Twitter, Digital Footprints, Digital Shadows, Tagging and the Age of Transparency

Last December, The Pew Internet & American Life Project put out the results of a provocative survey entitled Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. 

Compiled by Mary Madden, Susannah Fox, Aaron Smith, et. al., you can view a PDF of the Digital Footprint report here.  The survey spotlighted the question "Are internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprints."  Respondents revealed:

* 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.

However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity.

* Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it.

* 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

* Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available

   about them online.

* Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of

   information that can be found about them online.

I found the survey provocative not because we have digital footprints but more importantly, not many people are thinking about it. 

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit, govern or direct that information.

Active Digital footprints are one thing.  Your passive digital footprint, or digital shadow, however, is an even more obscure set of data and quite another thing altogether.  It may include things like:

* your high school or elementary school photo
* your prescription medicines - uploaded for storage by pharmacists
* your driver's license records
* zabasearch records
* your college transcripts
* your charitable organizations memberships
* races or competitions you have been registered in
* boats, trains and other forms of transportation you have used  
* tax records
* mortgage records
* voter records
* PTA and school newsletter mentions

and most importantly, for our discussion, your tweets and your @replies. 

Better search your exact Twitter user name right now and every twitpic that has your @name attached to it, like this one of me I found on page 1 of a google search.  Fortunately, it was put up by a friend and basically with permission but in the Age of Transparency there will be great loss of privacy.  I know of quite a handful of online photos that are up on Twitter and the person in the photo is unaware of their existence, much less their searchablity.

We should also likely check out our accounts at Dodgeball, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, Spoink and a list of others.

The Age of Transparency is upon us.  Accountablity vs. loss of privacy?  What are the pros and cons for you?  

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Last year, I blogged Innovate '07 podcasts had been put up.  This year, I've been looking forward to Innovate 2008 podcasts.  Since conference goers have to be choosy, podcasts are a vital resource.  And they may become all the more desirable as conferences collide.

Some Christian leaders have a hard decision to make between these two upcoming events being held at the same time.   On Thursday & Friday, September 18 & 19, Oklahoma City will host Ministry COM, a National Church Communications Conference.

"If you're crazy enough to love working in a church, make plans to give yourself a mental break at MinistryCOM. This two-day experience brings together experts and leaders who are balancing the chaos while on the brink of innovation. Their level-headed guidance provides you with realistic solutions. Hands on workshops offer therapeutic interaction. Time away from the office mentally invigorates… and just might keep you from going over the edge."

Keynote Speakers include:

Mike Foster - Founder, XXX Church

Scott Hodge - Senior Pastor, The Orchard

Dawn Nicole Baldwin - Founder, Aspire!One

Jon Acuff - Blogger, Stuffchristianslike.net

Also on Thursday & Friday, September 18 & 19, 2008 in Granger, Indiana, Granger Community Church will host Innovate 2008:

"Nobody wants to be all talk and no action. Jesus certainly wasn’t. But sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. We think that whether you have a church gathering of 100 or 10,000 you can begin making innovative, strategic moves that will impact your community. Start at Innovate 2008.  You’ll experience a multi-sensory showcase of proven, real-life examples from Granger Community Church and other churches doing innovative ministry around the country. Gain perspective and practical steps to take your capacity as a leader, a practitioner and a church to an unexpected level. Get started. Save the talking for later."

You'll also hear from a combination of innovators outside of Granger.

Here's the complete speaker list.

To prevent conferences from 2009 collisions in your schedule start keeping a list of Church Communication Conferences like this one. 

Or, if you're just interested in a media/tech conference list try this one.  In fact add to these two and I'll re-publish them with updates.  Obviously, 2009 dates will change, but if a conference is good enough, the targeted date usually falls close to the year before.

image: GodTube

21 years ago, I visited Jerusalem for the first time.  One of the many stops on our trip was the Western Wall (aka - Wailing Wall).  Seeing the particular physical place where people poured out their requests to God really made an impression on me. 

Several years ago I got a picture in my mind of a similar wall, only this one was online, a place where people from all over the world could leave their "Dear Heavenly Father"…..electronically. Recently, I was reminded of this picture because today, electronic prayer sites are increasingly easy to find.  As we see more specialization on the web, 24/7 prayer pages like this one will likely become commonplace. 

