It doesn’t require rocket scientist-like brains to do a “go figure” with the recent advertising aired at the Super Bowl by GoDaddy.com.

They were racy and “offensive” to many, including the evangelical community at large. As reported by Wired:

During Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, the domain registrar and hosting company ran two sexually suggestive ads featuring auto racer Danica Patrick — one featuring Patrick and a few busty models tossing around double-entendres about their breast size, and another featuring Patrick stripping down and stepping into a shower.

In the hours after the game ended, Harrell says he began receiving complaints from his Christian clients, who demanded their hosting and e-mail services be moved to a different provider.

And the calls kept coming. By Tuesday, Harrell says he has orders to move 20 of his clients’ domains off of GoDaddy’s hosting service and another 40 off of its web-based e-mail service. He anticipates more calls as word spreads across the Christian community.

From one perspective, GoDaddy’s marketing team are a bunch of geniuses: There advertisements are (unfortunately) close to unforgettable and their brand is well “situated” in the mind of many. They are memorable which means that people use them for their services.

And apparently Harrell is going to continue campaigning against GoDaddy. Is this the “right” response?

So, do you host with GoDaddy.com? Are you thinking about leaving? Love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks to @jonese for the tip!

There are a number of challenges that face us as we begin to engage more deeply into the online space. There are certainly more than 2 critical issues but these two have repeatedly cropped up on my radar and I’d love to both inform and discuss how best to manage them.

We are Educators First, Technologists Second

For some of you the acronym MMORPG is already in your vocabulary and the above image is simply “funny.” For some of you, this might actually be your first encounter with the acronym, and here’s the challenge:

Which one’s more true? Is it dependent on the institution or the individual?

MMORPG stands for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.” [Read more here if you're curious!] That is the real and right definition. The problem is that many, who have never seen this, may now believe that it stands for “Many Men Online Role Playing as Girls.”

That is incorrect. The second one is a “joke.”

But do you see the connection? You see the issue? We must constantly be aware of the many different interpretations and “definitions of identity” of the tools, technology, and the way we use them. There are “right” definitions and “uses” and then there are “wrong” ones, generally speaking.

As a result, we must constantly be educating people about how to use technology and technology’s identity as properly understood, interpreted and used. We must be educators. People don’t ask for guidance, they need it. We are those vehicles.

What do you think?

Check out Part 2 of the 2 Part Series Here!

Matt, the founder of WordPress, the best semantic publishing platform on the planet, just released some insane statistics for WordPress.com for the month of January. Take a look:

• 372,519 blogs were created.
• 393,836 new users joined.
• 4,592,097 file uploads.
• 2,710 gigabytes of new files.
• 553 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
• 8,771,891 comments.
• 6,528,657 logins.
• 1,073,421,738 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 945,105,050 on self-hosted blogs (2,018,526,788 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,373,108 active blogs and 18,768,022 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,295,531,829 words.

I could probably spend some time explaining these numbers and their significance, but I’ll just let you soak it all in.

In addition, in the latest Practical Web Design Magazine, WordPress (and Matt) was name the Open Source application platform for 2008.

There is, without question, a clear winner in the blogging platform space. Make the jump, everyone’s doing it, so why not you?

The benefits of switching could be “eternal.” =)

This year I’d love to spend a bit more time doing “neat” things like screencasting. I’m no professional, that’s for sure, so there’s definitely some room for improvement.

For those that need a quick definition:

A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It’s not a new idea. The screencaster’s tools—for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files—have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products.

I think video is a powerful educational tool. I think we need to use it more.

Here are some resources that I’ve collected and drummed up. I’d love to know if you have any more as well!

Continue reading »

Wiggio, first seen and announced here, is something to be investigated, especially for the savvy technoevangelist interested in testing and stretching this little application beyond it’s original conceived intention.

It’s like Twitter (and Yammer) but with a host of other tools and features that may persuade you to get an account:

On Wiggio, you can share and edit files, manage a group calendar, poll your group, post links, set up conference calls, chat online and send mass text, voice and email messages to your group members. Each group member can define how they want to keep informed of group activity.

