Nathan Scott Bourgeois has arrived!
Our sixth child, Nathan Scott Bourgeois, was born December 19 at 8:17 AM at St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton, CA. He was 6 lbs., 12 oz., which was our smallest child yet. The timing was perfect – he was born the morning after we had just seen the last of our children’s performances. My son Aaron and daughter Corinne had just completed their performances in our church musical and my son Joel had just (the night before!) performed in his band concert.
Nathan is two weeks old today. Sorry for the late posting but I’ve been in “vacation mode” and just now am getting back to blogging.
So, the two-week update: Nathan is gaining weight, eating well, and doing all those things that newborns should do. His siblings all love him, with Aaron and Cori especially doting on him. He is sleeping pretty well at night: Marne usually gets up to nurse him once or twice and I usually get up just once with him for an hour or so to get him back to sleep. I am not teaching my usual Interterm course this January, which means that I do not have to get back to my regular schedule until the end of the month.
We are now a very full family of eight children: dad, mom, five boys and one girl. Our Toyota Sienna is now packed. What are we going to do when we have our next one?
Woot! for Christ
In my previous post, I related my recent purchase of a Roomba robot vaccuum cleaner. I purchased the Roomba on woot.com, an amazing e-commerce web site that has a simple strategy: sell one compelling product a day. Each day, the Woot home page is completely devoted to one particular product. Generally, the products fall into a hi-tech category, but they have sold just about everything there. My purchases include the aforementioned Roomba, an HD-TV USB stick for my Mac, headphones, and a bluetooth music transmitter. The site is worth going to every day just to read the write-ups about the products. Each day, the products are presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner that makes it a must read. And of course, the prices are usually the best you’ll find anywhere, suggesting that Woot works with manufacturers to move products that aren’t selling well on the open market and/or are refurbished. They also solve one of the biggest problems that many e-business sites have: shipping costs. No matter what they sell, shipping is only $5.00.
Then there’s the “Bag O’ Crap”. Every few weeks, woot sells this as a way to move product that has not sold yet. Each bag can hold up to three items for $1 each, so for $3 plus $5 shipping, you can get three unknown products sent to your door. There are many who wait and wait for the bag o’ crap just so they can order them and see what they get. And sell on eBay the things they don’t like.
Finally, Woot! is effective because they’ve built a loyal community. For each product sold, they open a discussion board for users to write comments. This allows those considering a purchase to see what others think of that days “woot”. I always review the messages to get an understanding of 1) is the Woot price good? and 2) is this a quality product? And maybe 3) to wonder at the amount of time some people have to post messages on a relatively obscure e-business site.
Woot is successful because every day you know exactly what you’ll get and because they always present their products in a unique and interesting way. I make it a habit to check woot.com just about every day to be sure I don’t miss out on “something good”. If the site offered 500 products, I wouldn’t bother. By offering one, I can easily check it out and make a decision.
Sometimes I wonder if we as Christians cannot learn something from Woot. As I research “effective Internet ministry”, I wonder if creating an Internet presence with complex menus, podcasts, and blogs actually makes the message harder to find. What if we could offer a site that gave users a simple message every day? Something that addressed the issues of the day in a manner that conveyed Christ’s love simply? Users would be compelled to come to the site daily to be inspired.
Are there any sites out there like that right now? Let me know…
And look: w00t has been made “word of the year” by Merriam-Webster. Of course, the Woot web site is not the first use of the term. You can look up the full history of the term here.
I am George Jetson
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbuulDiM_U&rel=1]
Did you used to watch The Jetsons as a kid? As a lover of sci-fi, it was one of my favorites. The visions of the future were somewhat idealistic, but in the sixties this was how Americans saw the future. And one of the best parts: a robot maid. Well, now I am part of that future: we now have a Roomba.
A Roomba is, quite simply, a robot vaccuum that scurries about the house and cleans your floors. It “learns” where the walls are and covers the floor several times, stopping and circling whenever it finds lots of dirt. When it’s done, it re-docks itself in it’s base station to re-charge. You can even schedule it to vaccuum during the middle of the night.
The results so far are mixed. The room we have it cleaning is a large “great room” with tile floors. This room gets quite messy every day, what with five (soon to be six, gulp!) kids.When it can complete its job, it does well, but several times it has gotten stuck on rugs with loose threads or turned up corners. However, it does entertain the kids (and scare the cat) quite well.