Electronic prayer examples are easily searchable.  GodTube provides it's subscribers their own prayer wall.   Third party developers are creating Facebook prayer applications so Facebook members can notify one another of their need for prayer. 

Kindle is a free worldwide social prayer network that helps people form prayer groups to share their prayer requests with each other.  Kindle, in particular, displays huge potential, as the developers anticipate the forming of specialized groups within Kindle where intecessors are matched with individuals who need prayer for specific issues.

I've personally struggled with the "disconnect" associated with technologically mediated prayer.  And yet, at the same time, I've experienced incredible personal benefit from electronic prayers, specifically, in times of crisis as well as during seasons of elongated suffering. 

So, here are a handful of questions surrounding online prayer in the metaverse:

Would you use an online prayer service?

Do you see drawbacks of online prayer?

Do you see benefits of online prayer?

Do you think online prayer will grow in popularity?

One of the reasons I agreed to speak in Dallas at the Dynamic Church Conference was so I could catch up with my friends who live there.  I love Dallas and so I planned to get a lot out of my trip.  I ran out of time to see everyone I had hoped to see but I did not miss church.   

I was a bit torn as to where to attend services because I have friends at Irving Bible Church, Fellowship Church, Watermark Community, Stonebriar Community, Bent Tree and a couple of others.  My friends who serve at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship won out and I ended up there on Sunday morning.

After my hosts finished their service roles, we got to enjoy the worship & teaching in the main service.  Following the service, another friend known to many of you, Technical Arts Director Greg Atkinson, (Church Video Ideas) led me up onto the platform for the pastoral team debrief following the service. 

I found myself with the key service leaders and Pete Briscoe, the Senior Pastor at Bent Tree.  And yes, son of Stuart & Jill Briscoe. They reviewed what worked and what needed tweaking for the next service since there are often improvements needed.  I loved seeing how careful they were about providing the best experience possible for those in attendance - even if it meant they had to alter their original service plan.

This fall, Bent Tree will move into their new expansion facilities and it will all be paid for - all $30 million dollars of it!  Serious vision requires some serious tech support and since I got such an extensive tour of the facilities from Greg, I thought it wouldn't be right not to let you peek into some of the behind the scenes set-up at Bent Tree.  
(Photos from iPhone)

What we see….. 

What they see…. 

Twitter fails, StumbleUpon succeeds, but just for one day.  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.  Online, they really do go together.  The more we use digital technologies, the more we expose ourselves to the potential for failures.  It's a topic that keeps coming up amongst the bloggers at Digital.  At the same time, our web technologies are equally likely to do exactly as they should and give us a superior performance. 

Case in point. Yesterday, I was going to follow the PD Network Summit via twitter, qik (bobbygwald) and ustream without actually attending.  Although we got an invitation, my husband declined for us since we had other commitments this week.  I knew I could follow along at different random points throughout my day.

Unfortunately, I got the image above in the few slots when I was free.  While I was busy trying to find out what was wrong with my twitter feed, my @replies and my archives, I was checking links like these: Is Twitter Down?, Get Satisfaction and others (no, I did not ask FriendFeed what's wrong with twitter?).

But, while I was preoccupied and frustrated, my personal blog was getting awesome traffic that looked something like this from the back end:

Seems one of my faithful co-contributors had StumbledUpon me and it resulted in a good shot of increased traffic.  It was a nice long tail of a day.

I'm assuming each of us have had a good amount of personal technology failures and some successes.  Since talking about failures can lead to greater transparency, I'd like to ask, what's the most frustrating thing you're experiencing with online technology these days.  

And no geek speak please… real life reflections about your current techno troubles….  information overloaders, represent!

Great news if you're looking for the place where media & the Church converge.  COLLIDE Magazine has a brand spankin' new, redesigned website.  It's less than 48 hours old.  

And how can I resist mentioning COLLIDE when several Digital contributors are featured in the magazine's new May/June issue.  Odd happenstance?  I don't think so; it's more like Spirit-led inspiration if you ask me.  

