Here are my thoughts on Twitter follower/following ratios, am I way off?

It’s happened to us all: You have mission critical content that is delivered from, served on, uploaded to or otherwise dependent on a third party web app/site and the provider is bricked… right when you need it most.

Ouch!

It happened to us just last week; for reasons we still don’t understand, our Facebook page was out. The most important piece of internet real estate in our quiver was down.

Continue reading »

The results of our poll (“How Does Your Church Serve On-Demand Video?“) are in and seriously, thanks for voting!

I can say that I am not surprised by the results, Vimeo does have a great product at an incredible price point. Currently we are using Vimeo for our on demand message video at Gateway Church and I have had few complaints.

At 60 bucks a year it is tough to beat. Vimeo also seems to be working hard at preparing for the HTML5 revolution. I’d say the only weakness is an individual file size limit of 1GB which will limit the length of your HD offerings.

Check out who was #2 and more…

Continue reading »

Even small churches are getting in the video game lately and as your church’s library of video grows, how do you manage all of that content?

Our team has gone through a couple rounds of tweaks over the last two years in the area of serving on-demand video on the website and I still think we can do better.

So what are you using? Please give me a sec of your time to answer this easy poll:

Continue reading »

I promised I’d give you a look at our studio space when it was done, well it’s not done…but it’s operational and we’ve been turning out content and doing live streams from it for about 11 weeks.

I grabbed my flip cam and dropped this quick video:

Continue reading »

The speed, flow and consistency at which we get information published to the web is quickly becoming super important as we move toward real time web reality. The two biggest hang ups I come up against when it comes to getting the staff at Gateway Church to jump into the blog world are lack of time and not wanting to learn the back end.

Posterous destroys both of those issues and I am falling in love with it more and more every week. I’m sure this is nothing new for most ChurchCrunch readers as a lot of us use Posterous as part of our social media arsenal, but I think is makes a great home for your organization’s cornerstone blog space.

Here me out on this one…

Continue reading »

I have been to my fair share of Christian conferences of all types, techie gatherings, pastor events, leadership weekends and on and on. Some good some bad.

I spent the last few days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference and had my mind blown. I couldn’t help comparing the experience to the pile of Christian conferences I have been to over the years.

Here are a few observations:

Continue reading »

South by South West Interactive is arguably the most import gathering for the Internet of the entire year.

So who’s coming to Austin?

The amount of sessions and keynotes is so overwhelming that I am heading into SXSWi with a very rough penciled in schedule so I have time and space to connect with people.

If you’re going to be here, we should connect.

Continue reading »

Hey pastor, I have a confession: I’ve been pastoring people from your church.

I have had really deep and meaningful spiritual conversations with your sheep. They still show up at your church every Sunday. They say really good things about you. In fact, I have been watching your sermons on the web and talking with your people about it. They asked me to.

This story is becoming quite common; it’s playing out online.

Continue reading »

We started live streaming our Sunday morning experiences this last week and here is a look at version 1.0 of our live page setup:

Big props to @rcjohnson and @andrewbredow for their work on getting this thing going.