Day Out, later broadcast by the BBC - and so a UK institution was born.
[From The Guardian]

Fairtrade Chic

The Fairtrade chic website describes itself as "your guide to buying fairtrade products and services in your country and area". The website aims to provide information about why you should buy Fairtrade, what products are available from fairtrade producers, and where in your area or online you can buy the fairtrade products.

If you printed the internet.....

If you printed the internet.... is a set of visualizations of what it would take to print the entire Internet. It is astonishing that, in only fifteen years, hundreds of millions of us have created this repository of knowledge from scratch, without centralized management, and mostly without remuneration.

Pray the Bible

An online edition of Matthew Henry’s Method of Prayer is available on the Internet. Matthew Henry's method, quite simply, is to “pray the Bible” and so the website is full of prayers composed almost entirely of Scripture. In addition to prayers of adoration, of confession of thanksgiving and intercession, in addition to prayers for many occasions. These include: morning and evening, and for Sundays and more specifically: “For Those Weighed Down and Burdened” or “For Those Who are Sick and Weak.” If you want to grow in your practice of prayer - and who doesn’t? - do check out this site today.

Archbishop's environment videocast

The Archbishop of Canterbury encourages ‘response to God’s hope for us’ in an environment videocast. Launched last week, the Ready Steady Slow videocast is available on the http://www.whywearewaiting.com/ website and on YouTube. In it, the Archbishop shares his concerns for the planet in a new videocast encouraging viewers to sign up in advance, via the Internet, to the Church of England’s environmentally-themed online Advent calendar for 2009, with its daily green challenges and thoughts.

Celebrating 40 years since Apollo 11 Landing

A Wordle of Neil Armstrong's words from the Apollo 11 mission

• NASA website: Apollo 40th Anniversary features
• The Science of Apollo 11
• Apollo 11 Landing's 40th Anniversary celebrated, new footage released

Historic Bible pages put online

About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet. Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half the Codex Sinaiticus manuscript - written in Greek on parchment leaves. For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery until it was found in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.

The British Library is marking the online launch of the manuscript with an exhibition - which includes a range of historic items and artefacts linked to the document.

Birdsong Radio lives on

Did you ever listen to Birdsong radio? Unfortunately the DAB Station went off air on 1st June. However, you can order the CD for offline access, or listen to the peaceful sounds of Dawn Chorus via your computer, using the player on http://www.birdsongradio.com/. You can also become a Facebook Fan or follow the service on Twitter.

Students help connect the Vatican to Internet 2.0

A college student helped bring Pope Benedict XVI to YouTube and Facebook — literally. As an intern for the Vatican’s Internet office, Samantha Chin researched different ways for the Roman Catholic Church to publicize the Pope’s message for annual World Communication Day, in May. Ms. Chin was part of a Villanova University internship program that has been working for the past seven years to keep the Catholic Church up to date with multimedia tools and technology. Tools include the Vatican’s YouTube site; a Facebook application called Pope2You, which allows users to send virtual postcards and get-well messages in five languages; and an iPhone application that distributes news.

Hungry Elephant - affiliate scheme for charities‏

The Hungry Elephant website runs an affiliate scheme for charities to obtain a financial contribution from a vendor when someone uses the charity's code to shop online. It can be a way for voluntary organisations to lever income from the spending of your members or supporters. For example, some supermarkets will pay a certain percentage of the bill to the charity when people shop online with them. And the name? It comes from the "feeling that trying to fundraise is a bit like trying to feed a hungry elephant...a lot of hard work for very little gain". [forwarded by Phil]

Listen to wildlife

The British wildlife recordings collection offers the opportunity to listen to over 600 recordings of wildlife from around the UK. Captured by three British wildlife enthusiasts from the 1960s to the 1990s, most are published online for the first time.

The selection of sound recordings of all kinds of wildlife from around Britain is from the British Library's Sound Archive's unrivalled natural sounds collection. Made for the most part in nature reserves and wild locations, the recordings often have special significance in documenting ancient habitats that are gradually vanishing.

Some habitats continue to dwindle under the pressure of development: peat bogs, old Caledonian forest and lowland heaths are all slowly disappearing. In others, wildlife populations have increased: on the Scottish moors, for example, as a consequence of the extensive re-planting of forests there. Every shift in the balance alters the sound of the countryside. The recordings selected here include not only the familiar noises of country gardens and suburban parks, but also the increasingly elusive cries of some of the country''s rarest creatures. Together, they paint a fascinating sound picture of Britain''s ever evolving landscape. Further information here.

Member communities: top Internet trend

A recent report indicates that social networks and blogs are more popular than e-mail. Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time. “Member Communities” which includes both social networks and blogs, have become the fourth most popular online activity - ahead of personal e-mail. It is growing twice as fast as any of the other four largest sectors, according to Global Faces and Networked Places, a comprehensive report revealing the new global footprint of social networking.

One in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites. The social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age: the biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites globally came from the 35–49 year old age group (over 11.3 million).

So if you read this blog and belong to the Infusion Facebook group, you are right on trend!

The End of the Internet?

The End of the Internet

Anglican website survey

Just after posting about the God.com radio feature, I have discovered that the webmasters from the national Church of England web-site have launched an on-line survey to gather visitors’ views, recognising the need to engage directly with visitors to the site. It is available now at http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/cofe/cofeweb and will be there until the end of March. The survey questions will help the Church discover who is accessing the site (and why), whatpeople think about the Church of England site compared with those of other large organisations, and how the site can be improved.

Also worth noting is that, following the success of the Church of England’s monthly podcast People and Places, the website is now featuring a weekly podcast.

God.com

In God.com (broadcast yesterday on Radio 4), Dr Robert Beckford examines the popularity of religion on the internet. Every traditional religion and their denominations within has a web site as do a fast-growing number of individual churches, mosques and synagogues. In the programme, a podcasting priest, a blogging rabbi and an imam whether on-line religion is replacing more traditional forms.