After taking it for a spin, I must say that I’m impressed. You can easily administer and manage your groups, share files, set up conference calls and live chat with a few mouse clicks. In addition, people can join your group without actually needing a username and password. This makes the ease of adoption significantly simple. I like that.

Check out this vid after the jump. It’s comprehensive and should give you everything you need to know.

I’d love to see someone knock this out of the park and use it for their online community group efforts… in fact, I may look into that as well for the ministry that I serve.

Finally, if you want to join my test group, I’ve created one called “ChurchCrunch” and the password is “123456“. To get access to the site, use the “TechCrunch” code for signup.

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Growing as fast as “pastors with blogs” is the multi-site revolution. It’s a model that’s being copied, developed, and explored for many congregations this year.

I’ve never been a church planter so I do not have the faintest idea about how to go about making the critical decision about “extra” campuses, etc. but here’s a resource that you may prove to be useful.

From Multisitechurch.Typepad.com comes a super easy Self-Evaluation to see if Multi-Site Campuses is for you and your congregation.

In addition to having the image and content of the diagnostic here, I’ve also quickly put it into a printable PDF format which you can download here.

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There are a number of “benefits” to blogging and no, they aren’t like these types of benefits (although I’m not sure I’d turn this down…). I’ve been thinking about a couple lately and I thought I’d share just a few:

1. Writing and Speaking

Simply put, blogging has made me a better writer and speaker (not the conference speaker, but just “talking” in general).

For many, this isn’t really the reason that they blog, but for me I’ve always been able to better express myself through the written form and a result express myself verbally.

If you’ve met me in person you may have noticed how I sometimes stumble on my own words and take long pauses before I can crystalize what I really want to say.

If you really know me, I’m a blubbering idiot.

Blogging has helped me synthesize faster, more effectively, and to the point.

2. Boundaries and Scheduling

Blogging has helped me firm up how to schedule my life and help me create boundaries of engagement. It’s strange to think that art of blogging has done wonders for the rest of my life but it’s true.

In blogging, if it doesn’t fall under my “mission” then I’m not blogging about it. This has helped me learn to “filter” the many distractions in life as a result.

3. Relationships

I’ve met some of the most creative (and entertaining) people that I’ve ever met through my blogs. These have provided valuable relationships which are growing daily. This is absolutely priceless to me. Some, I feel, will become life-long friends. There are few things better.

What are some of the “benefits” that you’ve personally experienced through blogging?

Godin’s post today inspired me to take another look at my web statistics and finally sit down and explore other analytics/metric tools like Woopra, which has been sitting in my “To Do” box for a tad bit longer than I had originally intended.

[Woopra, by the way, is amazing... so far.]

Godin’s choice words for us “common folk” today:

Plan for the end.

I think there are relatively few of us that “plan for the end” in regards to our blogging. Many people just randomly disappear, many reach a “boiling point” in their frustration with it and explode (or implode), and some just simply fade away.

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Let’s start at the beginning: What exactly is a Sitemap?

Here’s what Sitemaps.org says:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites.

Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

So, sounds good, right? For the most part, yes. But take careful note of the bottom few paragraphs which tells us more than what we probably understood first pass around:

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Apparently Tim Keller is cool enough to rock 2 Wikis.

The first is much more well known in the Wikipedia dbase [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Keller]. The second is much less well known, but perhaps is more “interesting.”

Officially called the “unabridged” version, Tim Keller Wiki [http://www.timkeller.info/] has launched to the general public. The “other” Wiki has been considered the “abridged” version.

It was created by none other than the most famous DJ Chuang. I hope that the number of regular updates can match the supposed “ambition” behind it; he’s obviously one of the only guys updating it [see image].

It does bring up an interesting question though: Is this going to become a growing trend? Should I buy up JohnSaddington.info and start filling in the information myself (or have others do it for me)? What exactly is the “point” or reason? Quality control of content? More detailed content? What?

Would you do this?