I am George Jetson!
The best band nobody’s heard of…
I got a chance to go see The Lost Dogs at King’s Harbor Church in Torrance last Thursday night. Who are the Lost Dogs? It has been explained better elsewhere, so go ahead and read about them here and here. I’ll wait…
To me, the Lost Dogs are one of the great bands of all times. They deserve to be headlining big, or at least medium-sized, venues. So why were there only fifty people or so at the concert last week? I’m not sure…the music is amazing and accessible, the lyrics are deep and insightful… Popular culture is a funny thing: we all know of artists, whether they be writers, musicians, or actors, who are extremely talented and deserve the accolades and yet struggle in obscurity, sometimes forever. I am going to do my part to get these guys noticed. I am not sure how, but maybe I can convince some fellow fans to put something together with me to get them noticed. For now, I will blog about them.
The concert was a lot of fun. After getting off to a late start, the band performed about four songs before Mike Roe leaned over to Terry and whispered “I have to get off the stage”. The band promptly left, except for Steve, sitting at his drums, not quite sure what was going on. After a minute, he slinked off and the audience was wondering what happened. Turns out that it was Mike’s turn to have the flu and he needed to get offstage to, uh, “center” himself. They came back after about 15 minutes and proceeded as if nothing had happened.
One of the highlights of the night was the Lost Dogs Christmas play. Staged like an old time radio drama, Terry read reviews of the play saying that it was “so bad it was good”. And sure enough, it was. The play was based on the story “The Gift of the Magi”, though this time it was Mike and Derry giving each other the gifts. Mike sold his best guitar to get Derry the guitar he wanted (which was worth less than the guitar Mike sold…) and Derry sold his hand to get Mike strings for his guitar. Yes, that’s right, Derry held up a bloody stump. The story deteriorated from there, but that was the point. Terry played himself, the pawn shop keeper, and the narrator. And Steve played Tiny Tim, constantly popping up and saying “God bless us, every one!” It was Lost Dogs zaniness at its best. We all took it very seriously, of course, because they all used barely noticeable British accents.
Set List:
- Imagine That
- Bullet Train
- It All Depends (off the Eddies’ latest)
- Devil’s Elbow
- Rocky Mountain Mines
- No Room for Us
- If You Want To
- Eleanor, It’s Raining Now
Break for Christmas Play (“so bad it’s good”)
- Here Comes Santa Claus/Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
- Song for the Day After Christmas
- O Holy Night
- Silent Night
- Fruitcake from Hell
- Blue Christmas
- Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Encore
- That’s Where Jesus Is
- Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
The Lost Dogs have to be seen live to be truly appreciated. Keep checking their web site to find out when they will tour in your area.
Should churches be in Second Life?
I have visited the topic of the virtual world Second Life before, and I am still planning on incorporating into my research on the use of Internet by the Church. One use of Second Life that I have been following particularly is that of the Anglican Church. According to the Church Advertising Network:
“The Anglican Cathedral on Epiphany Island was built to support the Anglican Group in Second Life, which was founded in November 2006 by Bill Sowers, who is a member of St David’s Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Kansas.“
The services are led by Mark Brown, who is licensed as Deacons Assistant by the Bishop of Wellington in New Zealand. You can see a video of their first service here. Mark also has written a good article on ministry using web 2.0 tools that complements much of what has been written in this blog.
The title “Should churches be in Second Life?” was prompted by the latest entry in Mark Brown’s blog. It seems that the web site Anglicans Online has taken issue with doing church in Second Life, comparing it to the phenomenon of televangelists in the US. They raise issues with how “real” Second Life experiences can be (also raised by me in response to LifeChurch’s SL presence). The overall tone of the article is that Second Life is at the very least not important and at the very most to be avoided altogether.
I disagree. As a church, we need to go where the people are – and there are people in Second Life. I demonstrated SL to my MIS class last week and someone asked me what I thought it would look like in several years. I said that I didn’t know whether SL would even be around in a few years, comparing it to the experience of old BBS services that were the precursor to today’s social networks. But something will be around in a few years, and the more we understand about how to be effective in Second Life now, the better we can minister in that new environment. Mark Brown, as you might expect, also disagrees; read his well thought response here.
