Catholic Tech Talk

I checked in at Google+ this morning and was surprised to see a user post that he just deactivated his Facebook account.  The question that immediately came up for me, “Why would he do that?”  As online social networking is evolving many are left wondering which one to use or use multiple services.  The other [...]

As the conversation continues about technology and the Church, those advocating it’s uses encounter a lot of objections.  The objections interestingly seem to be pretty consistent.  It came up again last night in a phone conversation and today online, and a question has been going through my mind for a while now . . . [...]

Tomorrow, I begin my trek to Kansas City and the 2011 Catholic New Media Conference. Considering the level of tech-geekdom in attendance, I expect many will have their smartphones and taking pictures. The question is – what’s the best way to share all of them?

I’m sure there are Pastors out there getting the constant barrage of “we gotta be on Facebook”, “we gotta be on Twitter”, “we gotta get a better website”, so forth and so on.  I’m also sure that many Pastors are also similarly asking “Why?” which is where the conversation is often taking a “nose-dive”.  I [...]

Do you check out our website, follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, via an RSS feed, or do you just wait for the emails to come out?  Do you think there’s a team of people behind the scenes executing all these functions for you, the reader, trying to reach you on whatever social media venue [...]

If you’ve stopped into Facebook within the past week or turned on the news, you’ve probably seen and heard about big changes to the service format and features.  You’ve probably seen opinions that range from extreme displeasure to not knowing what to think.  It seems strange that a free internet service causes such huge stirs [...]

Here’s a few thoughts on what the Church can learn from the Netflix/Qwikster debacle. The blog post I mention is available here; Marc Cardaronella replied to it here and I replied to his reply.

Sitemaps are not just for making your website easier to navigate for visitors. Search engines rely on them to index your new content.

It’s fair to say that modern society is steadily bombarded with noise. Outlets such as television, computers, smart phones, e-mail, video games and social media sites are overwhelmingly present in our day-to-day lives. Finding a healthy balance when maintaining our daily lives, religious lives, and online personas can prove difficult. Prayer in the Digital Age [...]

As someone who works full-time in support of helping parishes increase their ability to communicate and engage their parishioners, I am all too often confronted with the lack of familiarity and use of technology by parishes. It is infrequent, even at some of the larger and more financially blessed parishes, that I find a strong [...]

Software As a Service (SAAS) SAAS is becoming rather commonplace in Corporate America, but has only recently started to enter our world. The idea that your church’s software and data is housed ‘somewhere’ in the Internet cloud may leave some uneasy, but I’d like to make the case that its actually a better place for [...]

There’s been a lot of good discussion on Google+ lately in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Catholics over the last week. Craig Berry then came out with a great post “Catholic SEO: A Failing Grade?”  When it comes to how search engines and discovery works on the internet a lot of people get [...]

How important is SEO to your web strategy?

Chances are your church has a Church Management System (CMS) such as ParishSoft, ACS, Logos, or Parish Data System.  A CMS tracks your church’s members, their pledges, donation history, sacramental history, and may help you manage your church’s finances.  It’s probably installed on one computer in the office somewhere and, if your lucky, it’s networked [...]

“Back in the day” (well, just back in the early days of the web), remember screen names?  You know.  Those wacky “handles” we came up with that allowed use to participate freely in early social platforms without any one knowing our true identity.  We were “redcaper145365″ (my apologies to the person who may have actually/still [...]