Twitter.com is not just fluff. There’s a fair share of “Making a sandwich” and “drinking my seventh Starbucks,” there’s also a lot of useful ways to use Twitter.

A few ways i’ve seen Twitter be a useful little web app.

1. Comcastcares - Comcast has a person on twitter who scans twitter for complaints about Comcast. I’ve done my fair share in the last 3 months. Comcastcares actually responds, and apparently is a customer service big wig who can make things happen and get problems resolved. This is a great customer service tool, even if you’re usually pissed with the service by the time you make a post on twitter (tweets as us nerds call them)
2. I put up a post on twitter about how I love getting food from our CSA share (community supported agriculture - we own a share with some friends and get a bag of veggies straight from the farm each week). One of my twitter friends was interested but had never been able to get connected to a farm before. I was able to quickly pass on info to her and hopefully she’ll be supporting a local farmer soon too.
3. A while back I posted on twitter that I was working on some new web strategy ideas. A twitter friend, and well respected authority on the issue, responded that she would review my strategy docs and give feedback. It was very helpful in framing this new project. 
4. Had a friend who needed a recipe for chicken breasts. Hit reply, great dinner.
5. Book suggestions
6. Music suggestions
7. Software suggestions
8. Idea sharing
9. Link sharing
10. Useful work-related connections

Sometimes we get stuck in the rut of thinking the church should have one look, one feel, one experience, one message that hasn’t changed in two thousand years. The reality is that even Jesus put his message in context for the people he was communicating to. When he talked to fisherman he used fishing metaphors. When he talked to farmers, he spoke of the grains in the field.

Dogma is the hard and fast rule. The way things were, and to the dogmatics, the way things should be. Context is the variable that is constantly changing. The mold isn’t fixed. People are different. People who live a mile apart can have tremendously diverse contexts. Things that were once solid, welded, defined, are now taking new shapes and providing flexibility in our experiences.

The Gina Project at BMW represents an aggressive shift in thinking about how we can experience our environments. The user defined experience is going to change the way we do things. Even in the church. Whether it’s through providing content at the touch of button or having our people be a part of developing content and the community around it.

Are you flexible? Are you ready to reach people in their context? Put your innovative foot forward and think about how people experience Christ in your community, or how they could? Be there.

If the church really is the body and Jesus the head, then we should have in mind the human way of doing things. Responding and anticipating the felt needs of our communities.

Check out this video on the GINA project:

Time Capsule will be my new wireless network at home. It will also be the first layer back-up for the family photos, the music library, and all those Redwire Files that are just waiting to be zapped by a hard drive crash. Still need some redundancy and offsite back-up, but I’m excited about this first layer being accomplished with the style and intuitive usability of an Apple product.

I have previously bashed the Amazon Kindle as being “not quite there yet.”

Basically, when the Kindle first came out, I wasn’t for it. But, I’ve been reading a lot of thick heavy hardcover books lately. I’d love to have a lightweight handheld device to read on. I just think the kindle still needs a design overhaul. It’s simply not elegant. I don’t buy a lot of tech products, mostly because I can’t afford to, but when I do, I revert to Apple products every time. The products look superior and generally run the way I want them to. 

I wish Amazon would change the look, modify some of the quirky buttons and give it a new ad campaign. Then, I think I would be in. And I would use it all the time. (oh, and cut the price, or give me 10 free books with my $359 device)

I saw this software over at The Apple Blog.

Grab up is a Screen Shot software that allows you to take a screenshot, upload it to the grab up server and get a url within a matter of 3 seconds. I love this. 

Here’s my first screenshot as I was working on a refresh of the logo for our Youth Ministry:

This is incredible. I will start using this for customer proofs right away…I can’t believe how simple it is.

This dude is ridiculous.
Hot. You could actually have some real world use with this now that Apple iPhoto is running in multi-touch (though, I don’t know if Johnny is mac-ready).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ&hl=en]

Johnny Lee

The Amazon Kindle© (which, I’ve previously bashed here before) is growing with potential in my mind. I’ve recently gotten into audio books. I wonder if I could get into the ebooks?

I like that it is a wifi device, so you can browse the net, look at blogs, and listen to audio through it.

So far, the problem with Amazon’s business model with the kindle is the lack of ability to get it in my hands.

