Simply brilliant, and not too surprising.

Combining forces between their already world-reknown-but-not-so-world-adopted GooReader (Google Reader) and their sometimes-highly-inaccurate GooTranslate (Google Translate) has resulted in a self-contained mashup of epic proportions.

Or, it’s a start.

Now, I will admit that I do use both and so I’m not knocking it.  In fact, I’m applauding it and I think it shows one thing that we can all learn from:  Sometimes the most effective uses of technology are also the most obvious and not always the hardest to achieve.

I’ve been talking with a number of “edge-bleeders” in regards to technology, the Church, and online, and more often than not we’re trying to either “re-invent technology for the evangelical vertical” or “do something completely revolutionary that the secular world has never ever thought of”.

What if we took a step back, saw the need and built easy tools that got back to our focus on reaching the unreached by doing things that no one else has done before (gross paraphrase here)?

So, marinate on that for your tuesday morning brain-chew.

Other thoughts:

Do you create your ministry websites with web standards?  Do you  use dynamic and easily-transferable/manageable/portable data?  Ever heard of XML?  (Because XML is juicy goodness for translating your websites for other nations to consume…)