Catholic Tech Talk

The past two weekends my wife and I traveled to visit family.  I’m a fan of traveling, but I’ve never been a fan of packing.  In addition to clothes and toiletries, now we have to be concerned with access to business stuff plus you want stuff to do.  So here’s what we took in addition to our [...]

Ignore this book and your blog posts will suffer. I should know – mine did.

The Parish Website is becoming more and more common.  Most parishioners think the parish needs one, and most Pastors want one.  I’m a firm believer that every parish should have a website.  It’s my firm belief that the parish website’s purpose is to serve as a community hub and 24/7 extension of your parish office. [...]

If you weren’t aware, October has been National Anti-Bullying Month.   When I hear the word “bully”, it sometimes seems harmless.  I picture that kid on the movie A Christmas Story.  The truth is that it’s not harmless.  In recent years it’s even been taken to another level with technology to what is now called [...]

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 . . . [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This past weekend me and my wife went away to help our daughter with her move.  I’ve been using Four Square for her for her business for some time now, but she hasn’t played with it  all that much.  She decided to check it out more in depth and found out she could obtain points, stickers, [...]

The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet (Our Sunday Visitor, August 2011) is a new book by Brandon Vogt that reveals the benefits, dangers, and potential of new media. It covers many of today’s most popular digital tools including blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, podcasts, text messaging, and interactive websites.

Social networking services have added a great many benefit for individuals and organizations. But like anything, these benefits haven’t come without their share of problems and issues for some.

So you are thinking of creating a blog for your parish and not really knowing how to start or what to “blog” about.  Don’t feel like you are alone, we all started there.  The one advantage faith bloggers have over all other bloggers . . . an endless supply of content.  Ideas for blog posts [...]

A catechetical colleague recently emailed me to ask about my use of social media — specifically, how much time I spend in social media and do I find it beneficial. Here is my (rambling) response: Yes I think it is beneficial, although I vacillate on just how beneficial. I get something different out of each [...]

At the risk of upsetting a number of good Catholic bloggers (including some friends), I want to talk for a minute about the practice of adding “emphases and comments” to someone else’s work and uploading it as a blog post. [2010-12-10 Author's note - I realize I was unclear here. I'm talking about copying most [...]