Our Digital contributors in COLLIDE include:

Aaron Linne (Mr. Vimeo himself) His article, Stop Throwing Sheep, explores how we can use Facebook applications to spread the messege.

Cynthia Ware My article, Technology and the Virtual Church, was written to inspire early adopters of new media technologies to forge ahead.

Joe Suh (MyChurch.org founder) Joe's interview explains how social networking can serve local churches and facilitate their members connecting online.

Additionally, there are a lot of other good resources, articles and reviews in the magazine and while you're visiting the new website, it's easy to get a risk-free issue or subscription. 

Congratulations again, Tim Stevens, on Pop Goes the Church making the cover with some amazing graphics by Barton Damer.  And speaking of Barton and his way good digital media skills… you didn't think I was going to forget to show off some of his video maneuvers did you? 

Not when they feature this August's Echo Conference…..

ECHO Full Promo Video from barton Damer on Vimeo.

First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal, published the article - The Augmented Social Network: building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster.

The authors describe the future of the internet as an evolution from online experimentation and fads to stabilizing trends creating reliability, trust, even dependence.  They view social linkages as far more than a passing phenomenon.  They predict the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in online citizenship.

They propose an Augmented Social Network (ASN) model that facilitates connections between online communities and even builds into Internet architecture the role identity brokers could play. The authors note several elements of an ASN including:

Persistent Identity. Enabling individuals online to maintain a persistent identity as they move between different Internet communities, and to have personal control over that identity. This identity should be capable of reflecting an endless variety of interests, needs, desires, and relationships.

Interoperability Between Online Communities. People should be able to cross easily between online communities under narrowly defined circumstances, just as in life we can move from one social network to another. 

Brokered Relationships. Using databased information, online brokers (both automated and "live") should be able to facilitate the introduction between people who share affinities and/or complementary capabilities and are seeking to make connections. Such a system of brokered relationships should also enable people to find other individuals, information or media that is of interest to them, through the recommendations of trusted third parties.

The surprising thing is that this abstract was published back in July, 2003.  Only 5 years later, and here we are. 

My Facebook tells me I should add you as a friend.  Why?  It knows who we share in common.  Let me search you and verify your established online presence.  Now I can add you to my Plaxo, LinkedIn and twitter contacts.  This means I get to find out who you're connected to, see your work history, and probably hear what you ate for breakfast today via tweet.

Because building community is essential for the Church, we can capitalize on social networking.  In fact, isn't one of our primary goals to seek out those in need of spiritual hope and initiate relationship with them?  Since we know the Good News is most commonly transmitted person-to-person, it's not hard to see how the social web provides a unique new forum for sharing our faith. 

The relational trust individuals share paves the way for those with spiritual hope, healing and health to link with those they find in their circle of trusted others.  Equally importantly, it allows buildable bridges / connections with those a degree or more away. Quite obviously, we can not try to impose our beliefs on a whole society, but individually we can be witnesses of Jesus Christ, communicating with people of other faiths (or no faith) via the linkages we have online.

While some criticize the masks people wear online (persistent pseuds), view online communications as "not real" or reflect on the fragilty of social networking (all important considerations by the way) many Christians are engaging in conversations, networking and even collaborating with individuals they might never get a chance to communicate with face-to-face.   I say it's an opportunity.  What's your take on online social networking?

Fellowship Technologies is hosting it's 2nd annual Dynamic Church Conference in about a month.  If you are a church leader who wants to know more about ChMS, learn more about leveraging the power of the internet, networking with partners, etc., please join us in Dallas, May 15 - 17. 

Because there are two Leadership Network Digital contributors on the speaker list, I thought you'd like to know we'll be at the Frisco Convention Center.  We'd love to meet you.  Here's more of what's offered:

    * An pre-conference called 'Power Start' with six different, personalized training classes 
    * 60% more sessions across six different tracks, both Beginner & Advanced user levels
    * Guest speakers include:

            Terry Storch, Digerati Pastor, LifeChurch.tv and YouVersion.com

            Joe Suh, Founder, MyChurch.org

            Cynthia Ware, Pastor, Writer, Blogger, The Digital Sanctuary

    * 50% more hands-on training labs, both Beginner & Advanced
    * Dedicated Q & A - 'Ask the Experts' with Fellowship Technologies staff
    * Free wireless Internet throughout the conference facilities   
    * Free 2 hour live worship concert featuring Lincoln Brewster   
    * And much, much more!  

