Day: 9 December 2005

Lord of the Bargains

The Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings
The Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings knew where to find a bargain.

Last month, as many readers will know, our holiday house in Cellardyke was trashed by paying guests from Poland. Amidst the damage, burned carpets, kicked-in doors and general disarray we quickly discovered that they’d taken (or lost) our VHS copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. They didn’t take the box, just the cassette.

I’ve just bought a replacement copy from Amazon UK. For only 25p plus P&P (£3.00 in total.) Bargain!

Band rehearsal

Photograph of the band in rehearsal

Two photographs from the Powerpoint (monthly Christian youth event) band rehearsal this evening that I’ve ‘stitched’ together using the wonders of Paint Shop Pro X. Why are Andrew (drums) and Tim (keyboards) both hunched over so?!

Neil Costley

Here’s an action shot of Neil (acoustic guitar and vocals). He looks nothing like a folk singer, I don’t know what you mean!

The rehearsal went really well, with some quality prayer time before hand. I’m back on my Burns Brian May guitar through the Vox VBM1 treble-booster and Digitech GNX2; the last few months I’ve been playing my Fender® Stratocaster® (though mine is a Mexican Strat rather than American).

I’m looking forward to the Powerpoint tomorrow evening. A time to worship God through playing guitar and singing.

What about a Church blog?

Photograph of a PC and monitor

I’ve been reading the book Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and it’s been fascinating to discover that right from the start TBL envisoned the web to be a collaborative affair, non-hierarchical tool where people could share their knowledge with the rest of the online community. The World Wide Web as we’ve known it so far has been very much a commercial, one-way, publishing medium. But that’s beginning to change with the emergence of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0, as much as anything, is about greater participation and contribution. It is about Flickr and Wiki and Syndication and Blogs. It is about people contributing their comments, and wisdom, and points of view. It is about consumers being more informed about the marketplace than the manufacturers. It is about making connections.

And that got me thinking today about how cool it would be to have a corporate blog for the Church, one that any member of the church could post to. How amazing would that be?

On the front page of the Corporate Blogging website it claims:

Blogging can play an important role in both external and internal communications of your organization.

Microsoft, for example, have their own corporate blogs. The one that I read most often is the IE7 blog.

It would be great to have a site that any of the clergy, for example, could blog on, with news, prayer requests, worship ideas, their opinions about what’s going on in the world, in the church, in their own lives. What a rich tapestry would be woven.