Other Christian ministries have also begun using Second Life. Besides previously blogged about LifeChurch, the Church Advertising Network has created an online town modeled after “Bible Times”, where you can explore and find answers to questions about the Christian faith. Now that’s creative.
Empowering your church
In my research I come across different church web sites and, being inquisitive, I usually try to figure out what kind of software the church is using. I check to see if they are using a content management system (CMS) and if they have blogs, etc. Recently, I saw a web site that said they were using something called “Web Empowered Church” or WEC as their engine. Naturally, I had to check it out…
WEC is an organization created out of the web ministry of Ginghamsburg Church in Tipp City, Ohio. As their web site states: “The mission of WEC is to innovatively apply WEB technology to EMPOWER the worldwide CHURCH for ministry.” They have developed a customized version of the TYPO3 content management system for use by churches (and other ministries).
It looks as if this is what I have been looking for for our church: an open source solution for church ministry. It includes features for content management, devotions, discussions, flash presentations, maps, prayer requests, volunteer matching, sermon management, directory, and much more. I will be reviewing this software and will report the results in this blog…
China and web 2.0
A new report on how the Chinese are embracing web 2.0 gives me ideas on new strategies for reaching this mission field (hat tip to Sampsung @ HiLaws). According to the report, Chinese Internet users are much more likely to use user-generated content to make purchasing decisions than Americans (58% to 19%). They are also much more likely to post comments to blogs and are younger than those in the US. To me, this points to a trust issue: the Internet users their trust each other more than those here. It could also possibly point to a distrust of corporate web sites as well. If we want to reach these users, we should understand this. Tools such as Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife, and others should not be foreign to those trying to reach the next generation of Chinese…or Americans, for that matter. Missionaries should not create new web sites but, instead, learn how to get involved in the spaces where the people already are.
But are any missions organizations giving this a focus? I honestly don’t know…but I’ll find out!
Using eye-tracking studies to influence page design
Seth Godin is reporting in his blog about the results of eye-tracking studies done on web sites. These studies actually track the eye movements of users when they are using the computer – specifically in this case when they are using web sites. By watching the eye movements of users reading web pages and navigating through the site, designers can understand where users focus their attention and which things get ignored. As I read through these results, I noticed a couple of points keep getting repeated:
- the top left of the screen is by far the most important area of the page
- users are drawn to breaks in the text (bold, bullets, white space)
As we are working to understand effective Internet ministry, we must not forget that the design of the page is still important! These tips are a gold mine in helping us think through how to design our pages. How does your web page fare?
Taking it seriously…
MSNBC is reporting a story about a girl who killed herself over what someone else wrote about her on MySpace. While this is disturbing in itself, it forced me to think about how seriously some people take their online persona. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, or some type of message board, these are public places of a sort that are meaningful to their users.
Many in the Church are hesitant to get involved in these types of environments because they have heard stories of the unsavory things that go on. They can point to stories such as this as an example of the bad things that can happen there. But yet…just think what a difference someone could have made by making a positive impact on this girl. The youth pastor at our church was at first reluctant to go into MySpace to reach the high schoolers at our church. After we discussed it, he decided to jump in and give it a try. He now tells me that it is a key part of his ministry.
We cannot be scared to go where the people are. If they are in MySpace, go there. If they are in Samaria, go there. If they are in Facebook, go there. If they are Gentiles, go there. If they are in Second Life, go there. We must not be afraid to find people where they are.
Survey on Internet Ministry
GospelCom has just deployed my survey on Internet Ministry. If you are a chuch, parachurch, or other ministry that uses the web, head on over to http://www.internetministryconference.org/survey/ and take our survey. Additionally, if you know of other ministries or churches that have deployed web sites, could you forward this survey to them as well?
This survey is part of my research project on “effective internet ministry”. Read more about that here.
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Welcome to Lessons From Babel
This blog is where I share the latest thoughts on my research in the world of Internet ministry. Feel free to join the conversation by leaving a comment. For more information on what I am doing in 2010, see my first post of the year. To find out more about me, my company, and this web site, or to see what resources are available on this site, click on the images right below this.
- Dave Bourgeois
