There is power for good in the Internet and we can use it!

I'm making all of this up as I go along so feel free to chime in at any time.

Bottom line, my purpose on the planet is to serve in the best way that I can. Serve who? Everyone.

And that's what I think our various spiritual organizations are doing also. We are all serving in our various ways. We are all discovering how we can best be of service. For me, at least, it's been a struggle. It's the reason this blog is here; to help me figure it out and, I hope, to actually be of some service.

Without going into all the functions our organizations fill, I think we can all agree that education is one of them. Agreed! So we want to tell people about our principals and practices because we've found that they work. They make our lives better.

As I see it, there are two groups we are addressing; the people who are already affiliated with us and the people who don't know about us but would be interested if they were approached in an effective way.

I think the first group, the affiliates, need to be connected to the larger community to which they are affiliated. After moving to Texas, the larger community faded from my experience. When we started going to the annual Gathering the reconnection was tangible. It was then that I realized how disconnected I felt.

Effective communication may be the answer much of this.

I want to be involved in what's going on. I want to hear about and participate in discussions of all sorts. Planning. Distance learning. I want to hear from my leadership what they thing. I want them to solicit my input and ask me to work on projects. We can all collaborate together at a distance and in person. We can each participate at the level we choose.

Then there are the millions upon millions of people who have never heard of us or our teachings. How can we tell them about what we offer?

The traditional way is called proselytizing, but in business it's called marketing. At it's best marketing is just a way to inform people of a product or service they may want. We all know what marketing can be at it's worst so I'm not going to talk about that. All I'm suggesting here is that we gather the best practices used by business for marketing and apply them for the highest good of all.

Here's what I'm excited about.

The Internet is fomenting a revolution in communication. The barriers to entry are low. As a result, all media is converging to it. It's now called New Media mostly because it gives everyone choice. You can consume and produce whatever media you care to whenever and wherever you want to.

There is power for good in the Internet and we can use it!

In the past this blog has focused on new media technology and how to use it. But I think it's more important to tell you about what it's being used for and what it can be used for. About best practices and effective results applying the technology. About the changes, the surprises and the possibilities.

That's what I think. What do you think?

Peace,

Rob:-]

Pushing Into New Territory

Well, I jumped into the newest of new media this week. I already have this blog on blogger, a web site, Shaver Associates, a FaceBook page, LinkedIn account and a video hosting account on Blip.tv.

What's the newest of the new, you ask? Twitter. I have to admit I was resisting it for quite awhile. I just wasn't sure I had anything much to say ... at least as often as Twitter people say it. But then it dawned on me who has lots to say. Ministers.

That's right. One of the things ministers are doing is getting the message out to as many people who want to listen. Let's put it another way, if you could receive messages throughout the day from your favorite minister, wouldn't you want to read them? I love listening to Rev. Dr. Kathy Hearn.

I think every minister that has something to say should be on Twitter. Maybe they'll just have one or two posts each day. A thought for the day. A bit of news. Something inspirational perhaps.

In the next few posts I'll talk about how to do some of these things. For example, the two posts below this one were submitted using the Twitter infrastructure. In fact they went to almost all of the pages I listed in the first paragraph.

In the mean time, if you're curious, you can look at the little things I'm saying at my Twitter home. You can watch the video about Twitter below and you might even be inspired to sign up for a twitter account.

Peace, Love, Laughter,

Rob:-]

UPDATE: I added the Twitter widget on the lower left side of this page.

Expecting Synchronicity

I'm looking forward to meeting Sky Nelson this Sunday at his workshop, "Expecting Synchronicity" in Austin. 1 - 3PM, http://bit.ly/ApTCW

SxSW

Even though I'm here in Austin, I'm missing SxSW. Have to work, you know. #work

What is RSS?

All the alphabet soup of letters is confusing I know. RSS is another one. Here's a video that will help you understand just what it is and why you should care. You can subscribe to this blog using your RSS reader, called a news aggregator. Don't ask ... it's ancient history now.

On the other hand, I used a little bit of code to place the most current five sermon recordings from the Austin Center For Spiritual Living in the upper left hand corner of this blog. I did this by copying and pasting the RSS link information into a field and everything updates automatically. When we add a new recording, it will magically appear here. Saves a lot of work if you want them to appear in several places.

Here's that video as promised.
VIDEO PLAYER (May not show up in your news feed.)

RSS In Plain English

Video courtesy of

END VIDEO PLAYER (If you don't see a video player here, come to our blog to view it.)

Twitter Novice Experiments

Ping.fm sends my micro-blog postings everywhere. Now I've loaded MePing, a desktop Air app that sends to Ping.fm (http://ping.fm/HO9zh)

Twitter Novice Experiments

Who needs an iPhone when you can Peek? Portable email applience for $50 + $20/mo http://www.getpeek.com/

Twitter Novice Experiments

This posting is to test my connections to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Blogger from ping.fm