Ebooks have been the promise of the future for a long time. Unlike the ipod though, I can’t take it for a test run. I can’t sit in an Apple Store or Target or Best Buy and give it a go…I’m not spending $400 on a device that I can’t get into my hands and take a test drive first.

So, as brilliant as Amazon has been at creating the online marketplace, they have missed the mark so far with this one. I just don’t think you can create a revolutionary hand-held device and not give people a way to get it in their hands…

is too loud for me. I’m out.

I hate sounding like an Apple fanboy all the time, but it’s hard when you’ve worked on both sides and can easily see the advantage of the Apple experience. I don’t usually have to do much in Power Point, but when I do, I hate it.  

Today, I had to throw together a “state of the church” slideshow for a meeting on Sunday. I decided to use Keynote instead of Power Point. 

Wow. What a better user experience. Almost everything is easier in Keynote than on PP. Apple did a great job. I’m using one of their built in templates. When it came down to making a chart, I could believe how simple they made it. It was also so easy to make it look professional, that I didn’t even try to “design” a slideshow, I just used the template.

Ups:

• Fast
• Intuitive
• Clean and Uncluttered
• Puts the polish on for me
• Nice built in templates
• Animation is a hundred times easier on Keynote than PP
• Font consistency. A dream come true. PP is always trying to resize things

Downs:

• Still not crazy about how Apple deals with the font pallet. It seems clunky for the most widely used tool in the program.
• Floating pallets are still a clutter factor when you have 5 of them open and they don’t lock into a position. 

Things that are happening at Sanctuary this year:

1.  We launched Love Minneapolis. A place for people to “just show up and serve.” There’s been two events and already we’re extending far beyond our doors. 
2. We have a series of Amazing Hip Hop Sunday’s featuring the 3 of the hottest acts in Hip Hop. Starting this weekend with The Ambassador also of Cross Movement. This guy is amazing. The real deal. Not “Christian Hip Hop,” but Hip Hop that’s Christian. We can’t advertise it, because we already know that there won’t be any open seats unless the temps drop below 0 again. Soon to come Phil Jackson and his crew from Tha House. Urban D and others from Crossover Church (#21).
3. We’re adding another service. We’ve been maxed at 1000 for a long time. It’s time to open the doors a little earlier. I’m betting we’ll double in size this year.
4. Efrem will be speaking somewhere that might shine a bit of a spotlight on what we’re doing.
5. We’re tightening the belt. We’re moving to a new office. We’ll start a capitol campaign for our first semi-permanent facility. 

On the days when I’m a designer, I’m in Adobe Illustrator all day long. Until now, finding the exact version of a file I want has been somewhat cumbersome. With this Quicklook Plugin for Illustrator, it’s a breeze.  Now I cruise along finding things more efficiently…because I can see inside all of these files without ever opening Illustrator…Sweet!  

Ars Technica has a first look review of the new Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

I’m oddly excited about this. Everyone knows I’m an Apple Fanboy, and I love Pages, I’m just not so keen on Numbers.  Overall though, Microsoft has done something smart with their Mac line of products for years…Office for Windows and Office for Mac are developed separately. Not that they aren’t talking and including similar features, but if you’ve been on both platforms, you would recognize that some features (Mail Merge for one) have been much easier and more robust on the Mac for years.

The not so smart thing that Microsoft did, was they didn’t talk internally about cross-platform compatibility. They released the Office for Windows update last year, with no compatibility on the Mac for the .docx file format. — Not so brilliant.  

Anywho…it really looks like this is a huge upgrade and extremely well designed from a Mac perspective.

Can’t wait to get my hands on it…should be available at Macworld next week or sometime in January…

So take a look at them,

but also notice how amazing this web gallery is that I made with iPhoto.
I didn’t even try. I just put the photos in an iPhoto album and clicked “web gallery.”

It automatically synced with my .mac account and created the webpage and gave me a link to share. You can preview the photos in multiple ways, including in “CoverFlow” style ipodesque.

You can also download the high-res version to go make your own prints.

I just pushed one button.

Guy Kawasaki posted a top ten leopard tips post from Take Control Books.

He added a few.

And i would add another.

