It is important to understand what the possibilities are when we decide how to present ourselves on the Internet. This blog is intended to inform you not only about the technical issues of New Media, but also to introduce the complex social and legal issues as well. No one is more of an expert on these matters than Larry Lessig. In this video, How creativity is being strangled by the law, he presents the context into which much of New Media fits. He addresses both the social and legal aspects and hints at a possible solution, Creative Commons, which he invented.
While this video is twenty minutes I think it is well worth watching for those who wish to keep abreast of what is happening and understand the amazing possibilities we have now.
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Make Your Sermons Available To The World
Every Sunday in a few hundred UCSL affiliated churches a new message is delivered. Each one unique. Each one perfectly worded to inspire some listeners to put the principals into practice; to take the next step; to walk the walk.
Out of six and a half billion on the planet, how many listeners are there? Some churches have thousands but most have less than a hundred.
Why not make your messages available to the whole world? We can reach far more; millions more if we try.
This time I'm going to talk about how to get your sermon audio up on the Internet. There are two steps to get ready and five steps for each sermon.
Things You Need To Do One Time
1. Establish an account with an on-line hosting service. There are many free ones. We are using blip.tv. When you create your account it results in your own domain. You can look at ours at AustinCSL.blip.tv . They host both audio and video. We at AustinCSL have a mix with mostly MP3 audio with the occasional video to spice things up.
2. Embed the show player in your own web page. This is what makes it easy for visitors to your web site to listen to your sermons and to subscribe to them using RSS. (See my article RSS In Plain English and watch a short video that illustrates how RSS works.)
Things You Need To Do For Each Sermon
1. Record the sermon.
2. Digitize the sermon to transform it from analog into digital format. This may happen as part of step 1 if your making a digital recording. If you're not going to edit anything (step 3) then you could record directly into MP3 format in step 1. But for the best/most professional result, you need to do some editing.
3. (Optional) Edit the audio.
4. Upload file to Internet hosting service.
5. Test the audio to make sure it is working on your web site.
That's pretty much everything we do for the sermons at Austin Center For Spiritual Living.
Hosting Web Site: Blip.tv
Blip.tv has many features which can help you get your audio distributed around the Internet. The most important one is to make sure they are making your audio available on iTunes so people can find it and subscribe to it. That way ever time you upload a new file the subscribers' iTunes player will automatically download it to their computer and, if they set it up, right onto their iPod. But you have to take some steps to make this happen. I'll cover that in more detail in a later posting here.
That's all for now.
Peace, Love, Laughter,
Rob:-]
Out of six and a half billion on the planet, how many listeners are there? Some churches have thousands but most have less than a hundred.
Why not make your messages available to the whole world? We can reach far more; millions more if we try.
This time I'm going to talk about how to get your sermon audio up on the Internet. There are two steps to get ready and five steps for each sermon.
Things You Need To Do One Time
1. Establish an account with an on-line hosting service. There are many free ones. We are using blip.tv. When you create your account it results in your own domain. You can look at ours at AustinCSL.blip.tv . They host both audio and video. We at AustinCSL have a mix with mostly MP3 audio with the occasional video to spice things up.
2. Embed the show player in your own web page. This is what makes it easy for visitors to your web site to listen to your sermons and to subscribe to them using RSS. (See my article RSS In Plain English and watch a short video that illustrates how RSS works.)
Things You Need To Do For Each Sermon
1. Record the sermon.
2. Digitize the sermon to transform it from analog into digital format. This may happen as part of step 1 if your making a digital recording. If you're not going to edit anything (step 3) then you could record directly into MP3 format in step 1. But for the best/most professional result, you need to do some editing.
3. (Optional) Edit the audio.
- a. Edit the content. Examples such as removing over long pauses, digressions, etc.
- b. Remove any copyrighted music (which is pretty much any music played during the service unless you have an ASCAP and BMI Internet license).
- c. Remove/reduce any unwanted noises such as mic bumps, plosives, etc.
- d. Normalize the audio.
- e. Compress the audio to reduce the dynamic range. This lets the listener set the volume and still hear the very quiet parts. This is especially useful for listening in high noise environments such as in the car.
- f. Add an introduction with royalty free music.
4. Upload file to Internet hosting service.
5. Test the audio to make sure it is working on your web site.
That's pretty much everything we do for the sermons at Austin Center For Spiritual Living.
Hosting Web Site: Blip.tv
Blip.tv has many features which can help you get your audio distributed around the Internet. The most important one is to make sure they are making your audio available on iTunes so people can find it and subscribe to it. That way ever time you upload a new file the subscribers' iTunes player will automatically download it to their computer and, if they set it up, right onto their iPod. But you have to take some steps to make this happen. I'll cover that in more detail in a later posting here.
That's all for now.
Peace, Love, Laughter,
Rob:-]
Friday, November 2, 2007
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
This is another collaboration tool. You can use one of the social bookmarking sites just for yourself or let us know about your bookmarks. This is not something I've found that useful but you should know about it.
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Video courtesy of
Social Networking in Plain English
Social networking is all the rage among young people. Does your church have a MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn page? We don't either but it's something to consider.
Social Networking in Plain English
Video courtesy of
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
I love this little video. It pleases my nerdy side by the way it presents things. I see code snippets that seem like old friends. I feel nostalgia for my early days writing assembly language programs for embedded controllers (even though this video doesn't really touch on that).
Hopefully you'll find it entertaining. If not, forgive my indulgence and just skip it.
Hopefully you'll find it entertaining. If not, forgive my indulgence and just skip it.
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Collaboration Using Google Docs
Google Docs is a great free collaboration tool. As this video demonstrates, it facilitates the sharing of documents among many people letting them read, comment and even change them using only their web browser. This kind of tool will help us work closer even though we are spread around the world.
Collaboration Using Google Docs
Video courtesy of
RSS In Plain English
RSS is a powerful technology which helps bring you the newest information on the web but only from web sites you've selected. It is of interest to us not only as users of the Internet, but as a primary way we can let others subscribe to our messages.
One example is that you can subscribe to this blog. If you have the Google blog reader (as shown in the video below) then you can subscribe to this blog by clicking on the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link at the bottom of this page.
Also, we are putting recordings of our Sunday sermons on-line in such a way that people can subscribe to them. They appear in iTunes among other places. It is an easy way to reach the world even from a small church such as ours. http://austincsl.org
Watch this short video for a simple look at how it all works.
One example is that you can subscribe to this blog. If you have the Google blog reader (as shown in the video below) then you can subscribe to this blog by clicking on the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link at the bottom of this page.
Also, we are putting recordings of our Sunday sermons on-line in such a way that people can subscribe to them. They appear in iTunes among other places. It is an easy way to reach the world even from a small church such as ours. http://austincsl.org
Watch this short video for a simple look at how it all works.
RSS In Plain English
Video courtesy of
INTRODUCTION: Purpose of this blog
This blog is intended to help inform the people who set and implement the Internet communications policies for United Centers for Spiritual Living and their affiliates. Of course everyone else is welcome as well.
The subject of this blog is the new web technologies, how we might use them and why they are important to us.
The subject of this blog is the new web technologies, how we might use them and why they are important to us.
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Posts (Atom)