People who don't understand the value of social media see no point in "wasting time" connecting with others online.  However, as Christian leaders, we have an opportunity to encourage believers to spread out and focus on sharing our faith with those who may need it most.  All too often we've got too many "fellows in the same ship" if you know what I mean.  Online communication is really a modern-day parallel for getting to know your neighbors.  

Since the Good News is meant to be shared, it will only serve the Kingdom if we use online means to augment our physical world relationships.

Facebook is a perfect example of an easy, free way to connect with others and share your faith.  If you think it's costly in terms of time, you're mistaken.  It's an investment.  In fact, using online communication is the fastest, cheapest way to connect with large groups of people who you might never have a chance to keep in regular contact with were it not for your electronic link.  This is old news to many people but sometimes Christians clump together instead of looking for inventive ways to spread out.

If you've avoided Facebook based on MySpace's reputation, here are 10 simple steps to get you started: 

1. Repent!  Realize you've been apathetic or cynical about social media because, well mainly because, people put down what they don't understand.  Rethink; go another way.
2. Join Facebook.  Signing up is easy & free.  All you need is an email address and a desire to build relationships.
3. Create your personal profile.*  This can be as simple or complex as you like.  It can take as little as 5 minutes or you can get wordy.  
4. Invite your friends to add you.  Searching for your friends is very easy, especially if someone you know has already added many of your acquaintances.
5. Join groups that reflect parts of you, your interests, profession, education, geographic area, etc.  Anything you find interesting will connect you with others. 
6. Feed your page.  If you blog, make sure you syndicate.  RSS (really simple syndication) feed apps. for Facebook are easy to find & use.  Try Blog RSS Feed Reader.
7. Mingle on purpose.**  Remember you want to connect with friends but also stretch out beyond the familiar.  
8. Add events that you think others might be interested in hearing about or attending.  Anything counts, seminars, financial classes, scrapbooking parties, etc.
9. Create a group.  The options are endless.  I've seen unique examples including genealogy groups, reunion groups, memorial groups, elementary alums, etc.
10. Check your page at regular intervals.  Use it or loose it.  If you don't check in and respond, people will loose interest in their ability to connect with you.    Plus, your home page is where the news feed lives.  It's how you get current information on all the people you want to be connected with.

* If you don't know how to add your picture to your profile just ask anyone under 21.

** You can add me as a friend or any of the other Digital team members.  Don't be shy to ask for connections, this is how relationships multiply and your sphere of influence grows into a community you facilitated.  And sharing our faith within our personal communities should be our goal. 

And lastly, some Christian leaders are disenchanted with Facebook and are deleting their accounts.  (See all the comments at Tony Morgan Live.)  But, all the folks who commented agreement have personal web sites, or other ways of connecting with people electronically (i.e. - blogs, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) so don't give up on online opportunities.

The March issue of Christian Computing Magazine just came out.   Good reminder for me that both CCMag, as well as it's sister publication Christian Audio/Visual, are great resources for those of us who enjoy whole publications dedicated to our favorite topic - the use of technology by the Church. 

Christian Computing Magazine, published since 1989, is now available exclusively through digital distribution.  I get it via monthly email so all of the articles are provided in PDF format and are ready to read online or print out for hard copy archiving.  The articles cover everything from ChMS evaluations to social bookmarking services, from podcasting to congregational messaging systems.

Most importantly, the magazines are FREE thanks to many sponsors including:

ACS Technologies, Shelby Systems, Arena, Advanced Ministry, WordSearch Media, Connection Power.com, LOGOS Management Software, Fellowship  Technologies, Icon Systems, Power Church Software, Sermon Companion.com, Church Community Builder, PhoneTree, NuVerb, RDS Advantage, ParishSOFT,  Vian Corporation, MyFlock.com, Covenant Eyes, Power Notebooks.com

This entry has been cross-posted at Digital.