#13 Stop opening files to see what’s in them.
Highlight just about any file, click the spacebar and let Leopard give you a preview without slowing down your computer by opening programs.

I love how Mail in Leopard now has “To Do Lists” and “Notes.”  

Special Features of Mail/iCal’s To Do Lists: 

• Synced with iCal
• Categorized by iCal Calendar (home, work, soccer schedule, etc…)
• Deadlines on to do’s (pick up milk for the cake batter by Wednesday at 4pm)
• Alarms (Little reminders through email our alarm beeps that remind you to do what you told yourself you need to do. 
• All shared over .mac or your network so they sync on multiple systems.

One of my favorite new features in Leopard is the ability to have RSS Feeds in Mail. Mail is the mac equivalent of Outlook - Though both have features that the other should dream of and aren’t really equals…
When new items post on a blog I’m following, it will come into an inbox in my mail program just for RSS. Now, it’s almost like bloggers are sending me mail, even though they don’t know they are…. 
I love it.  

I barely have to hop into Safari.

Leopard has been running on my mac for about 2 hours now.
It’s a beautiful thing. The first thing I noticed is that safari is screaming fast. The animation of everything is absolutely beautiful. Not sure about the new Finder yet.
Stacks are my new best friend.

Absolutely love the simplicity of them and the look doesn’t hurt either.

Safari all of a sudden has a fantastic RSS reader. No need for bloglines. 
I’m going to keep playing this weekend. 

Check out this time-consumptive work from Caleb Coppock

So I’m not a geek, but I play one on TV…
Ok, I am a geek in real life too…

Since January of ‘07, I’ve been heading up our IT direction at Sanctuary in addition to communications, web and design. Some things are finally coming to fruition.

At the end of 4 days of Mac OS X Server Essentials training, I was able to configure 4 servers from installation, with 1 Open Directory Master, 2 File Servers with windows and apple file sharing, and 1 Netboot server all talking to each other with multiple users, multiple workgroups, multiple sharepoints, varying levels of directory access, application and file permissions, vpn access, multiple printers, ftp file access and much more, all in under an hour.

Beautiful, intuitive, APPLE.

With a bunch of new iMacs and iBooks to replace our dying Dell Desktops, we should be golden…

And when Leopard Server comes out in a month with new ical server, podcast producer, wikis, and time machine….well, this is what the simplified productivity is really about….!

Communications Revolution - Terry Storch
If you’re not there yet, it’s time to go to Web 2.0
Web 2.0 simply stated is The Participatory Web
(Enabling and Encouraging Participation, the relinquishment of communications control to viral methods and utilizing God’s people to deliver the message.)

Four C’s of Multicultural Marketing - Tracy Lewis
Cultural Awareness - eliminating fear, perception, criticism, preconceptions, doesn’t imply endorsement
Commitment - Long Term
Creativity - throw out the box
Christ-Centered - don’t sacrifice the message…but don’t limit the reach of it…

To accomplish this, you will need to have Multi-Cultural Awareness (Find Commonalities, Embrace Differences, Overcome the fear of honesty), Appropriate Application (Be Authentic, Know your Audience), and have a Strategy (Build conviction through scripture, Affirm diversity through identity and vision, Build a multi-cultural leadership and staff, Enjoy Progress and anticipate problems).

Writinng as an Act of Service - Jon Walker
Service Journalism answers two questions:
1. So What? (Why does this make any difference to me?)
2. What Now? (What should I do with this information?)

The goal is to leave the reader with a call to action.

Practical Outputs of Service Journalism:
- Timelines
- Headers and Subheaders
- Charts and Graphs
- Breakouts
- Q&A’s
- FAQ’s
- Captions

Branding 101 - Dawn Nichole Baldwin
Brand
the practice of delivering a promise that reflects the mission, uniqueness and personality of your organization…..

Positioning
Determining how you want to be defined by your audience.

A Matter of Message - Brad Abare
Matthew 5:13-16 - If you lose your saltiness what will you taste like>?
- Be Salty - Pursue God
- Be transparent - Pursue Your Own Story
- Think Local - Pursue Others
- Keep it Simple - Un-clutter the Message

I plan on getting my hands on an ipod touch really zune.

Say see ya later to THE SOCIAL.
REMARKABLE INNOVATION is what keeps them coming back…