by Rhett Smith | Aug 13, 2008 | Technology
I had the privilege yesterday of interviewing Andrew Jones along with Andrew Jackson, Cynthia Ware, Matthew Anderson and Marcus Goodyear. Jones has some great insight into the history of blogging (he’s been blogging since 1997/1998) and ministry. Some really...
by Rhett Smith | Jul 1, 2008 | Leadership
Social Networks have been one of the greatest things to happen to college ministry. There are many reasons why I have found them to be so helpful, but let’s begin with a video primer, because I know some of you, though familiar with social networks, may wonder...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 22, 2008 | Leadership
Irony: streaming shot of hundreds of laptops at #GA218…all unconnected to the world. Metaphor for the PCUSA? That’s the quote I came across by Neal Locke on Twitter last night. He was commenting on PC(USA)-218th General Assembly, and I thought it was a...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 19, 2008 | Technology
On Tuesday afternoon I went to coffee with Chris Capehart, one of the co-founders of ROOV. I told Chris when we met that I wasn’t quite sure what to think of ROOV when I heard about it. 1) One more social networking site seems like one too many right now. 2) I...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 17, 2008 | Technology
Vanity Fair magazine has a good story on the invention of the internet, Inventing the Internet, An Oral History. You have to buy the magazine to get the full-version, but browse through the online article to get a snapshot of some of the key figures past and...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 16, 2008 | Leadership
Despite some of the bad press recently regarding Twitter, I still must say that I absolutely love it. Sure there are days when things take way too long to load, or they don’t load at all. But despite all that, Twitter is still the first site that I log onto when...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 10, 2008 | Faith
This short 7 minute video with Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies is insightful. I tend to filter social technologies through the lens of church and ministry, and I think they say some key...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 4, 2008 | Leadership
When it comes to Facebook I’m definitely an evangelist, but it wasn’t always that way. I was one of those pastors who was somewhat fearful of online social technology. I was an early adopter in some ways, but when it came to working with college students I...
by Rhett Smith | Jun 3, 2008 | Technology
I know we all have our pet peeves when it comes to social networking sites and technology, so I thought you would enjoy this article, The Top 10 Social Networking Annoyances. Here are the 10 they talk about: MySpace kitsch The worms crawl in LinkedIn is up tight...
by Rhett Smith | May 31, 2008 | Leadership
Of all the topics I’m going to address in this series, this seems to be the no-brainer to me. I started blogging about 4 years ago at the encouragement of one of my students at the time, Jared Kleier. He set up a blog for me on our college website and away we...
by Rhett Smith | May 23, 2008 | Leadership
Ryan at Tilling the Soil asked me a couple of good questions related to my post below, so I want to give them proper attention in a post, and not just leave a comment for him. I had the chance to talk with Ryan by phone last week and I enjoyed our conversation, and...
by Rhett Smith | May 22, 2008 | Leadership
I think it’s important for college ministries to be forumlating a plan, and developing some ideas about how they can strategically use the internet to best serve their ministry. There are a lot of topics that I could cover, and maybe 9 posts is too much, so I...
by Rhett Smith | May 21, 2008 | Technology
Back on Wednesday, April 23 I wrote a post called This Isn’t Your Parent’s Prayer Chain. The post was about a young woman in our church, Katherine Wolf, who was one of the volunteer leaders in the Young Marrieds ministry, and who went through an...
by Rhett Smith | May 16, 2008 | Leadership
DISCLAIMERS: 1)There are better technical people out there concerning the web. 2) Do as I suggest, not as I do. I’m trying to keep up myself, and our college website reflects almost nothing of what I talk about. That’s how fast things change. 3) There are...
by Rhett Smith | May 12, 2008 | Leadership
I have blogged a lot on this site about the collapse of hiearchical structures, especially within the Church, and the rising level of leadership from the bottom. I see this change in structure as a good thing and I saw a couple of good posts over the weekend. First,...
by Rhett Smith | May 12, 2008 | Technology
A little over a week ago I was having coffee and talking technology and ministry with Cynthia Ware of The Digital Sanctuary. And she told me a story about some friends of hers and how they had received information from Twitter regarding some events that later became...
by Rhett Smith | Apr 28, 2008 | Technology
I think most of you know by now, I have become a huge fan of the New Media and Web 2.0. But there is one aspect of it that I am most excited about: collaboration. With immediate access to amazing and simple tools we are able to collaborate more rapidly and effectively...
by Rhett Smith | Apr 22, 2008 | Technology
It seems like Facebook has just really exploded over the last couple of months. When I got on Facebook a couple of years ago it was basically my college students who I was friends with. Which makes sense since it began as a college social network. But recently I have...
by Rhett Smith | Apr 18, 2008 | Technology
Obviously we have reached the tipping point, or maybe we are now beyond it. But as others are saying more eloquently than me, the New Media is not a trend, and it’s here to stay. The New Media, Web 2.0, Social Networking, etc…. Check out Collective Muse....
by Rhett Smith | Apr 18, 2008 | Technology
I was already sold on Twitter about six months ago and I have been using it more and more everyday. But if you are not sold, or if you are asking yourself, “What is Twitter?” Then here you go. Thanks to Jared Kleier for pointing me toward...
