The Word of Our Testimony via Visual History

There's a company called Kronomy that will enable you to create a timeline of your life complete with descriptions, pictures and video.  Thus, you can share your story by making your life into a flowing visual slideshow via 3D browsing.  Kronomy also features social networking functionality including commenting, sharing, and friends.  Currently in beta, you will need a Kronomy invite to get the full effect.

Also, Guy Kawasaki (source of my beta invite) proposes other creative options for using Kronomy to document, for example, a product's lifecycle.  From initial sketches to prototypes to beta versions, almost any product could benefit from it's own archival history.  Guy proposes someone create a history of the Mac using Kronomy.  Good idea.  And I think there are lots of other possibilities.

As a fan you could document your history of relationship with a favorite band; as a CEO you could document the evolution of your company; as an adoptive parent you could write your adoption journey in pictures as an archive for your child's future.  As a runner, document your marathons.  As a couple, document your anniversaries.  As a pastor, you could create a rich visual history for your church. 

In fact, for Christians, nothing is more powerful than documenting how God has been present in our lives and how He has used us to touch the lives of others.  We often call this 'our testimony'.   Now, our stories can be told with words supported by visual media.

How would you use Kronomy's chronological memory abilities for the Kingdom?

Check out Guy's Kawasaki's life path in action.

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Recently, COLLIDE Magazine published an article I wrote (Technology and the Virtual Church) and used some cool graphics with it that caught my attention.  Somehow, they felt familiar, like I'd seen the style before.  In fact, I was certain of it.

Then I realized I'd seen similar artwork at conferences, on t-shirts, in video and in magazines lately.  Surprisingly, I've traced all of it back to a single artist - Barton Damer.   I wanted to familiarize myself with his work so I interviewed him. 

Barton is a a thirty-something resident of Dallas, Texas, who, besides being a skateboarding enthusiast, is setting the world of Christian graphic arts on it's occasionally uncreative ear.  You can count on seeing a lot more visual media authored by him in the near future. 

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this glimpse of his work, Barton's Motion Reel, Digital Art & Motion Graphics; it's your teaser in the first of a four part series.  And, it's well worth the visit.

Part One: Motion Reel, Digital Art & Motion Graphics and Motion Graphics Reel

Part Two: The Creative Media of Barton Damer / Bio & Current Status

Part Three: BartonDamer,  In His Own Words

Part Four: The Future of Christian Visual Media

                                                 image: socialmedia.biz

Kem Meyer, Communications Director at Granger Community Church has been having ongoing conversations with her team about improving the online experience their church delivers.  Recently, Kem posted What we like… a brief list of the things Granger's staff enjoy when visiting a website.

Kem, an insightful communicator and active user of new media, noted that when the staff stepped away from their own church website to discuss what they liked about the websites they visit on a regular basis, they came up with 5 things they like (aka - what they value):

  *  I get to choose what information comes to me and how. (personalization)

  *  I can interact if I WANT to, but I'm not forced to. (interactivity)

  *  I can access it from any computer; public or private. (mobility)

  *  I like the "insider scoop" on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (user generated)

  *  It's instant. (instantaneous)

I was curious to see if their list paralleled the list I created late last year for the Dynamic Church Conference '08 - Social Media - 10 New Media Values Your Ministry Needs.  Sure enough, of my ten, they listed the five found above.  You can down my list here Download Presentation (PDF).

Although your church website should be well-designed and easy to use, what's as important is that the values it reflects embrace a new communication mindset.  

You can also comment, twitter, ichat or facebook me for more exploration of new media values.

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?  

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?

ROOV.com Stories from Trey Tucker on Vimeo.

Thanks to Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance we’re reminded about Roov.com.

Kent posted Roov.com:: A Christian Social Network for Causes and Common Interests that should give us all a taste of the value of connecting individuals in the evolving relationship economy.  Roov is simple to join (although you must wait while they check out your church before accepting you).

It’s a great opportunity to celebrate Church Relevance since it just won the best blog of the year award from Prodigal Son Magazine. 

Congratulations Kent - well deserved!

Finally have time to blog my great experience from the Dynamic Church Conference in Dallas recently.  I loved meeting all the Fellowship Technologies staff and was impressed by their mission and strategy to serve churches.  A couple of highlights include hearing the breakout sessions by Terry Storch, Digerati Pastor at LifeChurch.tv and Joe Suh, founder of MyChurch.org. 

Terry spoke on the future of LifeChurch's bleeding edge ministry to the next generation amongst other things which I could hardly wrap my head around. He breezed through pioneer works like internet campuses, metaverse church, YouVersion and OnePrayer and then got into his real passion "what if…"  Absolute inspiration to those of us who envision tomorrow's Church.

And Joe Suh gave an excellent overview of all things social media related.  It was particularly helpful to see the evolution of social media sites and view how rapidly they are establishing new expressions of community.

What a privilege it was for me to speak alongside these experts.  You can get some of our material as PDF downloads at the Dynamic Church Conference site.

And lastly, we got to hear a closing session by Randy Draper whose resources can be found at HeartSpring Media.  Randy is a member of Ed Young's Fellowship Church and is both an excellent story-teller and a passionate communicator.  

Following my time with Fellowship, I got to visit my friends at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship.  But that's another post.

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!

In case you missed this recent Digital post, How to Twitter (see Twitter in Plain English), you might consider going back and taking a second look.  Upon introduction, Twitter can seem both frivolous & narcissistic.  But as fan created, 3rd party apps roll out we will likely see it's growing value. 

For example, this weekend I suddenly lost over half my Feedburner subscribers here at The Digital Sanctuary. My data report clearly showed all those subscribers were using Google Feedfetcher.  No online troubleshooting provided me with any updated information.  I assumed, having just updated my WordPress from 2.3 to 2.5., it must be my problem. 

After hearing of my dilemma, a search genius someone sent this link to me……

Summize, a Twitter search engine, increases the value of the micro-blogging sphere for me. Mashable reviewed Summize and compared it to Tweetscan here.  Next time I have a problem and need immediate, niche-oriented news, I'll start with a Twitter search.  And now I might even pay attention to tlogging.

By the way, if anyone knows whether this micro-blogging sphere has an official name yet, please let me know. And please follow me on Twitter.

See also, Todd Rhoades post on Twittering.  

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?